I’ve been on a Colson Whitehead tear in the past year having started five of his books, finishing four of them. This year I raced through the Ray Carney series (Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto) and I just finished The Underground Railroad. While not my favourite of his books The Underground Railroad was still a compelling read. Whitehead has this talent that I struggle to explain. He’s very good at writing historical fiction that makes you sad or angry at the history without feeling sad or angry with the story. That’s what buoys up books like The Underground Railroad; it was a fantastic read, I daresay a borderline fun read but it also served as a poignant reminder of the atrocities of chattel slavery to the point of being physically moved. This is undoubtedly a hard balance to strike but Whitehead has managed to do it in nearly every book I’ve written.

Full Title: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism Although it’s a short read this book was dense. That’s not to say it was a difficult read; quite the contrary, it was extremely approachable but every single page was so laden with facts each paragraph served as an essay unto itself. White Fragility asks left-leaning progressively minded folks to examine their own attitudes towards race; are we more concerned with being racist or being perceived as racist? Do we only think of racists as “very bad people” the kind who form lynch mobs or march with tiki torches? Or are we able to see how our own race has given us an unfair advantage? Are we able to see how we silently perpetuate racial disparities to suit our own needs? Do we do this in subtle subconscious ways or more overtly by proclaiming that we are “colour blind” and therefore race doesn’t matter?

Not only did White Fragility implicate me in my own racism, it also gave me e pause to reflect other areas in which I have blindspots. Benefiting from the various privileges I have, not just as a consequence of my race but also my gender, sexual identity, appearance etc. What things have I said or done over the years that uphold and reenforce the patriarchy? Am I excluding disabled people in my actions (a very salient question for somebody who designs and builds websites, I reckon this site is not fully WCAG compliant).

Definitely worth a read, likely a second in a few years.

America has a long history of moral panics, the phone, rock music, rap music, etc. I always want to be careful about blaming “that new thing the kids are doing” and therefore I try to offer a balanced perspective when somebody starts talking about “the kids and the phones”. Needless to say I went into this book with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Right off the bat my skepticism was rewarded in the form of a lengthy anecdote about sending kids to Mars as test subjects, which Haidt uses as some kind of metaphor for the way big tech uses kids as test subjects in social media, advertising, etc. And while I agree with the point I felt the metaphor was heavy handed and it kind of commenced the book with a bad taste in my mouth, although I still kept an open mind.
Fortunately, the Mars story was the first and last of such abstract anecdotes and the book settles into a well researched and factual deconstruction of the way children have been raised for the past 30+ years (essentially my from my childhood to now: my daughters' childhoods) and the impact that phones and social media has played on that. I was pleased that Haidt didn’t only point fingers at “the phones”. He deconstructed the “stranger danger” panics of the 80s and 90s which directly led to more sedentary inside time for kids and more fear mongering for both kids and parents.

Nothing happens in a vacuum and Haidt got the approach right; yes social media drives young adult anxiety and depression but it it’s particularly virulent because of these devices which are in our pockets all the time. And yes we have our phones on us all the time but we also are less equipped to have real-world interactions because of parental fears about kidnappers and molesters which arose directly from 1980s culture. Yes there was a lot of fear in the 80s and 90s most of it misplaced, but there was also a new emphasis on child rearing as an active pursuit rather than a passive one. This “active” parent was more than just being loving, supportive and attentive it led to the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting” because heaven forbid kids were on their own for five minutes.

Back to my original skepticism I think it was largely misplaced because the scope of this books was far broader than just “phones are bad”, The Anxious Generation is a survey of the evolution of children over two generations. As much as I like to push back against the panic around phones; there is a reason we don’t have a TV in our home. There is a reason we send our daughter to a Waldorf school. I acutely feel so much of what Haidt’s saying, I think too much media (social or traditional) at a young age is harmful not only as a leaver on anxiety and depression. Kids have wonderful imaginations and substituting this natural creativity with a screen of any kind can severely damage it. I see a pipeline from kids in front of the TV; to kids in school finding the textbook answer; to compliant adults who do what their told- adding value to the military industrial complex, and being good consumers. (Now who’s panicking‽)

I volunteered for a few years at a youth group for kids roughly 6-9 it was fascinating to observe the kids who, at that young age, had phones and those who did not. The ones who had phones were almost always on them; although they were still able to engage with the group and participate in meaningful ways the phone was almost always in hand. Not only that but these children seemed older than they should have been, more worldly. They would reference jokes and memes laughing at the humour but not understanding the point because they were 9 years old not 25. Their lived experience did not match the content they were viewing and it was ageing them without making them wise.

