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SURVEILLANCE STATE

INSIDE CHINA'S QUEST TO LAUNCH A NEW ERA OF SOCIAL CONTROL

The underside of digital technology on full, frightening display.

A study of the Chinese government’s sweeping surveillance program.

Chin and Lin, veteran reporters on China for the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, have spent enough time in the country to effectively trace the development of an extraordinary surveillance system, a defining feature of the Xi Jinping era. It began in Xinjiang province, supposedly to keep track of Uyghur dissidents, but the Communist Party leaders quickly saw the broader potential. Featuring a nationwide network of cameras feeding into a massive database, the program connects with online shopping giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, and it also extends to internet usage and mobile phones. Using this data, Chinese authorities established an algorithm-based “social credit system,” under which “responsible” people could be rewarded while others could be monitored and, if necessary, punished. “By solving social problems before they occur and quashing dissent before it spills out into the streets,” write the authors, [the Party] believes it can strangle opposition in the crib.” Another crucial piece is facial recognition software, and the government is reportedly working on “emotion recognition” software, aiming to pick up individuals who have not done anything wrong but might think about it in the future. “China’s leaders,” write the authors, “wanted to redefine government using the same tools that Google, Facebook and Amazon had used to remake capitalism….They could engineer away dissent. China would have optimization.” Party officials understand that most citizens will trade privacy for order. Worryingly, the system is now being exported around the world, with aspects of it appearing in India, Uganda, and Singapore. Occasionally, the authors wander away from their main theme, but they paint a grim, disturbing portrait that deserves close scrutiny, especially as the technology becomes more precise and easier to deploy. While tech giants in the U.S. “exploit this technology for profit…the Communist Party has adopted it as a means to maintain power.”

The underside of digital technology on full, frightening display.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-24929-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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