Daily Media Diet

From The Economist : Among the college-educated in America, only 12% of births are to unmarried mothers; among those who dropped out of high school, the rate is 70%, up from 43% in the early 1980s. Similar trends can be seen across the wealthy world: the average out-of-wedlock birth rate for OECD countries is 40%. From The Economist : Although a wedding cannot turn a flimsy relationship into a strong one, it adds scaffolding that can save one that is in between. Making a public, lifelong commitment to another person is not the same as drifting into cohabitation to share the rent. From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book I am currently reading"): The Invented Part, by Rodrigo Fresán. A wonderfully inventive, intricate and entertaining novel on what it means to be a writer, and a reader. From  Journal of Consumer Research : Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others’ money. Using a variety ...

From The Paris Review (Jeffrey Gleaves on Favorite Books of 2017): I like my reading to be as ironic as possible, that’s why Robert Coover’s Huck Out West was my favorite novel this year. Coover’s sequel to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to the edge of “sivilization,” through the Civl War up to the centennial year of 1876. Huck Out West is hilarious and pointed in the way only Coover can be. If you’re left wanting to stay in that era, then Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 is an impressive history. I’ve long appreciated Ulrich’s view of history as a chorus of singular stories. A House Full of Females isn’t your typical history pulled from headlines, memoirs of “important white men,” or official records; it’s a history gleaned from individual journals, personal stories, and heirlooms, putting us as close to the real story as possible. From The Paris Rev...

From The New York Times : In 2014, the economy was 2.5 times larger than it was in 1980, but the bottom half of the population made only 21 percent more, on average, even after including government benefits. America’s middle — families earning more than the bottom 30 percent but less than the top 30 percent — gained only 50 percent in those 34 years. By contrast, the after-tax incomes of Americans in the top 1 percent — families like President Trump’s or Senator Bob Corker’s — tripled. From Harper's : Being visited by a rival male causes male fruit flies to defer sleep until later, but being visited by a virgin female eliminates the need for sleep altogether. From The Economist : Marriage idealises permanence, and yet it is changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. Almost everywhere it is becoming freer, more equal and more satisfying. From The Economist : As women earn more and the stigma of divorce fades, more men are finding that they cannot treat thei...

From The Paris Review (Nadja Spiegelman on Favorite Books of 2017): This year, I found myself swept away by Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. The jealousy-inducing story behind the book (Rooney wrote the first draft in three months, at the the age of twenty-six) is difficult to reconcile with the tight grace of this novel, though all of the volatility and speed is there. Rooney so expertly captures what it’s like to be young today: the conversations that flow seamlessly from email to text message to unspoken glance, the sexual and creative confidence, the admiration for older men who write emails written in all lowercase. Her first-person narrator, the twenty-one-year-old Frances, is a constant, careful observer, and yet Rooney leaves room for the reader to see all the things Frances herself does not. Frances’s deceptively deadpan tone encases moments of revelation; among the many sentences I underlined: “She made us all laugh a lot, but in the same way you might make someo...

From The Economist : One way to create a market for NETs would be for governments to put a price on carbon. Where they have done so, the technologies have been adopted. From The Economist : [Politicians] must expand the focus of the 23-year-old UN Framework Convention on Climate Change from cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to controlling their airborne concentrations, suggests Janos Pasztor, a former climate adviser to the UN secretary-general. In other words, they must think about stocks of carbon dioxide, not just flows. From The Paris Review (Nicole Rudick on Favorite Books of 2017): It turns out that the books that top my reading list this year are, in one way or another, about intimacy. First, biography: Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker and Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink (which, full disclosure, I worked on as posts for the Daily). Kraus and Stephenson have written unconventional lives, approaching their subjects askance and with varying degrees of subjectivity....

From The New Yorker : I also admired a very different, extremely beautiful novel, “Reservoir 13,” by Jon McGregor (Catapult). Despite the fact that it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this book, too, went almost unnoticed in the United States. “Reservoir 13” is nothing less than the portrait of an entire community, a northern English village, over the course of thirteen years. In a sense, it’s a radical novel: nothing much happens, the plot is almost subterranean, and McGregor practices an experimental poetics in which no character—among a very large cast—is lingered over for more than a few paragraphs at a time. But “Reservoir 13” uses unfamiliar techniques for deeply traditional and humane purposes. The repetitive and circular narrative—the same things happening to the same people, year after year—yields a kind of prose almanac in which the reader can measure the passage of months and years in a single community: we see how lives are lived, how the seasons come and go, how...

