Book Review: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (2025). Adam Becker.

I’ve been very interested lately in artificial intelligence (AI) and our current fears and hopes about it, and have done a lot of reading on the topic. From the title, this book looked like it might be more of the same. But actually this is the one book I’ve read that goes deeper into the underlying problem behind not only AI, but also many of the other themes and obsessions occupying the attention of our high-tech oligarchs.

The basic story here is surprisingly easy to grasp. A small circle of grown-up boys, fascinated by the science fiction stories of the mid-twentieth century they read as children, have become the leaders of new technology empires, often based on devices and applications they invented. In the process, they became so fabulously wealthy that they can now exert disproportionate influence on policy and funding for research and development of new technologies that echo the science fiction stories they loved in their youth.

An unfortunately common collateral development was that as they became richer and more powerful, these men increasingly began to fall victim to “the engineer’s fallacy” – the idea that because they had invented or designed something remarkable, and had become vastly wealthy using their bright intellects, engineering skills, social connections and astonishingly good luck, that they were also the smartest people in every domain of knowledge and policy, even ones in which they had no training or relevant experience.

It is true that these "bright boys" have brought much of mid-twentieth century science fiction into being. Our computers, our global electronic networks, our smartphones, our software, our healthcare, our transportation systems – all these science and technology miracles, and many more, have been brought into being in our lifetimes by some of these men, in ways that do resemble science fiction stories of the past century. 

And certainly there will be more amazing technology developments and scientific leaps ahead for humanity, presuming that the second Trump administration doesn’t destroy our ability to do science and educate our young to prepare them for the future. The problem is that although many astonishing breakthroughs have occurred, that doesn’t mean that every 20th century science fiction plot can come true, or will. Some of them are just fantasies, and will remain so.

Becker does a wonderful job inventorying the wrong turns and bad ideas now being promoted by a familiar cast of characters: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Marc Andressen, and others in their Silicon Valley circles who are less well known to us. In this absorbing walk through the tech bros’ grandest dreams, the author lays bare the shaky scientific foundations on which their hyped-up plans rest, their problematic ethical and philosophical roots, and the personal quirks of the leaders who have been involved in promoting them.

Early on, there is an excellent discussion of the rise of “effective altruism” (EA). This was originally conceived of as an approach to life and charity that suggested that giving should be based on a moral imperative to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people per dollar. Many of the current generation of wealthy tech leaders were enthusiasts. It sounded morally very defensible in theory.

But then the tech and finance types who found it so appealing for its rational-sounding ethics began to come up with other complementary ideas, like “long termism” – the notion that effective giving should be based on the number of lives saved across all future time.

When combined with outlandish beliefs about space colonization, life extension, eugenics and other unproven technologies and science, this quickly led EA enthusiasts in high tech to rationalize focusing their investments on those areas where there was a great deal of money to be made, while feeling ethically excused from dealing with any contemporary problem areas or suffering. From there, the author traces how EA and its offspring tendencies have devolved into various factions and cults.

Becker particularly caught my attention with his history of K. Eric Drexler, the MIT-trained cross-disciplinary engineer and scientist who wrote Engines of Creation in 1986, the book which launched the nanotechnology revolution. (I met Drexler while he was promoting his book and ideas back then, and even became enthusiastic about his theories for a time, after hearing him speak at a conference of space colonization enthusiasts).

Drexler’s thrilling idea was that we would soon be able to utterly transform the world, create inexhaustible wealth, fix all diseases, cure aging, and create colonies in space, using tiny robot engines to build and transform materials at the molecular level. This was nanotechnology as he defined and explained it, and it sounded like magic come true.

Drexler had some brilliant insights, based on an idea originally voiced by the famous physicist Richard Feynmann. As the first and greatest promoter of this new field he conceptualized – “nanotechnology” – Drexler really did set off a “race to the bottom” in the late 1980s and 1990s for research and development in many different disciplines, most notably in medicine, genetics and materials sciences. Large amounts of money would be allocated for nanotechnology R&D based on his ideas and his persuasive promotion of them, and many important scientific advances did happen as a result.

