Review: The Uninhabitable Earth

Zach and I looked down on the St. John's River. He had just woken up. The river was blue and white. The trees of the Southside were green. A walked dog barked.

"All of this will be underwater."

Don't get me wrong, Jacksonville will be the last great Floridian city to descend into the waves, but it will descend. One of the lessons -Wallace-Wells might not like the word lessons- of climate change is that change will happen mind-bogglingly slowly and quickly all at once. The hurricanes that lashed Florida and drowned the globe of Memorial Park will come soon as Category Sixes within our lifetimes, but the seas will continue to rise higher and higher farther and farther in the future.

I loved David Wallace-Wells' article in New York Magazine. The 7000 words had a simple structure: (1) The science is telling us that these are the effects of global warming and (2) why are scientists being so pusillanimous about sounding the alarm?

The book, "The Uninhabitable Earth" is largely an expansion of the depth for the first topic and a widening of scope for the second. Whereas DWW had a few words to tell us how heat waves will leave man laid low, now he had an entire chapter to describe how heat death actually works and who will feel it the worst (India will). Indeed, he has twelve terrifying chapters that go effect by effect by effect.

The latter part of the book doesn't look at just scientists as much as it looks at the stories that climate change has generated. He calls it the Climate Kaleidoscope. There are multiple ways of interpreting the data, but the data isn't just CO2 levels approaching 420 PPM, it's the ways we respond to climate change. This may sound lofty or corny but the question is real and important:

What does climate change imply about being human?

Your ideological and personal background color your answers and twist their shapes. If you're a neoliberal, Whiggish capitalist then climate change is simply a challenge for The Machine to overcome, like water scarcity or the Malthusian trap. If you're a left-leaning socialist or communist, then climate change represents a demon summoned by capitalist excess that can only be contained by changing (see: reducing) patterns of consumption. If you're an ecologist or paleontologist, then it represents the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Again, what does climate change imply about being human?

Wallace-Wells spends what I think are the most poignant chapters talking about the cosmic significance of climate change: Are we humans gods or are we bacteria? The evidence for godhood is piling up- we have reached the heavens, created artificial life, can see forward and backward in cosmic time, and communicate with anybody anywhere across our planet instantly. There is no reason to think that we will not continue to get better and better at manipulating the atoms around us unless we're interrupted.

Yet, there is also evidence for being nothing more than oversized bacteria, swimming in our own shit: A bacteria is not a thinking thing. It is a complex set of chemical states and those states change and flow into one another. There is no memory of its population size, there is no predictive forecasting. There is just simple stimulus- glucose- and then there is simple excrement- shit.

Humans have the memory of our population size, and we have predictive forecasting. Our stimulus might be more complex than glucose, but sex, drug, rock n' roll, and McDonalds are all ultimately just stimuli that generate more excrement. Our excrement is high volume and highly varied, but ultimately carbon is the one that matters. Carbon is the one that causes mass extinctions. If we can't reduce it, what differentiates us from bacteria aside from size and genetic energy efficiency? Bacteria have no control over their behavior; mass suffocation is hardwired into their genetic circuits. Will we suffocate ourselves?

Are we gods?
Are we bacteria?
Are we human?
Are we dancers?

Review: The Introvert's Edge: How the Quiet and Shy Can Outsell Anyone

This book is a TED talk, a HBR article, or a thirty-minute worksheet at an all-day corporate training event. The insights are few and pulpy stories are littered between them. Here's the introvert's edge:

Because introverts don't like talking to people, they're required to enact efficient, well-rehearsed and planned communications strategies that are less likely to be impacted by emotional baggage. Cool. 

Review: The Gene

This is modern contemporary science canon. Dr. Mukherjee has written a comprehensive read that is so, so necessary. He carries us from the Greek philosophers to Mendel to the modern debates about gender, mental health, gene therapy and CRISPR babies. In fact, if you have not read The Gene, it is probable that you cannot intelligently debate any of these topics.

Our current world is ruled by three units: the atom, the bit, and the gene. The first is unquestionable and its secrets have been drawn out. We have broken it down into its constituent pieces, figured out where it comes from, and we've figured out how to get more. Hell, we've created its polar opposite.