From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. From Harper's : The efficacy of flu shots is boosted by good moods. From The Economist : The median IPCC model assumes sucking up a total of 810bn tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2100, equivalent to roughly 20 years of global emissions at the current rate. To have any hope of doing so, preparations for large-scale extraction ought to begin in the 2020s. From The Economist : The problem with afforestation and BECCS is that the plants involved need a huge amount of land. The area estimated ranges from 3.2m square kilometres (roughly the size of India) to as much as 9.7m square kilometres (roughly the size of Canada). That is the equiv...

From Harper's : People tend to think common behavior is moral behavior. From The New Yorker : At the beginning of 2017, I started working on a Profile of someone who’s secure in his faith (Rod Dreher, an orthodox Christian); at the end, I wrote about a philosopher who thinks we live in a cruel, pointless universe (David Benatar, an “anti-natalist” who argues that we should stop having children). In between, this turned out to be the year in which I read about the meaning of life. Two writers, in particular, helped me navigate the territory between believing in God and becoming a nihilist. The first was Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind, whom I profiled in March. I deeply enjoyed his newest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” but two of his earlier volumes struck me with particular force: the accessible and elegant “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” from 1995, and the more academic “Freedom Evolves,” from 2003. In the first, Dennett helps us understand what it means to occup...

From The Economist : In fact, taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not an alternative to belching out less greenhouse gas. It is necessary in its own right. Unless policymakers take negative emissions seriously, the promises of Paris will ring ever more hollow. From The Economist : Sweden’s pledge is among the world’s most ambitious. But if the global temperature is to have a good chance of not rising more than 2ºC above its pre-industrial level, as stipulated in the Paris climate agreement of 2015, worldwide emissions must similarly hit “net zero” no later than 2090. After that, emissions must go “net negative”, with more carbon removed from the stock than is emitted. From The Guardian (Anne Enright on "Best books of 2017"): It used to be Plath, but now some part of every girl writer will want to be like Kathy Acker, especially those who are interested in pain; whether pain as kink or pain as artistic production. Her life was a hot mess, and these pages ca...

From Harper's : Economics students behave more selfishly than do arts majors and science majors in monetary experiments because they expect less from others. From Harper's : Anger shifts people toward fiscal conservatism. From The Economist : Though renewable energy could profitably generate a fair share of the world’s electricity, nobody knows how to get rich simply by removing greenhouse gases. When the need is great, the science is nascent and commercial incentives are missing, the task falls to government and private foundations. But they are falling short.  From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions--even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. From The Guardian (Jennifer Egan on "Best books of 2017"): Short story and thriller tend to be incompatible genres, but not in the hands of Tara Laskowski. ...

From Harper's : People tend to believe they will be vindicated by history. From The New Yorker : The Patent Office estimates that intellectual property currently represents more than a third of all value created in the U.S., and its value is growing far more quickly than the economy over all. Every year, patents and trademarks will collectively be worth trillions more than the year before. From The TLS (Terry Eagleton on Books of the Year 2017): After a distinguished career as a literary theorist and philosopher of science, the polymathic Christopher Norris has now launched out on another life as the author of what he calls “philosophical verse-essays” (though he admits the title sounds a mite pretentious). What he has done in The Winnowing Fan (Bloomsbury) is to reinvent the poetry of ideas, in a post-Romantic, post-Symbolist culture for which the poetic and the conceptual are generally viewed as antagonists. Poetry is supposed to deal with sensuous particulars, not wit...

From The Economist : There is a wide generational gap: millennials (those who reached adulthood in the current millennium) have a lot of catching up to do in the wealth stakes. Americans currently aged between 30 and 39 years of age are calculated to have amassed 46% less wealth on average in 2017 than the equivalent cohort had gathered in 2007. From The Economist : Higher student debts and the difficulty of getting on the housing ladder have made it harder for millennials to build a nest-egg. That disparity might come back to bite the baby-boomer generation, who are fast moving into retirement. When baby-boomers want to cash in their assets, they may find millennials can’t afford to buy them at current prices. From The New Yorker : Without clear property rights, capitalism and the modern economy could not exist. From Harper's : Attractive plagiarists are judged more harshly. From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : Milgram grasped that people are remarkably recept...

