Daryl

Sooooo disappointed in this book after Graeber's excellent Debt: The First 5000 Years.

While I do believe there are bullshit jobs, and those that harm or subtract value from society, I found his analysis fuzzy, arguable, and to be honest, sloppy and way too tied to Marxist and elitist arguments as to value, labour, and capitalism. I felt the subjective definition of a BS job to be way too fuzzy, though ultimately I think he's on to something about the fact we should all be working less, there are many roles that adds little value (if not harming society), and there needs to be recognition of this, I felt this was shoddy. His assertion that work of value in undervalued compared to work that he says provides none lacks deeper analysis (imho).

However, I do think he is onto something in our need to decouple livelihood from work. While he says he is avoiding making policy recommendations, I do think he makes very good points about first order reasoning on Universal Basic Income (though,I feel everyone really need to do more second order effects thinking on this or some really larger experiments to understand how it might work in practice (which I am very supportive of).

Meh.

Wow. An utterly stunning read that is both illuminating and horrifying in providing a breathtaking level of historical insight and context into the scientific, political, and wartime events (across both wars) that led to the making and dropping of the first atomic bombs.

An absolute brick of a read, clocking in at almost a solid week of full-time reading (30+ hours) but the best thing I've read all year, and fully deserving of its Pulitzer.

Required reading for the 21st century I'd argue.

Fantastic. Did not think he could possibly top or compare The Emperor of All Maladies, but this was coherent, articulate and eminently understandable for such a complex topic over such a long period of history. Required reading and a must if you enjoyed Emperor.

I should point out that I disagree deeply with some of the reasoning and theories in this book, and in general, think most arguments surrounding biological determinism are misguided (if not downright dangerous) but, I do think Ridley raises some good counterarguments to prevailing “nurture-only” arguments that currently prevail societally and warrant consideration and debate.

That said, I think his early sections on “Why sex?” and “Why sexes?” are infinitely better than when he starts to foray into what I think is mostly a survey and weaker thinking on human nature being defined by sex and feels he cherry-picks overly to support his case.

So, strangely, I think he fails in his premise, explaining human nature through sex and evolution, but does a really interesting job building the cases for sexual reproduction and the existence of genders.

Worth the read, but should be read very critically.