Of the bit- well, we understood it so well that we created a worldbrain that threatens to doom us all to hell.

But of the gene, we know very little, at least in pop culture. The ideologically-aligned people that take the gene very seriously -think race theory and intelligence inheritance- are those that reject the chemically complex and error-prone process of sex and gender divergence. Likewise, there are those who completely ignore the gene and consider it an abysmal tragedy of Western civilization. They end up cutting off men's balls because gender is purely socially-driven while also affirming that gays and lesbians have no choice.

(This may seem like two strawmens, but, remember, in a world of more than 100 people and Twitter, every strawman is instantiated at least once).

These knowledge-failures are driven by myths and fallacies and common sense. They're driven by personal ego defenses:

"Anybody can become a world-class athlete". No. They can't.
"Sex and gender are determined by whether or not somebody has a Y-chromosome." No. It isn't.
"My personal success is driven by my grit and strength of will, my choices"... which are all genetic.

Atoms and bits do not determine who we as human beings are, but genes do. This makes them incredibly important. Imagine if God wrote down, "This is why I've made you the way I have, and this is how I've done it, and this is why you behave the way you do and why you are condemned". The answer is there, written in the blueprints of your body and mind.

Humans have spent 2000 years trying to read the text. Let The Gene take you on that journey.

Review: Darkness Visible: Memoirs of Madness

I remember reading a passage from this book in high school. For the IB Exam? An AP test? I forget, but the context now thrown up around the passage makes me queasy about whatever essay I wrote after reading. Whatever I was reading when I was 17 did not in any way indicate that I was reading the author's beginning descent towards self-annihilation.

I read Darkness Visible after The Noonday Demon, and so can't help but compare them: The Noonday Demon is the textbook you read when you are trying to build a model of the depression-universe, Darkness Visible is what you read when you need to understand how you cannot understand the darkness, and you need to do it as soon as possible.

Review: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

"Depression is the flaw in love."

Damn. What a way to start, what a way to sum up 500 pages of unrelenting truth about the large and most pervasive failure of the human condition. Solomon takes us step-by-step through his own depression but shows us its many other colors through a wide range of interviews from those who are sent to the psychiatric ward in a cycle, to those who are too ashamed to tell even their spouse.

Depression is impossible to pin down. To describe one aspect of it is to ignore the thousands of others. To say that it is a "chemical imbalance" is to ignore the thoughts and responses to those thoughts that can be manipulated by therapy. To say it is all in the head is to ignore the millions of people with "perfect lives" that can hardly get out of bed.

I long thought that depression was a consequence of our modern world: we eat like shit, sit like shit, and interact like shit. No wonder our brains behave like shit, right? No. The Noonday Demon, Solomon assures us, has haunted every civilization and every society. It was isolated and its shadowy nature understood in ancient civilizations. It is summoned wherever and whenever a fallible human brain mashes its own gears.

It isn't genetic, not entirely. I have been reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene concurrently. In it, Mukherjee refers to a story of his aging father who slips from a rocking chair and unleashes a cascading series of symptoms that leave him incontinent and in-and-out of dementia. The hypertension that caused this was genetic, yes. But if the chair had been sturdier? The rocking a tinge less violent? Would he be alright?

And so we see the same with depression. It too is impacted by dozens, if not hundreds, of genes. Yet, the best guess is that even the most genetically gifted human would be laid low like Job if enough horrible, damaging stress was applied to his psyche.

I've also been worried in the past that the Internet was unleashing depression on the world: "depression as a meme" is not discussed in the book. Andrew Solomon does not consider that entire internet communities could be formed around Spongebob jokes where the punchline is suicide. (Both were in their infancy when he was writing the book). My fears may not be ungrounded- look at copy-cat suicides or the aftershocks of The Sorrows of Young Werther- but Solomon shows in interviews with support groups and with lone individuals that what's worse than a depressed individual reading memes about how all their friends are probably depressed too is thinking that they are a lone freak.

