Archives de catégorie : Anthropology/Sociology

THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS de Noah Rothman

Commentary editor Noah Rothman takes aim at the “woke left,” comparing them to stern, joyless Puritans who seek to make every daily choice a matter of life or death and break society down into the saintly or sinful.

THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS:
Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun
by Noah Rothman
Broadside Books/HarperCollins, July 2022

In Noah Rothman’s view, the Left used to be the party of the hippies and the free spirits. Now it’s home to woke scolds and humorless idealogues. The New Puritans can judge a person’s moral character by their clothes, Netflix queue, fast food favorites, the sports they watch, and the company they keep. No choice is neutral, no sphere is private.
Not since the Puritans has a political movement wanted so much power over your thoughts, hobbies, and preferences every minute of your day. In the process, they are sucking the joy out of life.
In THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS, Noah Rothman explains how, in pursuit of a better world, progressives are ruining the very things which make life worth living. They’ve created a society full of verbal trip wires and digital witch hunts. Football? Too violent. Fusion food? Appropriation. The nuclear family? Oppressive.
Witty, deeply researched, and thorough, THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS encourages us to spurn a movement whose primary goal has become limiting happiness. It uncovers the historical roots of the left’s war on fun and reminds us of the freedom and personal fulfillment at the heart of the American experiment.

Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine, author of Unjust, and an MSNBC/NBC News contributor.

ON BELONGING de Kim Samuel

In an age of social isolation, what does it mean to belong?

ON BELONGING:
Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation
by Kim Samuel
‎ Abrams Press, September 2022

Humanity is at an inflection point. Stress, disconnection, and increasing environmental degradation have people yearning for more than just material progress, personal freedom, or political stability. We are searching for deeper connection. We are longing to belong.
ON BELONGING is an exploration of the crisis of social isolation and of the fundamental human need to belong. It considers belonging across four core dimensions: in our relationships with other people, in our rootedness in nature, in our ability to influence political and economic decision-making, and in our finding of meaning and purpose in our lives, with lessons on how to create communities centered on human connection.
A trailblazing advocate and thought leader on questions of social connectedness, Kim Samuel introduces readers to leaders around the world who are doing the work to cultivate belonging. Whether through sports, medicine, music, business, culture, or advocacy, the people and programs in this book offer us meaningful lessons on building a world where we all feel at home.

“Kim Samuel dives deeply into one of the most complex issues of twenty-first-century human existence, the results of which can be discovered in this compelling book. ON BELONGING draws narratives from profound life experiences, timeless literature, and cutting-edge academic research. The key to finding potential solutions to so many of the social, ecological, economic, and political challenges we face will be revealed within these pages. Find inspiration and even hope right here!”―Annie Lennox, singer-songwriter and global feminist activist

Kim Samuel is an activist, educator, and movement builder. She is the founder of the Samuel Centre for Social Connected-ness and an academic lecturer at institu-tions including Oxford, Harvard, and McGill Universities. Samuel was recently named the first-ever Fulbright Canada ambassador for diversity and social connectedness. She lives in Toronto.

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WARUM ES SO SCHWER IST, EIN GUTER MENSCH ZU SEIN d’Armin Falk

Why we want to do the right thing, but do the wrong thing instead – and how to become a better person.

WARUM ES SO SCHWER IST, EIN GUTER MENSCH ZU SEIN
(Why It Is So Hard to Be Good)
by Armin Falk
Siedler Verlag, May 2022

Would you save a life for 100 euros? The answer has to be yes – doesn’t everyone want to do the right thing? But Armin Falk, Germany’s leading behavioural economist, shows that we often do bad things despite wanting to be good, and are far from being as good as we like to think.
Why is it that we don’t do the right thing day in and day out: help others, give to those in need, protect our climate or care for the well-being of animals? Using many concrete examples and the insights he has gained from years of research, the Leibniz Prize-winner reveals under what circumstances people are likely to act morally – or immorally – and the role that personality, gender, education and culture play. Once we have understood this, we’ll find it easier to change – not only ourselves, but the very fabric of our economy and society.

Armin Falk, born in 1968, is the director of the Institute for Behavioural Economics and Inequality (BRIQ) and of the Laboratory for Experimental Economic Research, as well as Professor of economics at the University of Bonn. He is one of the world’s most highly regarded economic scientists. His work has won him the 2009 Leibniz Prize (the ‘German Nobel’) and a 2013 Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, the world’s highest prize for economists.

IF NIETZCHE WERE A NARWHAL de Justin Gregg

Funny and counter-intuitive, IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL reveals how human intelligence may actually be more of a liability than a gift, and how the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it.

IF NIETZCHE WERE A NARWHAL:
What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity
by Justin Gregg
Little, Brown, August 2022
(via Writers House)

At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence. We invented writing. Produced incredible achievements in music, the arts, and the sciences. We’ve built sprawling cities and traveled across oceans—and space—and expanded to every part of the globe.
Yet, human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. Understood side-by-side, human exceptionalism begins to look more like a curse.
As scientist Justin Gregg persuasively argues, there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process.
In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Gregg highlights one feature seemingly unique to humans—our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness—and compares it to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself.
Destined to become a classic, IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL asks whether we are in fact the superior species. It turns out, the truth is stranger—and far more interesting—than we have been led to believe.

Justin Gregg is a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project and an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University where he lectures on animal behavior and cognition. Originally from Vermont, Justin studied the echolocation abilities of wild dolphins in Japan and The Bahamas. He currently lives in rural Nova Scotia where he writes about science and contemplates the inner lives of the crows that live near his home.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING de Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard

Weaving together cultural criticism, personal narrative, historical diversions, and on-the-ground research, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a search for pure, loud, vibrant sensory experience and the knowledge that can only come from that source.

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING:
In Pursuit of Sensuous Life in the Digital Age
by Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard
Ecco/HarperCollins, Summer 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As physical life on earth grows increasingly fraught and imperiled, technology moves to take us out of our bodies and into our screens. Capital is flooding into the development of the metaverse, designed to engulf us even more fully in tech’s trackable, commodifiable sphere.
And as the influence of these newly manufactured modes of experience promises to grow more fixed and invasive, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the years ahead will require us to reckon with questions that, at first glance, may seem surreal: What is the point of physical life? What are our bodies for?
Although we are saturated by an overload of stimuli, we engage with our actual physical senses—touch, taste, sight, scent, and sound—less and less. It’s no surprise we face an epidemic of depression and disassociation; no wonder that, in an era that demands engagement, we often find ourselves numb, forgetful, and detached. We need an urgent and necessary alternative: a return to the vital purpose and pleasure of our embodied senses.
This is precisely the mission of MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING, a multi-hyphenate work of narrative non-fiction offering a radical reappraisal of the five senses in our break-neck technological world, as well as our sense of time, place, and of self.
With the improbably intermingled properties of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING is a personalized, thematically anchored quest narrative that proposes a defiant way forward for sensory life.

Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard was born in Chicago in 1992, the year Apple declared handheld devices would change the world. A 2021 finalist for the Krause Essay Prize, her work has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Paris Review Daily, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, The Idler, The White Review, The New Statesman, and elsewhere in print and online. Her research on the societal impacts of artificial intelligence has received recognition and funding from the Royal Society, the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence in Cambridge and Oxford. A graduate of Stanford and the University of Cambridge, she has, for better or worse, spent several years working in the tech industry.