The problem was, as Becker explains, that Drexler’s actual plan – building invisibly small smart robots that could manufacture substances and products molecule by molecule – has still never happened. It doesn’t appear to be practical for a variety of physical and financial reasons. After a while, despite the lack of progress in achieving the specific nanotech engineering vision he promoted, Drexler’s dreams for the nanotechnology golden age, and his group of followers, increasingly took on the appearance of other tech cults or religions. As with EA and AI, this led inevitably to schism and apostasy among his true believers.

Becker goes on to dismantle other fantasies and wishful thinking of his wealthy tech subjects. He shows why the belief in artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the very near future appears to be an article of faith in AI business circles, but not one that can be supported by either the current large language models (LLM) used to train AI, or Moore’s Law (which appears to be reaching its end).

As he explains in detail, the belief in infinite technical acceleration in AI R&D breakthroughs, and in fast-doubling computing power, is already beginning to crash against physical, technical and financial limitations imposed by  the real world, and must inevitably do so.

The author points out that exponential growth cannot continue forever in any system, and it won’t. But without that kind of rapid growth in computing power, the common theory in the AI industry that scaling up existing AI models will inevitably lead to AGI simply collapses. It is a wan hope and a marketing ploy, not a realistic prediction.

Becker does a similarly effective job demolishing the idea of space colonization, which billionaires  like Musk and Bezos believe is inevitable, essential to humanity’s survival, and likely to occur very soon. Becker claims (and I agree) that space colonization could happen only over a very long time, likely centuries or millenia, or more likely never, and for very good and obvious reasons.

(For an amusing and more extensive book-length analysis of the many barriers to space colonization, read A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023), by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, which I also enjoyed reading recently).

Becker notes that the surface of Mars contains an abundant substance, perchlorate, that is poisonous to humans, a fact discovered by the robotic Mars landers. Cosmic radiation and lack of earth-equivalent gravity are also already known to degrade the human body in space. All known planetary bodies in the solar system except Earth cannot sustain human life for many reasons – no air, wrong temperatures, too much radiation, too much or too little gravity, poisonous environments and so on. There are simply limits to what even clever engineering can overcome.

Space colonization would also require safely transporting a huge number of people, probably hundreds of thousands or millions (needed to sustain a healthy population with sufficient genetic diversity) across vast distances and time periods, by some means of mass space travel not yet invented, and where necessities of colonization such as human reproduction are unproven, unlikely or impossible. Even attempting reproduction in space would involve ethically indefensible experimentation on any future human children who might be created.

And then there is the most obvious other question. How many actual humans on Earth would risk their life and future to attempt to live on a deadly planet Mars, or in a manufactured deep space colony? The obvious answer is “not very many”.

In short, space colonization won’t happen in any near-term foreseeable future, but spending billions on it can be much more fun, exciting and profitable than admitting to or worrying about solving the very real and immediate problems humanity faces here on its home planet.

Becker goes on to describe and then puncture more sacred fantasies of the ultra-rich tech oligarchs. Infinite life extension. Elaborate bunkers and preparations for surviving social collapse. Uploading human consciousness to the cloud, and the predicted impending Singularity to be caused by AI.

Becker notes (as others have also observed) that the idea of the Singularity, so popular in AI circles, bears more resemblance to ancient religious ideas like the Rapture or Armageddon, in its vision of a mysterious godlike power taking control of humanity’s fate and giving everyone eternal life in “heaven”, than it does to any scientifically-based projection of our likely futures.

Becker ties many of these tech bro aspirations back to the universal desire to escape death. It must be demoralizing for many of these powerful men to have so conquered this material world, yet to face the same aging process and ultimate demise as the rest of us. And they’re not going quietly into that night. They have their sci-fi visions of how to escape it, and the money to pursue those visions, no matter how outlandish and hopeless their plans may be.

And that, as Becker finally concludes in the last two pages of this essential book, is the root of the problem these few mega-rich, mostly white male tech leaders now pose for humanity.

Like the rest of us, they are free to pursue their dreams, make mistakes, have foolish ideas and hopes, and try to bring to life the fantastic stories they loved in their childhoods, regardless of how impossible or meaningless their goals might seem to others. But unlike the rest of us, they have the money and power to make their vain pursuits everyone else’s problem, and to waste huge financial and social resources that might be far better applied to fixing humanity’s real and immediate challenges.

