December 14, 2017

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):

The cultural critic Mark Greif writes that such privations “go with a degree of discernment and class distinction.” To be driven by basic impulses implies an existence rooted in primal sensation; the discerning person has accumulated so much culture that no room is left for natural instinct. Was my dehydration a symptom of class aspiration? Was it a response to cultural messages around femininity, a subliminal wishing away of physical desire? Was there just something wrong with my brain?

From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.