Review: Why Him? Why Her?: Understanding Your Personality Type and Finding the Perfect Match

Why Him? Why Her? has two Why's in it because its alternative title is "Why 2: The Sequel to Why We Love?"

Helen Fisher's sequel to Why We Love has all the same characteristics of the original book: an extraordinary amount of cultural references combined with many academic references to psychological and anthropological studies. In my opinion, she is more careful to address issues with transexuals and homosexuals than she was in her first book. However, unlike her first book she is not laying out her case descriptive case for love, but a prescriptive case. "If ... Then ..." is sort of the underlying point of the entire book. If you're a director, to x y and z to get a good relationship with a negotiator. Or, lets say "if you're a explorer in a relationship with a builder, then you should focus on matching your zaniness to their sturdiness."

The one questionable thing about the book really is the premise of personality types. Like: "it can't be that simple and the exact hormone/neurotransmitter relationships aren't really explained!" Fisher uses historical references- to Greek and Native American personality types- to try to shore up these divisions. The appendix includes some of the data from her Chemistry.com data, which, I suppose, does mean /something/ is going on here. But obviously it isn't very set in stone, and Fisher thankfully makes that clear. Instead of saying, "If my quiz says this, then you must date this" she talks about how best to deal with those around you.

Review: Everything Bad is Good for You

Everything Bad is to Better Angels as Johnson is to Pinker as Pop Culture is to Violence. That is to say, Everything Bad is a sweeping and powerful attack on the "we're all idiots now" narrative. Games teach us- not just button skills or better eyesight (though they DO do that)- an entire set of cognitive skills that allow us to recognize patterns and make better sense of the world. TV shows are increasingly more complicated, and technology bolsters their complexity. This complexity is due to the fact that humans are generally smart. We're NOT all idiots. Likewise, the best movies of the 00's are complicated, twisting tales that turn our brain on. Even reality TV, the pseudogame shows that aren't really "reality" are much better than they were in the 90s or 80s.

Sure, elite culture isn't getting any better or more complex, but so what?

Interesting, Everything Bad stands the test of time (about another 8 years). The success of Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Netflix, and online streaming are all trends that Johnson pretty much guessed at in 2006. Stories are more complicated, require us to think more about them, and expand our horizons. Hell, even the sitcoms that the author had no access to- the Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother- validate the claim that pop culture is more and more useful.

Johnson did not guess things like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, which reward easily digestible content, would attempt to thwart the new pop culture. But his guess that we'd tend towards more complicated social systems? Surely those image macros that pave the surface of the internet have a technical complexity, one that relates to pop culture and gives it the "meme-like" power it was supposed to have

Either way, good book. A summary of it could be, "My Star Trek is more sophisticated than my mom's Star Trek because I'm smarter because I was raised in a more system-rich environment."