The underlying problem here, Becker concludes, is billionaires, especially tech billionaires with childish beliefs based on sci-fi fantasies. If it weren’t for their power and wealth, he suggests, modern society wouldn’t be taking most of their grandiose but absurd ideas as seriously as we do.

After reading this very entertaining and well-researched book, and its thorough debunking of the science and logic behind these high tech moguls’ expensive hobbies, fetishes and plans, I would hope most readers would agree with his conclusions. That’s an important recognition for all of us as we consider any future hype, business decisions and political machinations of this small but massively influential power elite.

They may have won life’s financial lottery, but they aren’t necessarily wiser or more well-meaning than the rest of us. We shouldn’t believe they are, just because they’re fabulously rich, and can harness a massive hype machine and political influence to promote their ideas. 

Adam Becker has written the definitive expose’ on the Silicon Valley tech elite, and their flawed visions of the future. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sociopath: A Memoir (2024). Patric Gagne, PhD.

Years ago, I read and reviewed The Sociopath Next Door (2005) by Martha Stout, an eye-opening survey of sociopathy by a clinical psychologist with a career specialty in treating subjects with this condition. From that book, I learned that sociopathy is generally characterized by the lack of normal human empathy towards others, along with a lack of moral inhibitions and remorse. It is usually accompanied by a range of anti-social behaviors, and is believed to exist in about 4% of the human population, a figure which appears to be relatively consistent across different ethnic groups.

I have remained interested in the topic ever since, the more so throughout the first and now second Trump administrations, during which sociopathic behavior and its extreme adverse effects on other people have been on daily public display in the Oval Office, and from other major figures within the administration and the MAGA Republican Party. 

For that reason, when I saw reviews of Dr. Patric Gagne’s book Sociopath: A Memoir last year, I knew I would have to read it. It seemed almost unbelievable that an actual sociopath would not only publicly confess to having this condition, but would be willing to write a book-length autobiography about herself, describing what all she had done, and what she had felt or not felt about it.

Dr. Gagne tells a remarkable and even sympathetic story about her life and condition. She doesn’t hide who she is, and many of the shocking things she’s done in the course of growing up and slowly gaining insight into herself. She describes stabbing a classmate as a second grader with a pencil (one of the few transgressions for which she got in trouble), and a habit she developed early on of breaking into neighbors’ houses, scouting them and hanging out in them while the owners were away. She admits to stealing, lying and enjoying getting away with things she knew were not socially or legally acceptable. And she does confess to a lack of remorse or empathy for others.

She was also very smart. Her intelligence helped her do well in school, as well as helping her learn to conceal her lack of empathy and her deceitful behaviors from most other people. Of course, her parents and family eventually figured out that something wasn’t right with her, but she was bright and high-functioning, as many sociopaths are.

At the time she was growing up, there wasn’t yet a huge awareness or large body of psychological research on sociopathy. What little information there was tended to be focused on criminal psychopaths and older people who were institutionalized, which didn’t help her understand why and how she was different from her family members, and others she encountered at school and in the neighborhood.

This is an important and fascinating story of how a gifted sociopathic woman tried to cope with her lack of empathy and inability to connect with people around her emotionally, and to understand the traits that are hallmarks of her condition. She takes us through her childhood of maladaptive behaviors, her encounters with therapists as an adolescent, and ultimately the fortuitous connections she made at university that allowed her to begin to study and research sociopathy as a  college student and then an academic.

One particularly interesting part of her story was her description of a sort of “pressure” in her head that from an early age drove her to commit anti-social and forbidden acts, which were the only way she knew as a child to relieve this pressure that would build up inside her head. As she grew older, she slowly began to find alternative techniques she could use to relieve this pressure, and teach herself not to act out as a remedy to her inner drive to misbehave.

Eventually, in her own determination to figure out how to fit into normal society, and how to avoid doing “wrong” even though she didn’t feel any empathy or remorse herself, she gained the credentials as a psychologist (including her PhD) that allowed her to counsel and treat other sociopaths, and do social and psychological research on the condition.

Amazingly, Dr. Gagne also found love with a partner, built a community of friends, and had children she cares for and loves. She tells the story of those relationships, how they began, the troubles she encountered in maintaining them, and lessons she learned along the way that helped her fit in and be successful, despite the void in her where caring and empathy should have been.

