Reviews and Comments

This might be a perfect book, if there is such a thing. I'm selecting an incredible passage to include here, but I think you could just grab any paragraph and be be blown away:

"The wonder-horse show that evening in 1935 included a wolf-boy. He wore a mask of fur, and a suit that looked like fur but was really something else. Shining in the electric light, silver and blue, the wolf-boy frolicked and gamboled around the stage in such a way the watchers couldn't be sure if he meant to be laughed at.

They were ready to laugh in order to prove they hadn't been fooled. They had seen and laughed at such as the Magnet Boy and the Chicken Boy, at the Professor of Silly and at jugglers who beat themselves over the head with Indian pins that weren't really made of wood. They had given their money to preachers who had lifted their hearts and baptized scores of them and who had later rolled around drunk in the Kootenai village and fornicated with squaws. Tonight, faced with the spectacle of this counterfeit monster, they were silent at first. Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark honked like a goose, and people let themselves laugh at the wolf-boy.

But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a 'roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever." (115-116)

About 30 pages into this book, I thought "this seems like a Joan Didion book." That's a good thing for me, but the comparison only goes so far. Kitamura's writing is less impressionistic than Didion's. This is a book about an actor but more than that it is about acting - how it works, what it requires, what it means to be in a space where "it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind" (195).

These are my favorite parts of the book, the part where the protagonist is talking about acting:

"I sat back into my seat and my attention returned to Josie and Clarice. I was instantly engaged in the intricacies of their rehearsal, as if my focus had never shifted, I had worked with both of them but I did not think they had previously worked together. I could see that they were strongly attracted to each other, in their mutual admiration, their curiosity, but at the same time there was an edge of rivalry between them that had the potential to flare into open antagonism, it was the nature of the work and its rapid, temporary intimacies. And so, in addition to the story of the play itself, the narrative that was being enacted by Josie and Clarice, I was also observing the drama between the two women, who at times circled each other in the manner of prizefighters, wary and in a posture of constant assessment." (38)

Wythoff argues that a closer analysis of user techniques (how we directly engage with new and emerging technology) offers ways to respond to the creeping feeling that technology utterly controls users. He recognizes the power of "the feed" or "the scroll" or of AI, but he doesn't think that power leads to complete user disempowerment. The techniques users develop while engaging with tools are worth paying attention to as they open up space for rethinking how these tools can be put to use. He makes the argument with fascinating historical research into other technological moments, including a deep dive into the term "gadget."

The closing chapter takes up the efforts of community technology projects (especially the Philly Community Wireless project that Wythoff helps organize) as an answer to the solutions offered by "digital minimalism." The latter is often about individualized approaches to weaning oneself off tech, and it is also often about relying on more technological solutions to solve the problem (see the "Brick" that I keep seeing ads for that is supposed to keep us off our phones). Wythoff argues that "community tech" presents a more collective response and that it recognizes the possibility that people/communities/users can develop techniques together.

The deck is probably stacked against "users," but that doesn't mean the game is completely unwinnable. Examining and developing new techniques together offers one path forward for those interested in building potential solutions.

Bookwyrm is actually a good example of the kind of solution Wythoff has in mind.

This book, by my Rutgers colleague Eric Blanc, takes up some of the difficulties of labor organizing in the contemporary social and political climate. He argues for a worker-to-worker model of organizing, which relies on training workers to organize one another rather than hiring large numbers of staff to establish unions and organize workers. A staff-heavy model is expensive and doesn't scale, and a worker-to-worker model is not only more efficient but also (obviously) draws on workers' direct experience.

To me, the most interesting part of the argument is about "decentralization." Workers are mostly, unlike in the 1930s, not gathered in large numbers in hubs of labor (factories, etc.). How do we organize workers when there's no central "shop floor" let alone social clubs or other spaces where everyone gathers on a regular basis? More than this, I'd argue that workers aren't necessarily "decentralized" in many industries. Instead, they are dispersed, especially those who are working from home. This is a massive challenge for contemporary organizing, and Blanc offers the worker-to-worker model as a way to try to answer it.

He also is pretty optimistic about "digital tools" in this book. I am not. I see how zoom trainings can get people started with organizing even if an organization can't afford to send an organizer for face-to-face training. And maybe Instagram gets the word out about a union election and/or campaign. But more than anything, digital technologies seem to be mostly exacerbating the problems of dispersal, alienation, and isolation. When it comes down to it, f2f organizing is the key, and it's really difficult to do that when everyone is in different places and different times. Blanc knows this, and this is why he turns to the digital. He also recognizing that digital tools can't replace tried-and-true methods of organizing. But I am just more skeptical than him that we should rely on those tools much at all given that they are contributing to the problems we're trying to address.

This book guides us through a a day in the life of a team of astronauts orbiting earth. But to it's a "day" is a bit misleading given how often the sun "rises" and "falls" on these characters. The book proceeds through 16 orbits, and it offers a map of those orbits at the beginning. But the book itself provides a map as well, constantly reminding the reader what part of the globe is passing underneath the international space station.

Beautifully written, and there are too many great moments to not them all here. But my favorite moment is this passage about Michael Collins famous photo of the lunar module leaving the earth's surface.

