An intriguing if bet-hedging work of futurology that calls into question the whole business of futurology itself.
A gimlet-eyed look at the promises of technology and futurists past.
If people were to live to be 1,000, and if one of them committed some heinous crime, would it be just for a life sentence to last multiple centuries? Thus one of the thought experiments in the latest by the Novellas, a follow-up to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. The authors argue that while we have made tremendous progress in technology in the past half-century, it’s been in arenas that we didn’t quite expect: not the cure for cancer or the solution to climate change but instead fun apps to distract us from the world. “I drive to work in a car that would most likely seem ordinary to a driver from the 1950s,” write the authors, “but they would likely be blown away by my GPS and entertainment system.” That we might expect different comes from the overselling of a gleaming future by science fiction—e.g., the promise in 2001 that we would have traveled to Jupiter two decades ago or the projection that we’d have so much leisure time that we’d all become masters of our various corners of the universe. Instead, as the authors note, modern life proves “the deep philosophical principle that shit happens,” with most of us incapable of seeing it coming. The authors venture a few predictions of their own, including the expansion of robotics and the mechanization of biology, creating replacement parts within our bodies that are far more effective than the current titanium knees and hips. “But why limit ourselves to the original body plan?” he rejoins. “We can even add extra limbs.” One thing may be certain: If we live forever or very nearly so as “genetically modified cyborgs,” there won’t be much need for children—so maybe don’t buy stock in diaper manufacturers.
An intriguing if bet-hedging work of futurology that calls into question the whole business of futurology itself.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-538-70954-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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