As they say, "Representation matters".

Depression, because of its many heads and forms, could be called the cancer of the soul. Yet, cancer fails to truly enter one arena that forms around depression: the socio-political. If Trump and Congress were to renew their war on cancer tomorrow, there would be no change in deaths for quite some time. If Trump and Congress were to start a war on depression, they would be able to save millions of souls and thousands of lives in a few days. The existential stresses and value systems that capitalism engenders is a natural depression-carcinogen. Cancer victims, except for a few behavior-based cancers victims, are rarely treated the same way for coming into contact with an unlucky substance. In this Western, Christianized society, we blame those whom we make sick:

The world will always have skin cancer as long as UVA light is coming from the sky, but Western society is one of the only society that holds your skin to a UVA spotlight and blames you when your skin rebels.

The Noonday Demon is the best book I have read on depression. It is concise- each of the 500 pages is used to its fullest effect- and it is logical. It builds the case that this amorphous, vicious concept of depression is an interconnected, manageable whole. It connects the different permutations to the different treatments to the different victims and the social scaffolding that does or does not treat them.

If you are looking to upgrade your understanding of depression, mental health, or just the world, I strongly recommend you pick it up.

Review: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

In machine learning, there is a class of algorithms known as "unsupervised learning" algorithms. They will take in a set of data and automatically figure out how to label these data points to, hopefully, tell a compelling and actionable journey. They have a few failure modes. One type of failure mode is picking too few or too many clusters for the algorithm to find.

Let's say you put in the color, alcohol content, bitterness and sourness of different drinks into an algorithm- well, if you say "only find me two clusters" and you give it wine, beers, and hard liquor it might start labeling vodka as a beer, or cider as a wine! It is liable to tell you the wrong thing. What if you don't limit the number of clusters? Well, it might keep going and going and going. Soon, you've given it fifty different drinks and it says there are 50 different clusters.

The information, in both cases, is useless.

American Nations seems to have this problem, or at least, a highly related problem: how do you cut up the United States geographically to understand what the hell is going on? How do you cluster the cities and the plains and the deserts and the mountains into separate and cohesive wholes?

There are literally thousands of maps that attempt to do this on the Internet. They do it by commuting zones or population size or voting or the way you say "soda" or "pop" or the regions top porn search on Google. Do any of these make more sense than the others? Who is to say?

Woodard's attempt is to do it based on colonial history. He reminds us that American history did not start in 1776- that it was building for 200 years before colonialists even began to question whether remaining with Britain made sense. He reminds us that the American nation had many, many secession movements from all quarters before 1860.

He posits the existence of 11 nations, each connecting with different colonial waves and geographies. The first two come from the French and Spanish on the continental US's geographical edges. The Puritans, the Dutch, and the Quakers make up the northern nation. To the south, there is the Tidewater gentry of Virginia and the Slavelords of South Carolina (who literally came from Caribean plantations). Greater Appalachia contains the remnants of war refugees from Britain's internal wars of conflict.

American history, in Woodard's version, is the history of alliances and rivalries between these different nations.

But by the end of his history, everything seems like a just-so story. Maybe that's the point. Maybe Woodard is being hyperbolic about how an "American nation" isn't real and that he actually just means some trends in the voting habits by region are useful to name and think about.

There is no model-fighting in this book, and model-fighting is what you'd expect to have in a book that is trying to convince you of something. A lot of Woodard's statistical reasoning comes from predicting who will vote for who in Presidential elections. This is great and all, but how does his model beat "naive models" that guess that regions that vote for one party will just vote for that party again? How does it beat more complicated models that cluster the United States into two regions- the rural and the urban? The haves and the have-nots?

Should San Francisco and Portland and Seattle really be lumped in with another? Is the NOVA region even a little Appalachian?

How did the post-World War 2 migrations change these dynamics? Surely the fact that millions of black Americans fled north and millions of freezing cold Yankees moved south should have changed the way these dynamics work?

On the whole, this book is entertaining, and some of the characterizations of each region certainly ring true, but it is only really interesting as a play model. It isn't trying to be a real one.