Timely, well-informed reading.
A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute explores how modern technology is causing different types of embodied human experiences to disappear.
Technology has permanently changed the way humans interact with the world, causing many experiences to be mediated rather than direct. According to Rosen, this mediation has caused our understanding of experience to become so “disordered” that “we can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus.” She argues that part of the problem is that people now tend to prefer virtual interactions over face-to-face ones. A major issue with mediated communication, however, is that it leads to a blunting of human interaction skills, as well as a host of negative psychological effects, including anxiety and low self-esteem. Yet despite these pitfalls, people willingly compromise empathy and well-being for the convenience and “seamless ease and comfort” of digital interaction. Reliance on technology has also rendered certain types of activities, such as handwriting, obsolete. While this may not seem like a big loss for younger generations, Rosen cites research that suggests how humans “lose measurable cognitive skills” when they forgo instruction in cursive writing. More disturbingly, as technologies advance, they encourage users to see the world and themselves as needing the transformations offered by the latest apps or electronic devices. Everything in the world—from long-distance travel to loneliness—becomes “just another solvable engineering problem” that data-collecting megacorporations like Google or Meta use for their own profit. Meanwhile, what gets lost is an appreciation for the physicality of the world and for the sometimes inconvenient but always unique experience of human embodiment. Engaging and impeccably researched, this book serves as an important reminder that survival during this time of accelerated global change will depend on humanity’s willingness to impose intelligent, self-preserving limitations.
Timely, well-informed reading.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780393241716
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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