Talking about the generations
I've been listening to The Fourth Turning is Here (2023), an audiobook by Neil Howe, who co-wrote the bestselling book Generations (1991) with William Strauss. The pair wrote a few other books together but Generations is the most well-known. In it they described their theory of recurring generational cycles in American and Western history.
Annie Jacobsen: The Devil is in the Details
One of my favorite authors is Annie Jacobsen. For anyone who doesn't know her work, she's an American investigative journalist and author as well as a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist and television writer. She was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan about her latest book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. She was previously interviewed on his show in 2019 about her other books, and she has also appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast as well as many others.
Politics and propaganda
I've gone through a couple of extreme phases of caring and not caring about politics and the state of the world. I was raised by idealistic hippies, one of whom fled the United States during the Vietnam war to protest the draft and as a result I was born in Canada but raised partially in the United States.
The Mind and the Brain
I'm absolutely fascinated by how the human brain works, and many of the books I own are some variation on this theme, from Malcolm Gladwell to V.S. Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks, Jill Bolte Taylor and a myriad of other doctors, historians, scientists and popular science writers.
Books, part 2: the Power of Personality
Although most of the books I read these days are audiobooks, certain types of information are just better consumed visually; obviously graphic novels and art books, but also astrology. My collection of astrology books dates back to the first one I ever bought at the age of 12, which was Linda Goodman's Love Signs.
History's hotties: an irreverent list
Beauty has a powerful effect on the human nervous system. Although beauty neither shelters nor nourishes us in any literal sense, the primitive human desire to seek it out, possess it and create it is undeniable, among the most deeply ingrained of psychological drives.
So you think you're special...
I just started reading Jean M. Twenge's book Generations and it's bringing back a flood of associations and memories from my Generation X childhood. This might be one of my most disjointed and naval-gazing (yet lighthearted) posts to date, but as we'll see, that's pretty appropriate, given the topic at hand...
Long live the '90s
Oh, the '90s... Is it even possible to feel nostalgic about a decade that has never really gone away? People of every generation are still watching Friends and wearing Nirvana t-shirts. On April 5, it will be 30 years since Kurt Cobain died, and yet somehow the '90s feel more present now than the '60s or even the '70s ever did in the '90s.
The art and science of emotions, part one
I've been reading about the newest controversy in "emotion science," the branch of psychology devoted to the study and analysis of how human emotions are revealed through facial expressions.
Zombies: American apocalypse
I had a minor epiphany during a disaster movie marathon undertaken between seasons of “The Walking Dead.” I was watching “The Tower,” a big budget South Korean remake of the 1974 classic “Towering Inferno,” when I realized that, with few exceptions, disaster movies are about economic inequality.
Battle in Barbie Land
I really wanted to like the Barbie movie. As a gen-x girly grrl, I had to campaign hard for my hippie mother to even let me play with Barbies. She thought they were a bad influence, for all the reasons you might expect... body image, sexualization, superficiality, appearance-obsession, consumerism, the fashion industry racket, etc. In other words, none of the issues the Barbie movie is concerned with.
In which we dream of starting over
I recently watched the first season of the 2014 mystery series Wayward Pines. The story is fast-paced and keeps the audience guessing with surprising twists, but around episode five I started to notice a common thread it shares with other current shows and films.