She also has found meaning in a professional life devoted to helping other people like herself adapt to what she believes is another form of neurodiversity, and find ways to fit into the larger human community that fears and despises them.

I was truly impressed by her account, her intellect and her insights. And I believe she is sincere, honest and well-meaning, although none of those attributes are ordinarily characteristics of sociopathic personalities.

On the other hand, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that she and her story are a sort of black swan event. I hope she is successful in treating others with this same condition, and admire all she has done and accomplished, while also maintaining deep reservations that the vast majority of sociopaths among us will ever travel the relatively hopeful and constructive path she found for herself.

It would take many more success stories like hers to convince me that we would ever be wise to let down our individual and collective defenses against these wolves among us. And now watching the rise of a whole political party and movement in America, led by obvious sociopaths who obey no rules or laws, clearly enjoy inflicting fear and violence on others, and show absolutely no remorse for their crimes is not helping to assuage my fears about the threats that sociopaths continue to pose to the rest of us.

Nevertheless, this well-written and highly readable memoir is an important contribution to our understanding of the sociopathic condition and the people who have it. It is a useful counterpoint and alternative perspective to books like The Sociopath Next Door, one informed by living with the condition and describing it from the inside. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024). Jonathan Haidt.

In the course of my recent reading on the topics of the attention economy, and the effects of our society’s overload of attention-disrupting modern  technologies such as smartphones and social media, I have noticed repeated references to Jonathan’s Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation as an important contribution to the conversation.

After reading it, I understand why people keep citing this book and the author’s insights into the problems we are facing as a result of social media and the rise of the attention economy. It’s an exhaustive and impressive look at a huge problem we now face, one that perhaps wasn’t even that apparent to many of us until now.

The problem that Haidt sets out to first demonstrate and then explain is the disastrous effect on the mental health of the children of Gen Z, especially as pre-teens and early adolescents, from the almost overnight adoption of smartphones and social media apps in the period from 2008 (when the Apple iPhone was first released) until the present.

What Haidt claims is that we (as a society) have been unintentionally running a vast social and psychological experiment on the Gen Z cohort of kids, an experiment which has resulted in a verifiable epidemic of mental illness among these children. The main symptoms are increased depression and anxiety in our young people, the first humans to grow up in the age of smartphones and social media apps.

He calls this experiment “the Great Rewiring”. Many people have already drawn connections between social media, the internet, the attention economy and a variety of obvious related negative consequences to our social and political life. What’s new and unique here is that Haidt recognized and focused on a specific subset of this larger set of contemporary societal problems. His topic is why smartphones and social media are having a particularly devastating impact on our children.

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, the author draws on extensive and detailed medical and social science research, especially longitudinal studies of children’s mental health in the U.S. and abroad, to prove clearly that pre-teen and teen mental health has deteriorated massively during the early years of the smartphone age, and to prove the correlation with the onset of social media apps on smartphones. 

In the second section, he talks about the nature of childhood, what its social and psychological needs and phases are under both healthy and thwarted developmental conditions, and how and why our society as a whole is not giving children what they need to grow into healthy and happy adults.

In the third section, Haidt shows in great detail the harms that flowed from what he calls switching to “phone-based childhoods”, and the rapid switch we made to that new type of childhood in the era of 2008 to 2020 or so.

An important distinction he highlights is the difference between the “embodied” childhoods that children have always had, where their experiences and learning are naturally centered in their own bodies and their “in-person” relationship to the physical world, versus the “disembodied” phone-based childhood of today, where their minds and attention are engaged for most of the day with the virtual world, while their bodies remain  inactive.

He also explores four crucial and specific areas of harm to children’s psychological and emotional development that have resulted from the phone-based childhood: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. In doing so, he provides many studies and statistics to show how smartphones and social media use by  children specifically cause these developmental disruptions.  

In the fourth part of the book, the author examines some of the challenges of trying to undo the damage we’ve done, and how we might reverse the social behavior, laws and assumptions that have led to much of the harm that has resulted from ubiquitous smartphone and social media use by children.

This book is rich in analysis and insights into child development, and how changing social and technological conditions have impacted how children grow and learn, both for better and for worse. For example, he presents a surprising picture of how boys and girls (in general) have both been negatively impacted by the changing conditions of childhood in the online age, but (again, in general) in different ways.