"In the photograph Collins took, there's the lunar module carrying Armstrong and Aldrin, just behind them the moon, and some 250,000 miles beyond that the Earth, a blue half sphere hanging in all blackness and bearing mankind. Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photograph, it is said, and this has always been a source of great enchantment. Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.

Anton has never really understood that claim, or at least the enchantment of it. What of all the people on the other side of the earth that the camera can't see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere, which is in night and gulped up by the darkness of space? Are they in the photograph? In truth, nobody is in the photograph, nobody can be seen. Everybody is invisible – Armstrong and Aldrin inside the lunar model, humankind, unseen, on a planet that could easily, from this view, be uninhabited. The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself – his eye at the viewfinder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the more enchanting thing about Collins's image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains." (63-64)

I was familiar with most of this argument from reading Ezra Klein's columns and listening to his podcasts (and, to a lesser extent, listening to Thompson's Plain English podcast). I am convinced by the argument: The U.S. political system has put up layers of barriers that prevent inventing, making, and building. From homes to public transportation systems, everything takes too long to build. The barriers were built with good intentions (environmental concerns, racial justice, supporting union labor), but we have reached a point where it is difficult to build what we need. And it is especially bad in cities and states run by Democrats.

I leave the book without a clear sense for how Klein and Thompson would guard against the problems of a "just build it" approach that emerged in previous years (highways built through Black neighborhoods, energy infrastructure built in those same neighborhoods because suburbs take a NIMBY approach to everything from affordable housing to power stations). They would likely say that these trade-offs have to be worked in out politically but that the tradeoff argument can't always land us in a place of not building.

I find it interesting that this book arrived at the exact same time as Jacobin's Spring 2025 issue on "Progress." All parts of the left seem to believe that the time has come for an affirmative vision of the future, given that the right's regressive vision is a hellscape.

The left has not necessarily embraced the argument fully (I think the center-left will be much more amenable). Here's a Jacobin review:

jacobin.com/2025/03/abundance-klein-thompson-book-review

Matt Bruenig lays out the counter-arguments: 1) The historical narrative the book tells is contested; 2) The book sidelines a number of agendas in the name of removing barriers to building/inventing; 3) The authors never face up to the political practicality of their argument - how do they propose to deal with the resistance to an abundance agenda? Resistance from homeowner's associations, unions, environmental activists, and more.

The close of that review seems right to me:

"Ultimately, the book seems fine to me. I’d say the policy specifics are a bit of a retread, but that’s not really a critique: the authors never claim novelty and the book itself is literally a retread of some articles they wrote for the Atlantic and the New York Times. It’s a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have. In short, I think the pique over the book is out of proportion to what the book is.

With that said, the broader Abundist world that the book is attempting to push forward — a world that appears to be teeming with libertarians, right-wing Democrats like Jared Polis and Ritchie Torres, refugees of the effective altruist implosion, and tech sector types — does seem like it could head in some pretty bad directions that Abundance would fit naturally into. But this would not be the fault of Klein and Thompson."

Fanny is hard to be friends with, and this book puts you into those difficulties. A beautiful book that isn't plot-driven but focuses much more on the dynamics of a friendship. A story told by "the Narrator," a writer who is trying to muddle through interactions with Fanny.

My favorite part is the parallel between being friends with Fanny and the act of writing:

"It was like telling a story: you had to be extremely focused in order to piece the elements together, to be in an almost trancelike state where forms arise and take shape that never appear directly to reason. You had to formulate a question as accurately as possible and, in the painstaking work of edification that ensued, produce the kind of answer that never states its name but foists itself on the reader as one of the truths of human existence. Like the profuse material of life to which a text gives form and meaning, the turmoil and mystery of Fanny's emotions demanded to be worked upon. She was the living example of what a Narrator has to confront every hour of every day. She was a book from before the book." (45)

I only recently learned of the work (writing, political leadership, organizing) of Nikil Saval. Ran into this book in a small bookshop and immediately grabbed it after having heard Saval speak at two union-related events in Philly during the last month.

In 1964, in response to police violence in Harlem, June Jordan wrote to Buckminster Fuller to propose a speculative redesign of Harlem. Saval tells that story in a book that is a recreation of a lecture he gave on zoom during Covid restrictions and during his campaign for Pennsylvania Senate (an election he won). It's an interesting story and worth the read.

It's striking to read Jordan's account of what it's like to move through the grid of a city when you feel like you're constantly in the crosshairs:

"Given our goal of a pacific, life-expanding design for human community, we might revise street patterning so that the present patterns of confrontation by parallel lines would never be repeated. The existing monotony limits pleasures of perspectives. rigidly flat land is ruled by rectilinear for. The crisscrosing pattern too often becomes a psychological crucifixion; an emergence from an alleyway into a danger zone vlunerable to enemies approaching in at least two directions that converge at the target who is the pedestrian poised on a corner." (67)

Jordan and Fuller propose large towers (that resemble nuclear cooling towers) that reorient life away from "the street" and is various dangers and toward something more collective and something that would prioritize public safety (safety from, among other things, the police).