From Harper's : [As] oceans warm, fish are expected to shrink by 20 to 30 percent. From Harper's : Dry climates produce languages with fewer vowels. From The Economist : Switzerland is still the country with the highest mean and median wealth per person. From The New Yorker : I had a father in New York City whom I did not remember, and who (it was promised) would one day deliver my family to the States. And here was my first television and my first cartoon and my first superhero—a hero who, like my father, was in America—and somehow it all came together for me in a lightning bolt of longing and imagination. My father’s absence made perfect sense. He couldn’t come back right away because he was busy fighting crime in N.Y.C. . . . as Spider-Man. From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.

From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. From The Economist : Buoyant financial markets meant that global wealth rose by 6.4% in the 12 months to June, the fastest pace since 2012. From  The Economist : If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population. From Harper's : Tennis players’ grunts rise in pitch during the matches they lose. From The TLS (Katherine Duncan-Jones on Books of the Year 2017): Almost miraculously, but I suppose in great measure thanks to the skilful ministrations of A...

From Harper's : Researchers found that applying testosterone gel to men asked to trade stocks led to asset-price bubbles. From The Economist : Virtual reality will never be as widespread as the smartphone, but it will be influential. From The Economist : Technology is improving. Whether reality does too depends on the technologists in charge and the power of society to shape their vision. From The New York Times (Jason Segel on "What’s the last great book you read?"): I recently fell in love with Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book.” I read it over two nights right before bed and cried when I finished. I cried partly because the ending was so beautiful, but also because the experience of reading it was over. I’m jealous of people who get to discover it for the first time. From  The New York Times  (Jason Segel on "What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?"): I’m quite certain I’ve never read a book that no one has heard of. That said, ...

From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. From The TLS (Akhil Sharma on "​Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you’d written?"): The only one I can imagine writing and feeling the satisfaction of it actually being mine is Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders. This is because the book is so weird that it doesn’t seem a human wrote it and so why not me instead of Smiley? From  The TLS  (Akhil Sharma on "Which of your contemporaries will be read 100 years from now?"): I can make the argument for individual works versus writers. The Greenlanders will be read. David Foster Wallace’s essays will be read. Alice Munro’s stories will be read. From The Economist : Web platforms care more about the amount of time their users spend on...

From Harper's : In thinking racism is a major problem, the gap between Democrats and Republicans is now wider than that between blacks and whites. From Harper's : The crew of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley were killed by the shock wave of their own torpedo. From The Economist : Today the world's three most valuable companies are tech firms. From The Guardian (Roddy Doyle on Best books of 2017): The war is almost over, the Russians are getting nearer and two young men join the SS. A bad career move, but To Die in Spring is a wonderful, precise, very moving novel by German author Ralf Rothmann (Picador, translated by Shaun Whiteside). Anything Is Possible (Viking) is predictably great because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable – because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout. I like most of the books I read but, now and again, I read one I wish I’d written myself. This year it’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), by Jon McGregor. Its stru...

From The New York Times (Richard Lloyd Parry on Evie Wyld): Evie Wyld is in her 30s and has published just two novels, but she’s already on the small list of writers whose work I will buy without hesitation as soon as it is published. From  The New York Times  (Richard Lloyd Parry on "What are the best books you’ve read recently about contemporary Asia?"): I steer clear of books that offer big, overconfident diagnoses of an entire country or continent, written by the kind of “public intellectuals” who congregate in Davos every year. Having said that, “Easternisation” by Gideon Rachman is very good — published just pre-Trump, but offering more reasons to be pessimistic about Asia’s chances of avoiding an appalling war at some point in the next few decades. From Harper's : G.P.’s trained at the lowest-ranked medical schools prescribe opioids three times as often as those trained at the highest-ranked school. From The New Yorker (Sally Rooney on Dehydration): ...

From The Economist : [Even] stories from the news sites that formed part of the study, which were small compared with, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, increased Twitter discussion of the issues in those stories by about 60%. They also shifted the nature of the views expressed in those tweets towards those of the published pieces. From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : In politics, being deceived is no excuse (quote from Leszek Kołakowski). From  Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny : History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people. From The New Yorker : [Younger] writers take the world as a living principle within their work. They g...