As he describes and demonstrates, because girls tend to be more drawn toward socializing with their peers, to show more desire for group membership, and to have a stronger drive for social relationships and in-group status during puberty than boys do, social media apps on smartphones have tended to play the dominant role in girls’ "phone-based childhoods", and the most psychologically destructive one.

The constant need to curate personal brands, focus on making oneself look beautiful and sexy, say the right things in posts to win approval from a faceless crowd of possible critics, contend with online trolling and predators, and try to keep up with the impossible beauty and fashion standards of online influencers, are some of the examples of the exhausting and demoralizing process of being a young girl on social media that Haidt describes.  

For boys, though, Haidt suggests their more individual focused drive toward outwardly directed action and activity in puberty, rather than on socializing and in-group status, has tended to lead them much more toward heavy involvement in online gaming and pornography. Those online activities by boys actually showed up earlier, in the 1990s, before the age of social media, and have tended to increase many boys’ social isolation.

These two online activities harm boys in different ways. Gaming encourages hyper-aggressive and anti-social behavior, and social isolation. Porn has led boys to learn to resort to the “friction-free” and risk-free viewing of an infinite supply and variety of porn as a way to cope with their budding sexual urges and fears, rather than spending the time and taking the emotional risk of learning how to actually interact with potential romantic and sexual partners in the real world. This can leave them ill-equipped for developing healthy relationships, which in turn often leads to depression, anger and misogynistic behavior.

Of course, these are only sex-based tendencies, not absolutes. Boys use social media too, and girls play online games and sometimes view porn. The types of problems and dysfunctions caused by the different online options readily available on smartphones apply to both sexes. Still, the generalizations are reflected in data from studies of teen online behavior, and are useful for understanding the different relative risks and problems for each sex. The main point is that the adverse effects of a “phone-based childhood”, such as lower self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, loneliness, and feelings of worthlessness and pointlessness are likely to harm both girls and boys.

But there is another main thread (and causative factor) running through The Anxious Generation in parallel with the author’s focus on the disruptions caused by social media and smartphones. Haidt contends that the evolution of television as a mass media, along with cable news and the internet, have led to overly protective parenting practices and social norms that are increasingly at odds with what children need (and have always needed) to grow up to become strong, emotionally healthy and resilient adults.

He argues that our mass media and social media have created a pervasive fear for parents about the risks to children from child abduction, pedophilia, sex trafficking and all the other perils of the world, fears that he contends are out of proportion to the actual risk. This constant media-driven amplification of our fears about children’s safety has led to parents becoming increasingly unwilling to allow children the level of freedom they need to explore, to take risks, and to spend enough time alone and with their peers figuring things out for themselves, as has been customary throughout human history.

He invites older readers in particular to remember how we grew up, and the amount of freedom we had to roam our neighborhoods, to make mistakes and occasionally get a little hurt, to play alone and with friends by ourselves, and to organize our own activities and entertainment unsupervised by adults from an early age. He then contrasts that with today’s world of helicopter parenting, play dates under constant watchful parental eyes and guidance, and youth sports organized and run by parents rather than the kids.

This crucial concept, which he credits to his friend and collaborator Lenore Skenazy and her influential book Free-Range Kids (2009), asserts that the current super-protective practices and social norms around what children can and can’t do only began to develop in the 1980s and 1990s, but have now reached a point of restrictiveness on children’s free play and exploration which is extreme compared to the rest of human history, and detrimental to normal child development.

Haidt then makes the further connection that these recent changes in parenting norms and exaggerated fears about child safety roughly coincided with the arrival of smartphones and social media use by this same generation of children (basically Gen Z), who now aren’t allowed to play and roam on their own as older generations were. With these ahistorical new limits placed on their play time and opportunities for play in the physical world, these kids have been pushed even more toward the “disembodied” smartphone and online apps that further undermine their self-confidence and resilience. This  has increased their feelings of isolation and pointlessness, and accelerated the crisis of anxiety and depression they are now experiencing as a cohort.

Some people might want to dismiss all this as just the latest “moral panic” about new technologies and social change. I don’t believe that’s an accurate conclusion. Haidt makes many helpful and insightful observations, offers valid contrasts and comparisons, and makes helpful  recommendations throughout, all based on the body of mental health studies and longitudinal data he cites.

