Though the observations encompass the general populace, this intermittently interesting study aims at an academic market...
A dense analysis of mobile devices and how they have blurred the lines between public and private spaces.
As the subtitle suggests, wasting time has become big business, as brands extend across cyberspace and into seemingly every area of our lives. “The procrastination economy thrives at the intersection of branding, public space, and digital technology,” writes Tussey (Communication/Georgia State Univ.). “As our digital lives become entwined with our real lives, there will be material consequences in the ways we move through locations.” For readers capable of cutting through thickets of academic verbiage, there are some interesting insights. Rather than simply wasting time and hurting productivity, procrastination in the office can improve spirit and bonding (as with the NCAA basketball tournament), like the water cooler of old, and provide necessary breaks. In “The Waiting Room,” the author focuses on waiting at airports and on CNN Airport in particular. As “programming to entertain and relax travelers in waiting rooms,” it “is now available in 47 airport waiting rooms around the world.” In addition to delivering a captive audience to advertisers, its “real value to Turner lies…in the promotion of other Turner properties,” thus extending the brand. While travelers may feel that they are simply watching CNN, the programming shies away from crises and particularly airline crashes, switching “to pretaped segments or weather forecasts.” The audience also has other options on mobile devices, including thousands of games; the author suggests, of those playing those games, that “the level of care and effort that goes into these designs is astonishing.” Tussey also offers a useful analysis of how Twitter and TV have become so intertwined and how mobile devices have changed and expanded the living room experience: “the ‘connected’ living room can create a vicarious living room for families that are not occupying the same space or even the same zip code.”
Though the observations encompass the general populace, this intermittently interesting study aims at an academic market rather than a lay readership.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4798-4423-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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