From The Economist : A study of adult education in 160 villages in Niger by Jenny Aker of Tufts University and Christopher Ksoll of the University of Ottawa looked at whether weekly phone calls from researchers to teachers and their students would improve the quality of learning. Remarkably, those calls seemed to result in much higher grades for the students. From The Economist : What made mobile phones so much more important in Africa than in the rich world was that for hundreds of millions of people they were the first and only form of telecommunication available. From The Economist : “You cannot have a 21st-century economy without power and connectivity,” says Erik Hersman, a founder of several startups in Kenya. “But if you have those, you can do almost anything else.” From The Guardian (Ian Rankin on "The book I wish I’d written"): Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Such a complete and engaging world. From  The Guardian  (Ian Rankin on "The book I most...

From The New Yorker : The differences between Updike and Roth are obvious: Wasp and Jew, poet and tummler. From The Economist : In 2016 African tech firms raised a record $367m. Although paltry by the standards of Silicon Valley, this is helping to stimulate the setting up of firms such as Flutterwave, a Nigerian payments company, and Zipline, which uses drones to deliver blood to clinics in Rwanda. From The Economist : "The poverty gap is a technology gap," says Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, Ghana's science and technology minister. From The Guardian (Penelope Lively on "The book that changed my life"): Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece. I read it again and again when I was nine, 10, 11 – this is where I learned about story, and drama. From The Guardian (Penelope Lively on "The book I wish I’d written"): The Inheritors by William Golding: brilliantly imagined and infinitely sad.

From The TLS (Margaret Drabble on Books of the Year 2017): Margherita Giacobino’s Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter (Dedalus; translated by Judith Landry) tells the story of a Piedmontese family from a village in the foothills of the Alps, 30 kilometres from Turin. Part memoir and part fiction, it covers the twentieth century, and evokes lives emerging from rural poverty to the affluence of the 1950s, from a diet of polenta and maggoty chestnuts where bread is a luxury to canned vegetables and refrigerators, from goatherding and wool carding to factory work and shopkeeping. Giacobino, now an academic specializing in gender studies, pieces together her ancestry from dourly posed photographs and anecdotes and shipping registers, with a focus on her hardworking great-aunt, the strong woman of the tribe. It’s like a rural version of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga: this family, like Ferrante’s, spoke dialect, not Italian. It’s a powerful and atmospheric record of largely une...

From The Economist : [Every] lost one demands to be remembered, even though "nothing is eternal." From The Economist : Leading economists prefer to create knowledge rather than disseminate it, and they communicate with each other in a language that can be hard to understand. Although mathematical models add clarity and rigour (and Mr [Jean] Tirole is a heavy user in his own research), they can constrain which questions are asked, and be mistaken as the goal of research rather than the means. From The New Yorker : [You] can’t have a reformist project that doesn’t have an earlier idea of form within it. From The New Yorker : [Philip Roth's] patriotism recognizes how helplessly dependent we are on a network of associations and communal energy, of which we become fully aware only as it disappears. Not only can you go home again, Roth insists. You can only go home again. You get America right by remembering Newark as it really was. From Harper's : Gol...

From The Economist : To the modern mind, speculating about moral and philosophical questions is something people engage in individually. In most eras of history, and in many parts of the world today, such freedom would be inconceivable. From The Economist : [Religion] has generally been an activity, not a set of true-or-false propositions, and above all a collective activity in which the tribe or nation finds meaning. From Harper's : Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are strongly linked to a more acidic brain. From The New Yorker : “When I was first in Czechoslovakia,” Roth wrote in an often quoted line, “it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.” From The TLS (Richard Davenport-Hines on Books of the Year 2017): Odd Arne Westad’s daring ambition, supra-nationalist intellect, polyglot sources, masterly scholarship and trenchant...

From The New York Times : Yes, I want to know what else my favorite restaurant does well, but today I just want my favorite dish. From The New York Times : Experimentation is an act of humility, an acknowledgment that there is simply no way of knowing without trying something different. From The Economist (on the role of religion and ritual in human society): [The] human mind's need to find patterns in the universe and to situate itself within those giant matrices. From The New Yorker : [Philip] Roth is a comedian, really, rather than a humorist or a satirist. The difference is that you can be humorous or satiric out of intelligent purpose, while a gift for comedy is, like a gift for melody, something you’re born with. From The New Yorker : “How do you do, Alex?” to which of course I reply “Thank you.” Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer “Thank you.” Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, ...

