Review: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Doctors are always telling you some torturous way to live your life; it’s not like they know everything ever. Hey man, I went to college, too.”

An overdose of lithium is not a way to die, but for quite a while it was the only way we knew how to treat the runaway and broken brain:

Momentary Happiness, which we might define as a function of mood, conscientious, and raw mental horsepower has some set point for every person. The three inputs obviously have hunger, sleep, horniness, status and a hundred other factors as inputs, but the set point is basically something that the brain will correct towards like a PID controller*.

The problem it seems is that PID controller can get fucked up. You see, a PID controller is based off three functions that control the “P” the “I” and the “D”. Having a weak “P” function might mean you reach the set point slowly. Having a strong “P” function means you might never ever hit it. People get paid six figures because they’re really good at picking these three numbers.

But, evolution isn’t paid six figures.

To an mechanical engineer/data analyst, the stories that Kay Jamison describe are a heartbreaking- but enlivening- tale of the human PID controller gone terribly wrong.

Manic-depressive personality disorder (how Kay refers to bipolar disorder, which she thinks is a PC term) is ultimately a mechanical issue in the brain. We know this because it is *obviously* genetic, and because it is so readily treated with medicine. It occurs rhythmically: A swelling of energy, focus, and mental stamina are followed by damning dissipation of the very same.

This sounds to me like a controller trying to get to a set point and simply trying too damn hard. “I want to be happy” it says when sitting in bed for months before shooting like a rocket into space- where the air is too thin to breathe, but thick enough to pull you back down.

The power of An Unquiet Mind as a memoir is that it is, as they say, “From the donkey’s mouth.” If a fucking doctor in psychology can’t keep herself on her medicine for a decade, how are the rest of us -even those of us who read psychology books for fun- supposed to do it? How are the rest of us supposed to get medicine? To actually see a therapist? Kay’s madness isn’t “oh, I’m going through hard times right now”, she’s actually sick as fuck on a molecular level. How are the rest of us with relatively mental colds or flus supposed to react?

We’re not.

Kay’s book is littered with helpers. Truly, this book is more of a “thank you for helping me survive” book than a memoir of bipolar disorder. Lovers, brothers, and mothers are the powers that shoves lithium down her throat at a *healthy* dosage. There is the odd asshole who, despite studying the human mind thinking “suicide is selfish” **, but, in general, Kay is able to find human relationships building her up and keeping her together when her mind’s motor is spinning to explosion.

This book is a great read and I strongly recommend it for anybody that thinks they know people (or might be dealing with themselves) mental health issues. In person and on a day-to-day basis, the fundamental attribution bias has us assign feelings and values to people who are strongly controlled by mushy and messy computers very much out of their command. Kay’s own journey through the disease is a story that teaches us, “The Mind is not the Brain”***. Thankfully, she wrote this enlightening book for us to figure out the distinction.

*Proportional, integral, derivative
**What a dumb fuck
***I wrote a shitload of words a few weeks ago about the elephant and the rider, a concept from Jonathan Haidt. This is a different idea, that Kay makes clear when comparing “psychotherapy” to “psychopharmacology”. The Mind is the conscious thing that you are and the story that you tell yourself. It is the “You” that creates a coherent vision of the past and future. The Brain, however, is the actual physical thing. If it helps, the former is the operating system and the latter is the hardware (of a computer). The two are related, but the key to the difference is that the two methods of repair work on them separately. Therapy works on The Mind- it “defrags” and cleans up the files of our thoughts. It’s a patch, an update, a loading bar that brings the brain from the Blue Screen of Death towards functionality. Medicine- Prozac, lithium, etc- are hardware updates. They’re extra RAM, SSDs upgrades, and pressurized air blowers. They make the machine function the way 6 million years of evolution intended.

They’re both powerful, but neither should be dismissed compared to the other. This is a super key point in the book, and another reason to read it.

Review: Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

Trash tier self-help book. Imagine if you feed GPT-2 (the @dril version) the text of a thousand popular + useful self-help books and psychology books, and this is very similar to the output that you would find. TRITE AF. This triteness is just the tip of the iceberg. It follows into incoherence: "Write in a journal!" Benny-boy so helpfully advises, despite the fact it has nothing to do with environment whatsoever.

