Jenni > Recent Status Updates

So far am admiring this without enjoying it. People say that this book explores the masculinity crisis... if it does, then its only reflection seems to me to be that the crisis is self-imposed. Maybe that's the point? Except with some compassion? I guess I just don't get it.

Great writing style, but it’s a totally hysterical polemic written largely without substance and with blinders on. Pass. Even the most hysterical pro-Palestine books at least have *substance*.

Totally bizarro memoir from Trump’s US Ambassador to Israel. This guy’s living in a different universe than all prior US foreign policy experts. It’s not that he disagrees with them — it’s that he literally doesn’t even know the nuance and substance of their points. It’s terrifying to realize that a US Ambassador had such a simplistic understanding of international relations.

If you think critiquing Israel is inherently antisemitic, then you’re a victim of propaganda. This one’s for you.

Trying to figure out whether the environmental protestors are supposed to be coming off as totally deluded or whether I just have a really different eco-philosophy than the author’s.

I don’t usually update mid-book but I’ve gotta speak my truth: I just finished the first part of this thing and it has been a SLOG. And I’ve heard that the first part is *the most engaging part*. And that’s coming from a girl that loves trees.

This book is an eye opener. I had generally thought that the peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts in West Bank and Gaza were obvious wins. This book provocatively argues that they aren’t even wins, but rather a manipulative set of incentives and market manipulations that end up working against the possibility of achieving a just political resolution. I’m not sure that I agree, but it’s a new perspective.

Light reading for my ski trips the past few weekends.

This is a recent dissertation on the subject. Extremely academic read that breaks down into about 97% hard facts and 3% editorializing. Couldn't be more timely, especially as it's difficult to get credible information from Western sources about how Hamas leadership is run from both inside and outside Gaza.

We’re caught up with the present. Now that he’s talking about things I’m very familiar with, I see this actually has (or at least those sections have) a pretty extreme pro-Israel bias. Makes me wonder what he left out when he talked about stuff I’m *less* familiar with.

TLDR thus far: American support for Israel/proto-Israel had very little to do with the influence of American Jews, who were largely against the establishment of Israel until the Holocaust. BTW, this runs chronologically and is a cool 600 pages (not 288 as GR says), so I'm only up to, like, 1950. Remains to be seen whether he effectively refutes Walt and Mearsheimer's analyses of the Israel lobby.

If everyone in America read this book, the discourse around Israel/Palestine would be different.

Fantastic so far. Klein's an investigative journalist and author (and not an economist or historian), so there's a little more freedom with her narrative than I think is justified. But I still think it's a worthwhile read. And yes, that's after reading the Economist's "Naomi Klein smackdown roundup" (read: scholars with the neoliberal Cato Institute make ad hominem attacks on Klein's critiques of neoliberalism).

Klein argues that the Chicago School's economic vision -- if applied as puritanically as Milton Friedman claimed it must be -- gives rise to (and is driven by) corporatism and, in practice, requires a people to be intimidated and subdued by force. First data point: Chile, of course. Looking forward to analyzing add'l data points to see if Klein has a strong point or is just playing fast & loose w/ her arguments.

Genuinely loving this. This is a nuanced, thoughtful critique of "woke" social justice culture. I disagree with almost all of their conclusions, which I think only begin to make sense when they somewhat obtusely push everything further than it's clearly intended to be pushed. But it's well-written, intellectually rigorous, and offers a reasonable and good faith tour through relevant conservative critiques.

Super interesting. An approachable academic critique of leftists’ use of applied postmodernist theory. The intro had so many flaming hot takes - the kind of stuff that makes you assume they’re willfully misrepresenting their opposition - that I almost stopped reading, but it got more reasonable IMO. Great follow-up after reading Said’s Orientalism, which is basically a landmark in postmodernist theory.

The book’s title is SO misleading. It makes it unfairly easy to plausibly disregard when you can brush it off as being extremist. It’s not, though.

If Angela Davis’s goal is to persuade undecided readers, then she’s got to have one of the worst — and I mean like an all-time, hall-of-fame level of *worst* — public relations team. Second only to whoever came up with the “defund the police” slogan.

*visibly caving under widespread social pressure*

Walter Benjamin with a huge intro essay by Hannah Arendt. BEAM ME UP

I’m totally transfixed. Wow.

Very funny, and very kind-of gay. Who knew!

Can Westerners make objective scholarship in good faith on the Arab Middle East? It's gotta be possible, right? It almost feels like Said thinks not. IDK. At the very least, it raises interesting questions about imaginary geographies. Also, this is *so dense* and I'm lucky if I catch half of what's going on.

GREAT FUN! It’s so playful — it almost feels like Nabokov in his Pale Fire era, except it’s probably a bit easier to follow along.

I have no idea who the intended audience here is. I think it’s gotta be 40 y/o women that grew up in abusive households, were gaslight by men, and never read a book or had much of an independent thought until they picked this up. And then — without fail — they’ll say it’s required reading.

Wow. I’m halfway through and am impressed. I think a lot of lefty books overstate their case, but this one feels incredibly responsible. And poetic. And, honestly, probably pretty necessary reading for a whole ton of people that will write it off as woke propaganda. This one’s not. Read it!

Like Chekhov’s gun, except this time it’s Chekhov’s decapitations.

WHEWWWW. I. did. not. know!!! THIS IS NO LONESOME DOVE, FOLKS. It's more like an action-packed episode of Narcos, or maybe Breaking Bad, except it's written by a guy that won a Pulitzer and that says things like "That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash." This book is insane and it's all happening at breakneck speed and now I'm too scared to sleep so I guess I'll keep going.

We need trigger warnings for the chapters that focus on L*dgate and/or B*lstrode. Nobody needs this much doctor talk, or religious talk, or Great Reform Bill talk.

When Dorothea shows up at Rosamond’s only to see Will Ladislaw playing piano with her <<<