From The Economist : In a world where many people look to science to decipher the universe, there is something fascinating, and a bit frightening, about spiritual systems and codes which have commanded passionate loyalty among millions of people for millennia, but which are still impenetrable to outsiders. From The New York Times (on Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan): In this brilliant novel, Earth, circa 2049, has been devastated by global warming and war. From The New Yorker : Like any writer worth paying attention to, [Philip] Roth turns out to be the sum of his contradictions. From Harper's : People who hear voices but aren’t mentally ill have a superior ability to detect speechlike sounds hidden in noise. From The Guardian (William Boyd on Best books of 2017): As a Vladimir Nabokov completist, I could not resist Insomniac Diaries: Experiments with Time (ed. Gennady Barabtarlo, Princeton). Over a period of a few weeks in 1964 Nabokov wrote down his dr...

From The Economist : Everyone who has scrolled through Facebook knows how, instead of imparting wisdom, the system dishes out compulsive stuff that tends to reinforce people’s biases. From The New Yorker : One of my skills was making models for other architects’ projects. I was in far greater demand for these models than I was for my own designs. In fact, they pretty well ate my career. From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on Best books of 2017): Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (Piatkus) by Irvin D Yalom. When Yalom publishes something – anything – I buy it, and he never disappoints. He’s an amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and – quite rightly – one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners. All Things Remembered (Faber) by Goldie. A fabulous, whirling kaleidoscope of music, memory and trauma. Top highlights: when Goldie’s boa constrictor decides to try to eat him after he staggers home from the pub ...

From The New Yorker : [Because] God was a trinity, to be created in the image of God was to be created for relationships; so to make relationships the purpose of your life was to fulfill your human mission. From The Economist : Facebook acknowledged that before and after last year's American election, between January 2015 and August this year, 146m users may have seen Russian misinformation on its platform. Google's YouTube admitted to 1,108 Russian-linked videos and Twitter to 36,746 accounts. Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison. From The TLS (Lydia Davis on Books of the Year 2017): Climate Changed: A personal journey through the science, by Philippe Squarzoni (Abrams ComicArts; translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger), was on the reading list of a local library series here about how to help prepare our communities for the imminent future. I don’t know what to call it ­ ­– graphic non-fiction? – but it turned out to be the perfect way ...

From The New Yorker : In his 1970 book, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” the economist Albert O. Hirschman described different ways of expressing discontent. You can exit—stop buying a product, leave town. Or you can use voice—complain to the manufacturer, stay and try to change the place you live in. The easier it is to exit, the less likely it is that a problem will be fixed. From The New Yorker : Americans, [Albert] Hirschman wrote, have always preferred “the neatness of exit over the messiness and heartbreak of voice.” Discontented Europeans staged revolutions; Americans moved on. “The curious conformism of Americans, noted by observers ever since Tocqueville, may also be explained in this fashion,” he continued. “Why raise your voice in contradiction and get yourself into trouble as long as you can always remove yourself entirely from any given environment should it become too unpleasant?” From The Economist : Hannah Arendt, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, cautioned agai...

From The TLS (Diana Darke on Books of the Year 2017): Women Who Blow on Knots by Ece Temelkuran (Parthian; translated from the Turkish by Alexander Dawe) is a colossal sweep of a book, bursting with suspense, humour and sharp observations on societal tensions between men and women, Arabs and Turks. Ideal material for a highly colourful film, it documents a fast-moving road trip that begins in Tunisia after the Arab Spring, crosses Libya and Egypt, then reaches its climax in Lebanon. Three young women are thrown together by chance – a Tunisian dancer, an Egyptian academic and Ece herself, a Turkish journalist/author – and are persuaded by the elderly and enigmatic Madam Lilla to join her on her mission to kill a man. They are the “Women Who Blow on Knots”, a Qur’anic reference warning men to beware of them as witches, for the story is a spirited defiance of female stereotypes and male patriarchy in the Middle East. From Harper's : Smiling makes people look older; surprise, yo...

From Harper's : Unattractive scientists are assumed to be better at their jobs. From The New Yorker : To live in a city was to know that you were surrounded by far too many people to ever keep track of: there was so much that was outside your control that ignoring annoyances, human or otherwise, became a habit. Moreover, repeated encounters with people who didn’t think as you did could pry open a certain distance between your beliefs and your emotions. From The New Yorker : According to a Pew survey, for instance, nearly eighty per cent of liberals like the idea of living in a dense neighborhood where you can walk to shops and schools, while seventy-five per cent of conservatives would rather live in a larger house with more space around it. From The TLS (Jonathan Clark on Books of the Year 2017): Like it or not, religion is still determinative. In the West, the interpretation and reception of secular works of vernacular literature largely depend on interpretative tr...