Most self-help books have coherent theories behind their advice. Ferris has "make 3rd world people do your labor" and GTD has "just make a fucking list". This book's advice? "Just do random shit until it sticks and stop hanging out with losers lmao; grit it up mister growth mindset".

Benjamin does talk about how "changing your environment" will allow you to achieve the goals you set. Maybe that's his theory? "Don't keep beer in your fridge so you won't be tempted to drink it" he might say.

What about at the grocery, store bud?

"Hey, Publix manager, could you remove the Orange Blossom Ale from the shelves so I won't be tempted to it?"

"Well, no, some people like it, you just need to use your willpower, Son."

"But Benjamin told me Willpower Doesn't Work."

"Guess you're fucked kid, but these are on sale."

"Nice, I'll take enough to get hungover."

Christ. 

Review: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

I gave up on happiness a long time ago.

When I was a young Evangelical Christian, I wrestled with the battle between Mind and Body very often. The Body may have been a temple, but it was a jealous, lazy, and damningly horny temple. The conflict sparked a lot of self-hatred, and I can remember sitting under a breezeway near the high school auditorium remarking that it would be better to be neutered then to have to endure the inner conflict. From Roman 7’s:

“For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”

Of course, after a few years of psychology classes and Theory of Knowledge, the pain of Christian Dichotomism came crashing down to be replaced by the most beautiful fact: I am a unified whole, the product of nearly four billion years of evolution, and my Body is Mind and my Mind is Body. There is no conflict between the two, for they were designed together towards the same purpose.

“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.” - St. Augustine; Confessions

It turns out that atheistic monism, while it may be technically true, is completely useless in practice. For a super majority of the months of 2019, my Body wanted to sleep and drink. That’s *really* useless, even if it is a bit understandable:

In Jacksonville, I was walking a dog almost a year ago from the Jaguars stadium to the Landing. This dog is a super high energy dog, and so, while the entire point of doing this walk was to get him to act low energy for like, an hour, I was still surprised when half way back home he decided to sit and strain against the leash to stay put. He was having none of it. His energy was gone. “Fuck you” Fuck me.

I picked him up and carried him home. He liked that. (He did not act low energy for any time period whatsoever, but whatevs).

The Body strains against the Mind in the exact same way as that dog strained against me, and Haidt begins the Happiness Hypothesis with a deep dive into figuring out what this approximate dichotomism mean. I can think of a few modern secular descriptions. Tim Ferris has popularized and Westernized “The Monkey Mind” and he calms it by writing in his journal. Jordan Peterson means to treat The Body like an entirely different person that you have to help.

Haidt shows us a few historical analogies: Freud and his followers have the vast iceberg* of the id, ego, and superego. The Buddah has the “Horse and The Rider”.

What Haidt does is say, “Yeah, a horse is great and all, but a man riding a horse portrays the man waaaaaay too nicely. The man is riding an elephant, because the elephant is the biggest chunk of The Situation and decides what to do most of the time. The Rider and that which is Ridden are not equals; the Rider almost never gets to even steer.”

This is a freeing metaphor and it’s a useful metaphor, it immediately gives a high-level prescription on what to do to make our lives better: get the Elephant to behave in ways that are good for it; train it into happiness.

The rest of the book is more or less organized on that principle (though this isn’t really mentioned in the book, which thinks of itself as “10 principles” but I’ll get to that):

Happiness can be thought of the alignment of an ever greater expanding circle, starting from the individual Rider and their Elephant to the edges of the Universe. Think of it as an additional dimension to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but instead many circles.

Haidt walks us through them: Once the Rider/Elephant pair align, the Elephant needs to be deconditioned from its default Risk Aversion and the depression, rage and fear that come along with it.

As the two parts of the self are less at cross-purposes, Relationships make up the next circle. Three relationships literally matter the most in a person’s life: the two with their parents and the one one has with their significant other. Pick spouses wisely.

Haidt points to Harlow’s poor baby monkey study to back up his assertions about our attachment systems, and rightly points out that ancient philosophies mostly get “Love” wrong. He calls upon modern neuroscience to give some more timely advice: When finding a partner, Romance, Lust, and Companionship need to be given their time and place and balanced. Haidt points out a danger period in relationships between 1-3 years in when “Romance” collapses before “Companionship” builds up enough to take its place. Navigating this correctly or incorrectly has implications for both lost happiness and lasting pain.

