by Richard Stengel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2019
A revealing look at America’s difficult struggle to combat false, misleading narratives.
Former Time editor Stengel (Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage, 2010, etc.) offers a gloomy view of America’s efforts in the “battle of ideas” with Russia, the Islamic State group, and other entities.
We “still don’t know how to fight” disinformation, writes the author, who served as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2013 to 2016. “The truth is, it’s impossible to stop people from creating falsehoods and other people from believing them.” In this refreshingly frank account, Stengel describes his stint in the byzantine State Department, where he focused on countering IS messaging and Russian disinformation in the last years of the Obama administration. With great clarity, he recounts the hurdles he encountered: bureaucratic procedures, acronyms and government-speak, endless vetting and turf battles, all of which slowed efforts to bring his print-oriented office into the era of social media. Foreign-service officers with no media experience insisted it was “easy” to create content. He was also greatly hampered by the very openness of American society, which info-savvy IS and Putin used to their advantage. Most of his book details the creation of a messaging coalition with Arab nations to thwart incessant “out-tweeting” by “digital jihadis” bent on undermining the U.S. with messages and videos on kidnappings and beheadings of Americans. “Not everyone can afford an F-35,” writes Stengel, “but anyone can launch a tweet.” Even so, few in government were tweeting. One exception, social media guru and Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt, warned, “we are being out-messaged by the Russians….They don’t feel the need to be truthful.” Stengel relates the thinking of participants in the information war in ways that bring the dangers of this global messaging onslaught home. He notes how IS migrated to the dark web as a result of U.S. counterefforts, and he argues that artificial intelligence has great potential to detect and delete false information.
A revealing look at America’s difficult struggle to combat false, misleading narratives.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4798-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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