I read this book because I have two daughters but even for those without children it serves as a stark cultural survey. A rebuke not only for parents whose children faces are always aglow in blue light but even for adults such as myself who spend too much time doom scrolling.

I’ve never read anything from John Green but I used to watch his YouTube channel. As a young adult fiction author; I felt his handling of such a broad and complex topic, like the history of tuberculosis and it’s impacts on the world today would be both engaging and digestable. I was not wrong in this assumption. This book was fast even by quick read standards, I could have read another two or three volumns but I think Green was able to say what he wanted to: Tuberculuosis is not an archaic/cured disease it still impacts hundreds of millions of people who are for the most part neglected due to their poverty and or race. There is hope for the future but only if people speak up and speak out advocating both for themselves (Green points to several activists in both India and Sierra Leone) and others as we all must.

Some quotes and ideas that stayed with me:

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me to be a mistake… biology has no moral compass it does not punish the evil and reward the good, it doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying ‘you deserve to have this happen’ but implied within the stigma is also ‘and I don’t deserve it so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me’”.

“There are many acronyms within the field of tuberculosis global health, like any field, loves to shorten its phrases to make them obvious to experts and inaccessable to neophites.

TB has always been racially charged, first it was seen as a disease of sophisication and as such those of “darker skin” could not get it; then with industrialization it became known as a disease of the poor and has since been used, infurieatingly, as proof of white racial superiority. This is ancient history; in my life time:

• J&J actively priced third world health systems out of bedaquiline - unconscionable!
• In 2001 the head of USAid insinuated that HIV medicines couldn’t be distributed to Africa because: “Africans don’t know what watches and clocks are… when you say ‘take it at ten o’clock’ people will say ‘what do you mean by ten o’clock’” 🤯
• Between the mid-1980s the mid 2000s the commingling of tuberculuosis and HIV led to more deaths than the combined fatalities of WWI and WII combined!

Ending the post with a positive quote toward the end of the book: “Mere dispare never tells the whole human story, as much as dispare would like to insist otherwise. Hopelessness has the insdious talent of explaining everything; the reason that x or y sucks is that everything sucks. The reason your misearble is that misery is the correct response to the world as we find it and so on. I am prone to dispare so I know it’s powerful vdespairoice, it just doesn’t happen to be true. Here’s the truth as I see it; vicious cycles are common, injustice and unfairness permeate every aspect of human life, but virtous cycles are also possible.”

A phenomenal read, I was thoroughly hooked into this book from 1849 to 2346. I haven’t read anything quite like this; in the hands of a less talented writer, structurally, it could have been a bit gimmicky. However; Mitchell is talented provide one compelling story after another. Initially I worried that The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing and Sloosha’s Crossin' an' Evrythin' After were going to drag because of the verbosity or eccentricity (respectively) of the language but after a few pages I was engrossed in both.

Reading 80% of this book was an exercise in torture. I’m always a little wary of personal memoirs cum self-help books but a few have been transformative for me (ie. Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé). Katherine May hooked me early with this book, the prose was sharp and the anecdotes interesting however it very quickly devolved into anecdote after anecdote from a brief period in her life where, I guess, she was forced to work less?

This book is rife with privilege, which doesn’t always bother me but in this particular case it seems to hallow where half of of the book is dedicated to the message of “slow down, take it easy” and the other half is, “go to Iceland, trek the northern tundras of Sweden”.

Ultimately this book fell into the same trap as Gretchen Rubin’s Happier At Home (a did not finish from last year); an extremely self absorbed upper-middle class person thinking that their experience = wisdom and is therefore worth writing an entire book.

Zero stars. Did not finish.