This is a long and dense book, with a large list of footnotes and references. I’ll admit that it wasn’t always the easiest read, but it was one of the more impactful and influential books I’ve come upon lately. And he does also offer solutions. In the end, if you could skip to his conclusions, they would be along the following lines.

First, kids should not have smartphones or social media accounts until they’re sixteen. Their brains and psyches are simply not yet prepared to withstand the psychological and physiological manipulation engineered into social media apps.

Second, students should not have access to smartphones in school. They’ll learn a lot more without them, but also will be happier spending the time at school with their friends, learning to navigate social life in person, and developing the skills and self-confidence to be functional people in the real world.

Third, parents, teachers and leaders should use collective action to change social norms, and to avoid having to try to devise individual or one-family solutions to the hard problems of how to support children’s free play opportunities and rights, as well as control their smartphone, internet and social media use. Haidt provides good examples of tactics that have worked for groups of people who have begun to move the needle on some of these problems, by working together with other parents and educators in their social circles and communities.

Finally, let kids play and explore the world more from an early stage in their lives, without as much constant close adult supervision. Let them take some risks. Of course, parents have to make informed and appropriate adult decisions about how much risk and freedom is okay for their child at each stage of development, but they should resist the idea that children need to be under constant parental control and supervision every minute.

The Anxious Generation is an outstanding work exploring the distressed state of childhood and children’s mental health today. It probes the causes and unique challenges faced by parents, educators and policy makers in the age of mass media, the internet, the smartphone, and most especially the social media apps that are engineered to capture,  retain and exploit the attention of immature young minds. Even after my long synopsis here, there’s a great deal more to be learned and considered from reading this book. Very highly recommended.

One incidental note: Jonathan Haidt is an active writer on Substack, where he continues to provide useful ideas and updated information on the topics covered in this book.

Book Review: The Heat Will Kill You First. Jeff Goodell (2023).

I read this climate change non-fiction book some months ago, and it’s taken me a while to get around to writing a review of it, but I believe it's still an important review to write and share. The author, Jeff Goodell, is an editor for Rolling Stone magazine who has written several environmental “travelogues” of sorts, which combine accounts of his eco-tourism trips (for journalistic research purposes) with focused discussions of specific elements or results of the climate change phenomenon, the effects of which he observes and recounts from his travels.

In one of his other books, for example, he did a global review of the impact of rising seas from melting ice on Earth’s geography, mankind and our technological civilizations. In this one, he looks at the impacts and feedback loops of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.

 

He begins with an introduction and an overview about a fact which most of us already know and acknowledge is happening: the earth is warming rapidly due to our reliance on burning fossil fuels for much of the energy that powers our societies. He then gives some well-chosen examples of calamitous effects of heat which we are already seeing around us.

 

Next, he moves on to the topic of the effects of heat on the human body. He begins with the particularly grisly and heartbreaking story of a young California couple a few years ago who died with their infant child on a backpacking trip when they failed to plan for the dangers of heat exposure during a family day hike. From this, he moves on to clinical descriptions of how rising heat affects the human body, and how it will soon make increasing numbers of currently-inhabited places around the world no longer fit for habitation, particularly during the warmer months of the year.    

 

From there, the author provides well-researched and organized chapters on a number of other aspects of the effect of rising temperatures on the world. In one chapter, he explores the threat to crops and global food supplies. In another, he discusses the increasingly dangerous effects of heat on outdoors workers, including how extreme heat might prevent the delivery of crucial services in the future. He also explains why we need to develop new work health and safety standards to protect our essential workers who must work outside in hot weather from the extreme heat conditions of the near future.

 

Another chapter provides a close-up look at Antarctica, and the particular dangers to the planet from melting ice there, especially including the potential for sea level rise. He also reviews some of the scientific and engineering ideas that have been proposed to try to slow down and minimize the damage from warming on the polar ice fields and glaciers.

 

Goodell then proceeds on to hotter climes, and raises the problem of tropical insects like mosquitoes and ticks now on the move into many warming temperate zones. He analyzes the extent to which those insect migrations to new ranges will likely spread tropical diseases and epidemics into new regions and human populations, ones which haven’t previously been affected by these problems.