Tending to the next circle of relationships requires us to understand how the Elephant is a half-evolved bee: we are a social animal, and have huge mental machinery dedicated to navigating complex social arrangements (For example, one family of four has 6 relationships to keep track of, two families of four meeting for Christmas dinner have 28 relationships to keep track of, four families of four have 120 relationships, etc).

The Social Elephant works off two principles- Reciprocity and Reputation Guarding. The first is fairly obvious- social animals work better when they’re cooperating, and to cooperate they need to perform reciprocal behavior (grooming each other, sharing meat, sex [if you’re a bonobo], etc). To keep from being cheated, we build out a map of trust with everybody we interact with, and then we also download the map everybody else has of everybody else. This makes up a person’s Reputation.

The problem arises when we actually do fail others and lose their trust: we build stories and tell moral fables to say, “Well, aksually, I’m in the right.” This is post-hoc rationalization, or as they say, “Hamstering”. This is an attempt to guard our Reputation, but what we’re ultimately doing is having the Elephant go into Panic Mode. The Elephant in Panic Mode means an Elephant telling the Rider what to do instead of the other way around. This is bad.

Reputation Guarding comes from a good place- we want to preserve the trust we have- but left unchecked it ultimately leads to losing the ability to trust ourselves.

Continue scaling up the number of relationships, and Reciprocity and Reputation Guarding morph into something else: Identity and Morality. The number of relationships, and therefore the number of reciprocal interactions scales as a square (If you used one neuron for every relationship, then keeping track of every relationship at a school the size of UF would require using 1% of your brain just to identify those relationships).

Identifying as a part of a group lets you borrow the Reputation of that group, and therefore cooperate with people as a part of the umbrella of that identity. That means groups put constraints on those members to protect their collective Reputation. This constraint ultimately becomes Morality.

We’re hardwired to build Identity like this, just as we’re hardwired to find a mate and protect our reputation, so leaning into it is good. Becoming an exemplary member of our groups is an innate drive.

Ultimately, Morality, Identity, and Hierarchy blend together at the highest scale to form the dimension of Divinity. Just as we a stricken by adulation of those amongst us who achieve great moral behavior or who are super high status, that same machinery is activated by mountains, oceans, and stars. We naturally imbue the universe with moral purpose**. The Religious Right have a script for this- they have God. The Secular among us have to build out the story for ourselves*, but it is possible to build.

When aligned at this outer level, “happiness” might not arise, but you get the next best thing: a shot at meaning.

To recap:

Are you aligned within yourself? Have you trained your Elephant to want to do what you want to do? Is the Elephant content or trusting that you will satisfy its needs? Is the Elephant (possibly chemically) depressed?
Are you aligned with your spouse? Does your Elephant and her Elephant get along? (Imagine introducing two dogs if you need to, what do they do?) Do you guys agree on high level plans regarding kids, finances, and identity?
Are you aligned with your closest social groups? Do you *have* close social groups? Do you have an identity you can draw upon to represent yourself? To make yourself not bored and not be boring?
Are you aligned with a broader community? Do you have a place to volunteer? To donate? To perform acts of kindness?
Are you aligned with Universe? Do you know your place in it or a plan to find your place in it? Do you have a Mission?

Uh, answering these questions probably won’t make you happy but it’ll get you closer to whatever it even means to be happy.

As I commented above, the structure I’ve just described it not entirely adapted by Haidt’s book. He presents it as actually *testing* different Happiness Hypotheses, like the “Virtue Hypothesis” or the “Stoicism/Buddhism Hypothesis” or the “Consumerist Hypothesis.” This is great and fine (they’re all wrong) except for the fact that he isn’t just describing the relevant psychology and giving thumbs up/down on the hypotheses, but actively trying to create a prescriptive hypothesis.

It isn’t a self-help book, but, come on man! it’s got “Happiness” in the title and it tells the reader to take Prozac!

This is a quibble about the structure and presentation, but the content of the book is solid except for the problem of “Are all psychology studies before 2016 fucked?” The book is a teenager as of this year, and draws on many studies from before 2006, which means that some of which may have been destroyed by the replication crisis. There is a certain haze that surrounds some of the more surreal findings and that means a lot of references have to pass the “Aaron’s Mom’s BS detector test”***

When the content is good though, the content is good!

