Short and sweet. It also wasn't what I expected. The reviews about it as "a novel about Twitter" only describe the first half. There's a big tonal shiShort and sweet. It also wasn't what I expected. The reviews about it as "a novel about Twitter" only describe the first half. There's a big tonal shift in the second half. It might not work for you. It worked for me. Just like the author's memoir, this is a novel that only she could have written.
The book helps us break away from the internet (especially Twitter; Lockwood and her both character suffer from being "extremely online"). The second half shows how much more there is to life than Twitter. It can read like a novel about a woman who has a crisis while leaving youth and entering middle age, causing her to question if she has wasted her youth. I won't totally get behind that interpretation: the youthful character who is extremely online recognizes that the whole thing might be a waste of time. But I won't discard that interpretation either. It's one thing to know that you're wasting your life. It's another thing to feel it and do something about it.
The author has a wonderful writing style. You can tell she is a poet. You can see why she is successful on Twitter. The first half of the book is like a well-curated collection of poems. There are a lot of unrelated vignettes that drag you all over the place, but the sum is eventually more than the parts.
I liked the book. I would recommend it to a totally different audience than her memoir. That was a good fit for Catholics. This is a good fit for leftists who are "extremely online." Non-leftists might bristle at the references to "the dictator" (but (view spoiler)[they may feel some smug self-satisfaction in how the dictator mostly disappears from the author's thoughts in the second half of the novel, showing that it's the internet that makes his presence such a pervasive part of the author's life (hide spoiler)]). It helps to know the language of Twitter well enough to navigate its somewhat obscure language conventions ("it me").
As I was reading the novel, I thought about a recent tweet from another Twitter darling, @AliceFromQueens: "So many writers under ~40 do their best writing on Twitter. And their tweets are more widely read than their prose. Yet it's important to their dignity that we all pretend they do their "real" writing elsewhere, where we don't actually read it, rather than here, where we do." In Lockwood's case, @AliceFromQueens is wrong. This novel is good, Lockwood's memoir is good, etc. Twitter is a disorganized incoherent mess. The first half of this novel required the author's vision to make something out of the incoherent mess. The second half contextualizes it. If you only follow the author on Twitter and ignore her "real" writing, you're missing out....more
Disappointing. This barely comes together as a book. It's one of those collections of articles with a very loose theme that became a book.
The loose tDisappointing. This barely comes together as a book. It's one of those collections of articles with a very loose theme that became a book.
The loose theme is that Americans are becoming anti-institutional and getting their religious experiences from somewhere else. Chapters explore some of those "somewhere else" places including witchcraft, polyamory, Soul-Cycle, social justice, "techno-utopianism" (think Peter Thiel), and the alt-right. It's a good overview of how people throw themselves into those things, but it's never convincing that they are truly religions as opposed to just hobbies or ideologies. The author fails to convince because she can't seem to decide if a religion is merely what Durkheim meant by religion (essentially, a bunch of people get together and do stuff that makes them feel great) or if it was something more profound.
Worse, the author is inconsistent in some of her descriptions. For example, she talks about how social justice warriors are majority white, but she mostly uses extreme nonwhite queer voices to represent them. She also describes some of the most extreme social justice ideologies and equates them with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but I don't think either of those politicians would have endorsed what was quoted in this book. I was disappointed in how the author didn't take the longer view in some areas. For example, she is traces the history of "self-care" to Audre Lorde (1988), but she does not trace social justice to Catholic teachings (e.g., Rerum Novarum and its successors). That would seem important if you're going to argue that social justice is a religious movement... Still, I appreciate that she didn't put moral equivalence to social justice warriors and the alt-right.
Her description of the alt-right is a good introduction. But again, I think she put people like Robin Hanson and Jordan Peterson (both mostly harmless in my opinion) too close to internet trolls and atavistic insane incels. To carry on her religion analogy, this is like describing contemporary Islam and giving equal weight to (1) the vast majority of Muslims and (2) the 9/11 terrorists. The murderers among Jordan Peterson's fanbase don't merit more than a footnote in a discussion about religion.
Overall, the book reminded me of Microtrends, a book by a Hillary Clinton pollster from 2008 who tried and failed to find common meaning across small groups of people across the United States. I liked reading bits of it here and there, but I felt I was getting a bunch of articles that were hastily packaged together with a half-baked thesis. Good observations, not a convincing story. For a deep dive on one of these contemporary religions, I recommend To Be a Machine, which the author cited in her chapter on techno-utopians....more
Better than just a collection of articles on Chinese Millennials, but that's mostly what it really is.
The author has good perspective on what their eBetter than just a collection of articles on Chinese Millennials, but that's mostly what it really is.
The author has good perspective on what their education and early careers have been like. He shows their ambivalence towards their government: e.g., they seem to be proud of China and its history in some places, but he also shows a survey where 85% of them said they'd rather have been born in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan.
It's a good book for (1) people who do not know a lot about China (since the author provides plenty of historical context) and (2) people like me who read maybe one book on China each year, since it helped me tie together some themes I've encountered in Chinese history. (e.g., the Taiping Civil War and the civil service examination).
The book also has good citations to support it and show the reader where to go next. After reading the chapter about Chinese education, I'm looking forward to checking out "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?"...more
I liked this more than I thought I would. It's the story of six young protagonists from China and how they transition into adulthood. The protagonists I liked this more than I thought I would. It's the story of six young protagonists from China and how they transition into adulthood. The protagonists must be from mostly upper middle-class families, since their families have bailed them out after some missteps. So they are not representative of all of China. Despite that, I'd still recommend this to American millennials who want to learn about how the transitions to adulthood work over in China: many things are the same, some are very different. The author seems wiser than the young Chinese depicted in the book: he writes from their perspectives about their hopes and thoughts about the future, but I kept thinking that they were wrong and headed for disappointment. You might disagree. ...more
Charming but predictable story of recent elite college grads, circa 2009, and whether they want to stay at their "dream jobs" at Wall Street or do somCharming but predictable story of recent elite college grads, circa 2009, and whether they want to stay at their "dream jobs" at Wall Street or do something else. More broadly, the book shows how the culture of Wall Street shown in Liar's Poker and The Wolf of Wall Street is probably (and thankfully) in decline, due to the work at these companies becoming more boring and less lucrative after the Lehman Brothers / Bear Sterns financial crisis. For the cultural problems that remain, I'd suggest reading Lauren Rivera's Pedigree, about the process that these college grads go through before they even get their Wall Street jobs....more
Bleak scholarly study on how elite east-coast companies hire from elite east-coast universities. The author shows how these recruiting practices make Bleak scholarly study on how elite east-coast companies hire from elite east-coast universities. The author shows how these recruiting practices make a mockery of America's supposed income mobility and affirmative action: for example, recruiters at investment banks care more about whether you grew up playing expensive sports like polo than they do about your grades in college. In my experience at these kinds of schools and firms, I think the author gets more right than she gets wrong, and it is well articulated....more
Hard to revisit the Columbine massacre, but worth it for understanding how different the final story is from what you may remember from the news. The Hard to revisit the Columbine massacre, but worth it for understanding how different the final story is from what you may remember from the news. The author argues that the news media coverage was inaccurate, and that the police made mistakes and covered them up. It's human nature to want to understand the killers, which this book will help you do, but it's also reassuring that this book tells important stories about the victims....more
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