 

In another interesting chapter, he provides a description of how air conditioning works, and how current air conditioning technology actually makes the heat situation worse, both from burning fossil fuels to power them, and because of the heat released in the air conditioning process, but is still necessary to make many parts of the world habitable during the warm season of the year.

 

Toward the end of the book, he moves more toward creative problem-solving, by attempting to identify ways we can adapt to and survive the ongoing rising heat which seems inevitable. For instance, he talks about large-scale “heat events”, like the high pressure “heat dome” that has been over much of the country this summer, and asks whether we should start naming and tracking these high-heat extreme weather events the way we do tropical storms and hurricanes. He goes on to propose some possible approaches and ideas about what it would take to retrofit our modern urban areas for heat survivability in the near future.

 

Much of what is in this book has been in the news in various forms for years for those who are paying attention, as the age of human-caused climate change has settled upon us. However, the author has done a very nice job of focusing the conversation on the heat-related elements of the problem. He does it by taking us on a world tour to see some of the areas where rising temperatures are having early effects, analyzing how the various elements and impacts of rising temperatures fit together, and reporting on some of the means by which we humans may try to mitigate and adapt to the worst environmental effects of rising temperatures around the globe.

 

This is an excellent primer on the coming crisis of heat, and rising air temperatures around the world. Recommended.

Book Review: Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian Klaas (2024).

In one of my favorite lines from my song Strangers, I posed a rhetorical question: “Who can trace the mysterious chain of events that now bind us?”  Although in the song I was talking about a long love affair, it’s a question that applies more generally to everything about our lives, how we become who we are, and what combination of willful acts and serendipity shapes the reality and the history we experience. It’s a question I’ve mused about throughout my life, which probably explains my love of stories about time travel, looping repeated lifetimes, and the multiverse. Most of you probably have thought about it too.

 

Imagine my delight, then, to discover Brian Klaas’s best-selling new non-fiction book Fluke, which explores  these very topics of random chance, chaos, the role of unpredictable and unexpected events in our lives and the world around us, and how our own choices and actions interact with those of others and our environment to shape our lives, and the greater reality in which we live.

 

Klaas draws us in immediately with an introductory chapter, in which he tells a true story about a historical figure whose personal experiences decades before, and his subjective emotional response to those experiences, prevented one mass casualty event, and led to another one instead. He uses this dramatic example and several others to lay out his intentions for the book: to dispel the comforting but (in his view) false notions most of us have that the world operates in ways that are predictable and comprehensible in terms of causality, and that we can identify and shape the course of events through reason and the choices we make.

 

In essence, the book is a social scientist’s thoughtful exploration of the “butterfly effect” – the familiar theory in philosophy that even tiny forces, like the pattern of a single butterfly’s beating wings, can alter the whole course of history. Klaas makes the case for the notion that even small flukes, or unexpected events, really can have tremendous impacts on the course of events in our lives and world.

 

In making that case, he introduces a corollary: that we are deeply enmeshed in the lives of others, their choices and the random events that affect them too. In other words, we aren’t ever really in control of our fates, no matter how hard we try to guide the course of our lives through rationality or our actions. We still have to navigate events over which we have no control, and often don’t see coming.

 

One conclusion he draws is that we should feel empowered by our knowledge of the effects of random events to do things we believe in, even if it might seem that nothing will come of it. The author suggests this is true, exactly because we really don’t know what effect our actions will have on others. If we’re trying to influence others, for example, we might be ignored and not much will change at all as a result of what we said or did. But it also might change everything, or have an unexpected effect on others far greater than we expected.

 

The phenomenon of a social media post, or a music or video clip “going viral” would be obvious examples of that kind of unexpected impact on others. Or it might be nothing more than a quiet conversation that changes someone else’s life trajectory or opinions forever. There are an endless number of things we can do to affect others, and the world around us, so the author suggests there’s no reason not to try, even if we might doubt it will really change anything.     

 

I thought about this book the past two weeks, as the situation involving President Biden’s age and whether he should run for President again or not has played out in the national news. I haven’t usually been someone who wrote letters or emails to politicians, but in this case I did. And I did so, knowing my messages (along with those of many others) might help shape events and exert influence in a direction I preferred, but also realizing the ultimate outcome was unknown, and might arrive via any number of other unexpected and unrelated possible events.