Haidt’s book is overall great, and his prescriptivist hypothesis that a balance between Materialist Striving and Stoic Buddhism will bring about the most happiness is well-argued. He doesn’t fully synthesize a hybrid theory, but he definitely points an arrow in that direction.



*It occurs to me that the iceberg metaphor is no longer appropriate from a “politically considerate stand point” given the Warming of Our Times

**I’ve discussed the unnerving meta-apathy of black holes once or twice. If I lived in a state or society or generation that didn’t present as an apathetic machine, would it be harder to project apathy onto a celestial devourer. ?

***If I told my mom about this study, would she say “hmm, okay, whatever” or “why did they need a study on this? duh” (The first is the failed state)

Review: Circe

Circe is a fantastic novel. The story sits with you and finds its way into your thoughts when you don't expect it. I always found myself looking forward to reading it.

There are too many themes to look into, but there is one that I think sells itself: the relationship of women to men. Circe's relationships with three women are explored, but none as thoughtfully and continually as her relationship with her father, her brother, her various lovers, and pigs.

Each of these relationships is characterized by the explicit or implicit hierarchy that Circe accepts- the man is above the woman. She accepts this, time and time again, and is wounded in all the ways a person can be wounded. Why does she accept this? It's always been that way. Literally, since she's thousands of years old.

Better question: why do the men also accept this? Helios- well, he's literally the sun, so that's at least not unreasonable. Numerous Greek heroes treat her like shit though, and they're not gods at all. What they have in common isn't just run-of-the-mill narcissism (though they have that in spades), it is that they each see themselves as the heroes of their own stories. Their shitty behavior is enabled by controlling the narrative.

Of course, that's the point of the book: Circe is a retelling of a few Greek myths but namely The Odyssey from Circe's perspective.

This is the lesson for men who read Circe then: you are not the main character of the story; do not act like it; do not treat women like accessories to it. This lesson extends to women too but with slight adjustment: Do not let another person (especially a man) control your narrative; do not submit to be a footnote.*

A lesson for everyone: co-write a narrative with mutual respect and admiration without being dominating. The book is not a list of Circe being constantly abused-- she does damage in her own way. Those relationships that she and others attempts to dominate slip into rage and fear. Those that she submits to end with her being hurt. Those that involve a mutual, separate respect are those that ultimately redeem her.

Of course, Circe has a bunch of other themes like parenthood, a more powerful look at femininity than I am qualified to write about, and the question of "meaning and death." They are all worth reading this novel to think about.

*Obviously both lessons apply to both/all genders, but the historical precedent is for the lessons to be gender biased.

Review: Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney is a great author, and well-known among Millennial yuppies who read the New York Times. So well-known and liked in fact, that my copy of Normal People was stolen. Not the expected behavior of a New York Times subscriber, but Rooney's books are good!

Conversations with Friends is as good as Normal People* and that is strong praise. The two are both similar: they are both the coming-of-age romances of Irish college students where misunderstandings plague the characters. Misunderstandings run rampant, chaotically, viciously. Rooney captures how they appear from past life and intrude on the romantic sanctuary: classism, ambition, parental scars and more burrow their way into personal anxiety which extends itself into relationship anxiety which swings the souls of our poor lovers.

This leads to a rather stressful reading experience: We know the characters love each other- we don't even need their internal monologue in some cases- but they remain adamant to stick to their own psychological problems. "See a therapist, you depressed asshole!" you want to shout at characters fifty pages before they coil up on the floor in their first episode. "Don't you see you're giving up your love!"

There is a level of will-they-won't-they that runs through these novels, and this is the primary source of intrigue, but the conclusion is never brought. There is no ending. At the end of both novels, the lovers have left and come back together multiple times. The novels end- spoiler alert- with them together... but...

"Together... but" is what we're left with, then. The anxiety never releases itself, the dramatic irony never resolves. "They love each other, but they might fuck it up" is what you're forced to grapple with. In a Millennial world where uncertainty is ascendant (Peter Thiel would say that they are "pessimistically indeterminate") this is the best we can hope for.

The biggest flaw in Rooney books is not the kind of happy-sad endings. It's the flat characters. Our characters are buffeted by school chums and work buddies that are props on the stage of love. They are acted upon by our lovers' wit, but never challenge them, or they act like natural forces, and have no consciousness at all.

