Conner > Recent Status Updates

Strangely, my dominant emotion while reading this collection has been jealousy; Oliver’s joyful existence in nature is so much the antithesis of my experience being cooped up in a tiny city apartment for an entire year with nary a tree or bird in sight. The pleasure she takes in meadows, beaches and forests is almost unseemly in this context, like an unimaginable luxury. But anyway, that’s a personal problem.

I found it quite interesting to read about how Athenagoras of Syracuse debated Hermocrates by effectively claiming that his truthful account of the imminent invasion of their city by Athens was “fake news” (those are my scare quotes; not a direct quotation obviously), showing how truth has always been dispensed with in politics as soon as it doesn’t serve one side’s agenda. The rhetoric is very familiar.

"Labels are used to train algorithms to recommend more content that we're likely to consume. Average people experience this as the internet 'getting better'."
Interestingly, I've experienced this as the internet getting worse. As my attention is monetized, I've found that there is more homogeneity, less of a feeling of discovery, fewer serendipitous moments when I stumble upon something I didn't expect.

It was doubly horrifying to read the section on climate-change fueled wildfires while the entire continent of Australia is currently burning. These events further vindicate the author in his point that the realities of climate change will be worse than the conservative predictions made by climate scientists. And the madness of Australia's PM denying the fires are even linked to climate change is just mind-reeling.

"It is tempting to look at these strings of disasters and think, climate change is here... 'the new normal'. The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place...
"The climate system that raised us, is now, like a parent, dead."

The fact that I’m not able to vote for this book as the best of 2019 nonfiction in the “Goodread’s Choice Awards” — the result of 2 decades of meticulous research, rendered in prose that is vivid and alive; the first essay took my breath away with its terrifying beauty — is a scandal, and reveals the recipients of these awards as fare of the lowest common denominator. This book is triumphant and brave.

So far, this has been a more elucidating education on the Vietnam war than I’ve received in any history class or textbook.