 

In other words, it was strangely comforting to realize based on the ideas in Fluke that I could take actions in furtherance of my preferred outcome, and that they might even make a difference, but also accept with equanimity that my actions’ consequences and effects on developments like this are ultimately unknowable and unpredictable. I guess you might call that learning to “be philosophical”.

 

I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Malcolm Gladwell, because of the intriguing ways he challenges ordinary beliefs and assumptions, and takes us on a journey to look at things we think we already know or understand, but from different perspectives. In challenging what we think we know, and providing us with new information and analyses we might not have heard before, this kind of curious counter narrative can change us, and forever alter the way we view the world around us.  

 

Brian Klaas is taking us on that same type of  contrarian intellectual voyage in this book, with a similarly lively writing style and considerable success in making his case. I found it fascinating, and a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Sebastian Junger.

This 2016 book by Sebastian Junger, the noted action journalist and chronicler of people under extreme duress, whether at sea, as in The Perfect Storm (1997), in forest fires, as in Fire (2001), or at war in War (2010), is a short, intriguing discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans, which he explains as an understandable reaction of fighters to the experience of returning from war, and leaving the close-knit fellowship and shared purpose of small combat units, in exchange for the atomized, anonymous and mundane state of individual life in modern society.

Drawing in part from his own experiences and observations, which included months as a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan, as well as the literature and recorded history of war and warriors going all the way back to the Greeks, Junger explores the "natural" state of humans living in small groups, with their strong values of mutual aid and communal life, which are now mostly found only in armies, war zones, natural disasters, and in some of the few remaining primitive societies on Earth. 

He contrasts that with the widespread personal alienation and loneliness of life in a mass consumer society, which many returning veterans find so alienating, and which creates so much anxiety for them when they return to civilian life.

In developing support for his viewpoint, he also reviews the well-known and widespread phenomenon of “civilized” people kidnapped into primitive societies where similar bonds of mutual closeness and dependence existed, particularly cases of white settlers on the American western frontier who were taken forcibly into Native American tribes, but once there, did not want to leave, even when freed and given the opportunity to return to the white settler society from which they originally had come.

All of this leads the author to his main thesis (and this certainly has been controversial) that the problem of PTSD may be not so much with the soldiers and their traumatic, violent war experiences, as with the nature of the alienating and isolating modern societies to which they return. 

Without necessarily accepting Junger’s theory as a complete explanation of the problem of PTSD, and the difficulty that warriors have in returning to civilian life, this is a thought-provoking and insightful study of the lingering damages of war to the psyches of combat veterans. But it is also an exploration of the deficiencies of modern advanced societies, and the ways they may fail to meet basic human psychological and emotional needs, although we may not be aware of these deficiencies if we’ve never experienced the sort of intense, inter-dependent connections to the people around us that Junger describes. Recommended. 

Book Review: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019). Ronan Farrow.

An extremely well-written, fast-paced true-life autobiographical thriller, in which the multi-talented NBC reporter and New Yorker writer describes what it took to break through the wall of lies and defensive mechanisms that had protected Harvey Weinstein and other wealthy and powerful sexual predators for decades. 

It was Farrow, along with a couple of women journalists at the New York Times, who investigated, wrote, fact-checked and finally published the story of Weinstein's predatory sexual behaviors toward women in Hollywood.  His stories played a critical role in bringing Weinstein to justice, and also helped trigger the #METOO movement that brought other powerful sexual predators in media to light.  

In his book, Farrow details how he was strung along for over a year by his supervisors and higher-level executives at NBC who were bent on undermining and burying his story.  He only gradually learned as the investigation developed of the extent of  Weinstein's ongoing active measures to protect himself, including a well-financed private media and intelligence campaign to track Farrow's progress, and prevent the story from being told. 

Along the way, Farrow also uncovered The National Enquirer's "catch and kill" tactics for protecting rich celebrities (including Donald Trump), and was himself surveilled and subjected to negative media attacks to try to derail and discourage his investigation. 

An inspirational and exciting tale of journalistic heroism, integrity and dogged persistence in tracking down and exposing the crimes of the corrupt rich and powerful men who control many of our media and entertainment businesses.  Highly recommended.