Perhaps this is also a strength- after all, our narrators are horribly unreliable and sometimes stupid, so maybe the flattening isn't an accident. Our main characters are really just so enraptured that everyone around them seems stale in comparison.

Aside from my quibbles with these side pieces, the main characters are quite fleshed out. Their cares and motives propel not only the story, but the reader. They're funny, and we quickly build rapport with them and want to see them happy. We don't often, which causes us to read even more.

* which I did not review

Review: No Matter the Wreckage

We are not taught how to read poetry in school. We're taught to memorize it, and to analyze it. Enjoyment is something that maybe college students get to do. But for those of us who had to read in high school? Poetry is something you have two hours to write a thousand words about.

People therefore come to poetry via. other means. In the digital age, that's social media: Tumblr poets get reblogged, Instagram poets flash couplets on manicured pictures, and people press play buttons on YouTube in front of a black wall. This is a weird situation to be in! It's a very happy one.

Poetry, it turns out, is alive and well. Sarah Kay is fantastic. I have a good twenty five minutes everyday when I take a subway- not Kay's charismatic New York subway, but a subway all the same- and twenty five minutes is the perfect amount of time to do nothing, like surf the web or Twitter or Reddit or godforbid Facebook. However, twenty five minutes is also the perfect time to read a poem or five. It lets you chew them, like you're supposed to, without the pressure of a paper to write.

Of course, when you get off the subway, and sit where you're going, you can throw on a video of Kay reading the poem in its full glory. Poetry is meant to be spoken, after all. Poetry is an artform that is by its nature, both meant to be read and meant to be spoken. You have to do both, (or at least have somebody speak it for you) or you miss out on it, like reading the captions of a comedy special while its on mute or only listening to the special's audiotrack.

Sarah's poems are relieving reads. They're not relaxing because they certainly stir the mind. They're not exactly fun, because they're often heavy (though not exclusively in the slighest). They relieve certain unseen stresses that you might not know you have, or they prick your feelings in a way that reminds you those feelings still exist. The poems do not make you feel better, but they remind you that you will. They remind you that, like poetry, you will be alive and well.

Review: The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

At the beginning of the book, Simon Winchester plays the language game that everybody who ever talks about precision has to: What is precision, accuracy, perfectionism? How are they different? How do they relate?

What Winchester ultimately tells us is a story of intentionality. Our brains create platonic worlds and communicate in platonic ideals. The history of precision is a history that begins in pre-industrial England, but I would propose that it begins with the first stone tools, when humans first began graphing our intent on the universe. It is from there- with flint and rock- that humans first began with an idea and then extruded it into reality.

The machines our industrializing ancestors built- cannons and muskets -were machines of intent. Indeed, the advantages of the original Rolls Royce's and Ford's Model-T came from the intentful design and the intentful manufacturing, respectively. A century later, humankind has graphed our intent onto the most basic structure of the universe. We align atoms in lines and bid them individually to do our bidding.

This book is fantastic, and it uncovers the self-ratcheting power of human precision. It should help those who are interested in scientists, engineers, the history of either, and developmental economics.

Review: Unsong

There are lots of Christian fantasy stories, and there are lots of Christian science fiction stories. It turns out there are _Jewish Science Fantasy_ novels, too.

Scott Alexander’s Unsong is a deep dive into a world turned on its head. Jewish Kabbalah and its esoteric teachings are not just real, but copyrighted and commoditized. The adventures that arise are ultimately set pieces on a stage that answers the ultimate question: Why does God allow suffering? Or rather,

“Hey God, what the fuck?

This is not within the scope of Tolkein or Lewis. Explicit Christian authors rarely attempt to do more than inspire their readers with stories of hope, faith and love. Implicit Christians- Orson Scott Card, Madeleine L'Engle, etc- repackage Christ myths into dualistic worlds about temptation and personal sacrifice. Secular science fantasy/fiction writers deal with human issues of relationships, identity, and sex.

Saying “Hey God, what the fuck?”, in the Jewish tradition, is normal.

Jacob fought an angel thereby becoming Israel, and Elie Wiesel wrote the Trial of God. Scott continues this tradition, and launches his line of inquiry with Peter Singer, Derik Parfit, and lots of puns. Lots and lots of puns. Puns in this universe are literally weapons capable of destroying entire cities.

