Smart and sober business reporting.
Inside the creation and survival strategies of the controversial social media app.
In concept, TikTok shouldn’t be controversial at all. It’s designed to deliver short, generally upbeat video content algorithmically aligned to users’ interests. But it’s been entangled in politics practically from the start, as Baker-White’s well-researched book explains. Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in 2012, and the app itself in 2016; in a few short years it became an international phenomenon—unusual for a Chinese social media company. Because Chinese companies operate at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok has been subject to questions about whether U.S. user data is fed to the CCP. An internal effort to partition U.S. user data, called Project Texas, has proved imperfect at best; Baker-White, a technology reporter at Forbes, depicts an anonymous source’s realization that the company was riddled with security holes, and the author herself found evidence that she was surveilled by the company while reporting on it. Those issues prompted congressional intervention, which the company’s U.S. leadership tried to wriggle out of via lobbying and efforts at tighter restrictions. But its main strategy has been to appease Donald Trump, who despite ordering a ban on the app in 2020, has facilitated its survival to spite Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a perceived enemy, and because he sees the company as willing to pay his administration “key money” (i.e., funding for pet projects). It’s no way to govern, but it keeps the app alive in the U.S. Baker-White, who broke numerous stories around Project Texas and Trump’s self-dealing around the app, delivers a thorough accounting of the story; those looking for a narrative as vibrant as what the app serves will have to look elsewhere. But its seriousness is an asset, and an object lesson of what happens when international security becomes a casual plaything.
Smart and sober business reporting.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781324086666
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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