This is Bay-area, Bayesian bait. Sometimes the plotting is off, and sometimes the characters do stupid things, but the world building, humor, and the characters make the book an addictive read. I’m unsure if Scott’s answer to the question of theodicy is satisfying. I’m still mulling it over, crunching it in my brain. That, at least for now, is a good sign.

Review: American War

American War on the surface is just Global Justice Porn. I don't mean that in a good way.

It describes a world hit early by full (or nearly full) polar melt due to global warming. This world has a humbled United States governed out of Columbus, Ohio with four Southern states leading a rebellion. A large portion of its Western half has been ceded to Mexico. It also has an empire stretching from Morocco to Pakistan that has gained the technological edge. By 2090, Atlanta is a sweatshop where Southerners live in hot and cramped megatowers.

This world's history reads like an answer to the following question: "What if all the bad shit the United States did to the world got reversed and happened to it?"

The problem is that the United States Akkad sets his dystopian story in doesn't seem like America at all. The main character is a... Women of Color? and she... joins the Southern cause? The Southern cause that fights for... the right to use fossil fuels?

America does not work like that, and Akkad’s understanding of America has to be called into question. Perhaps this was the intention: When you imagine this story in South America, or China, or Africa (or Syria, the real target), you don’t find there is much difference. Truly, you could easily rewrite this book with any location in the world by just “find and replacing” a few key geographic terms.

The story of a refugee girl finding her way thrown into terrorism and torture is universally applicable. Akkad has said himself that the story is about revenge. If that’s what he meant, okay, that works.

Still, the setting and the way the dystopia unfolds holds this story back. The tale of revenge is painted on a moldy canvas, and a poorly drawn world map.

Review: The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses

We sit on top of apocalypses. This is evident in the names of places: Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin, Connecticut. This is evidence in the names of things: Avocado, Barbecue, Chipmunk. These words come from entire civilizations wiped off the map by disease, with the survivors then ethnically cleansed.

This is true across the world: past civilizations full of artists, writers, poets, bureaucrats, farmers, and engineers collapsed into chaos until the survivors found ways to build anew from the wreckage. Rome is built on top of Roman ruins.

There is apocalypse within us: the genetic sequences of non-African humans are littered with the debris of Neanderthals and Denisovans (depending on where your ancestors lived). Whether or not the African colonists predominantly interbred, killed, or out-hunted their cousins is irrelevant to this fact: the world that these archaic people lived in for thousands of years was replaced with a new species quickly.

Apocalypse is frozen in the ice: mammoths and sabertooth tigers and a great many more megafauna were eliminated by humans in wave after wave of migration. Even the greatest, most terrifying land animals that are alive today were nothing compared to giant demons that our species condemned to death.

These apocalypses- of civilization, of archaic humans, of giant mammals and birds- are nothing compared to what has happened or what will come. Surely, they are fractal representations. They are scaled down, but the principles are consistent: complex, self-regulating systems are shocked by a series of unpredictable and unstoppable events that disintegrate the "network of being".

For civilizations, the network of being is a complex social hierarchy. Trade and specializations are impossible when all your farmers are dying from a never-before-seen disease (it doesn't help the survivors are being picked off by invaders). For archaic humans, the network of food, sex and broad society are interconnected and each one was wholly absorbed by the newer human species. For the decimated megafauna, all humans had to do what shake the food chain a little before it collapsed around their necks like a noose.

What Peter Brannen describes in The Ends of the World is how the biggest apocalypses occurred by disintegrating networks of being that lie at the core of the world. Indeed, the human network is embedded within an ecological network, itself embedded in it a geological network, which is again embedded within an astrological network: the stars may not determine life on earth, but the sun, moon, and asteroids sure do.

The geological network- the mountains, volcanoes, continents, water cycle and carbon cycle- is the star of the show. Mostly. Three (and a half) of the mass extinctions appear to be mostly volcano-related: volcanoes heat the atmosphere by spewing lava, wreaking havoc on food chains, and then those volcanoes start sucking out carbon, wreaking even more havoc on food chains. The worlds dominated by trilobites, crocodile cousins, and ancient mammals were all killed in this way.

Yet, the geological network is not the only driver: ecologically, the evolution of life on land in the form of plants impacted its nest network by driving down carbon dioxide. The emergence of a new lifeform was able to push back downwards, until the network that sustained it broke to pieces.

Huh. Volcanoes mess with the carbon cycle? Also, plants mess with the carbon cycle? What else messes with the carbon cycle?

Throughout the book, Peter reminds us constantly: Carbon is important, carbon is the star, carbon is the intermediary between the massive geological and biological networks. It is also the prime mover of industrial human civilization. It is also the prime destroyer of the biosphere.

You know this. If you’re looking at a review for a book about the biosphere's history, you already know that we’re warming the planet by pouring gigatons of carbon into the oceans and sky. The importance of this book is that it provides a rejoinder to Elon Musk’s, “[Carbon emissions is] the dumbest experiment in human history”:

The experiment has been run before. We’re standing on top of it.

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.

Review: Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

Uncommon Grounds is a great book, and points to what I think is an overlooked section of history: the history of things. We have lots of books about people. There are cultural histories, like Churchill's history of English speaking folk and there are histories of activists and ideologies, like Zinn's histories. I just finished reading SPQR, which is the history of a city becoming an empire becoming an entirely new way of relating. There are small stories, like any of the biographies from Isaacson, or there are big stories, like Sapiens.

But these stories all involve people, and people sort of blend together after a bit in a fleshy, brown, tan, pink mess.

The histories of stuff -of things and their processes- is, in my opinion, unexplored in popular culture. I've read a few books about things, but I almost always read them as a joke. For example, "Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig" is the history of the pig. It's very interesting, but a book people give you a weird eye when you tell them you read it. Oink oink.

Perhaps a more defensible history of things is "Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World" which I read because I was feeling a bit engineer-y at the time. That book is an exploration of different materials, but also their history. It's a bit more professionally correct to be reading about the history of carbon nanotubes than it is to be reading about how the Romans like their bacon, but the fact is they're both the same: a thing exists that a human wants, and so the human must do something about it.

The history of things is the history of Societal McGuffins.

Nowhere was that made more clear for me than reading Uncommon Grounds. Coffee seems to be responsible for the best in humanity- the Enlightenment, scientific development, etc- and also the worst in humanity- slavery, imperialism, trade protectionism. The history of coffee captures the strained relationship between Latin America and the West, the Resource Curse, and the complexities that arise when a supply chain spans across the globe before globalism is even a coherent idea. Indeed, it's hard to read about coffee and not think about how its sister plants- the illegal kind- conform to the exact same geographic structure and follow similar economic laws.

Imagine if we went insane and wanted to stop coffee and make it illegal. Our current strategy for dealing with illegal subsistences is to bomb the shit out of peasants in the jungly hills of the Andes, and so we would have to expand that strategy across the trees of Brazil and West Africa. What about the millions of people, like me, who will have a homicidal headache if you take away their coffee? Well, it is just not economic to help those people. Bombing peasants who capture 0% of the value they create, somehow, is.

This is a benefit of the histories of Societal McGuffins: like things have like histories, like economics, and like societies. The parallel histories of foods and industries are not the same and they don't repeat, but they rhyme.

Read a history book about a thing! Things are more real than nations or ideologies. The Brazilian people went from Empire to Republic to dictatorship, but the coffee trees were constant (unless it snowed bad). The American people carried their coffee across the sea and across the Great Plains and over the Rockies more than they carried the racial and religious superstitions of their homelands. It may have taken 60 years for Italian style fascism to reach American shores, but the espresso jumped across the Atlantic as soon as it could.

Read a history book about a thing!

Review: Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America

Polarized is a good academic discussion of American polarization and it proves its story in a myriad of ways: American parties used to be pluralistic, geographically dispersed under the New Deal System created in the 1930s, but Democratic dominance led to a splintering and slow polarization brought to a head in 1994.

This polarization started in the electorate, first appeared in the presidential elections, and finally set Congress on its current dysfunctional path.

Ultimately, there seems to be no realistic solution to this problem. Campbell throws out “education” and “journalism”. I don’t know if he has ever heard “the ongoing education crisis” or “journalism is dead” but he doesn’t really have any other ideas. The disease has been diagnosed in excruciating detail, but there is no medicine.