Working people of all stripes have much to learn from this book.
A welcome cri de coeur against the soulless machinery of late capitalism.
While Jaffe admits that her freelance employment often involves financial scrambling—“I don’t have an employer that pays for my health insurance, and forget about retirement benefits. Vacation? What’s that?”—she enjoys more freedom than many Americans, even if she begins her argument with an extended refutation of the notion that if you do what you love, “you’ll never work a day in your life,” a hollow mantra that substitutes for the reality that most of us work longer and harder than ever before for less money. The author attacks the fetishization of work brought to the world courtesy of neoliberalism, “a set of choices made by the winning side in a series of struggles”—not to mention the economic doctrine born of the fascist coup that overthrew the socialist government of Chile’s duly elected president, Salvador Allende, in 1973. As Jaffe astutely points out, the subsequent Thatcherism and Reaganism were just Pinochet with a somewhat friendlier face. Neoliberalism also assumes, as did earlier brands of capitalism, that women’s work is less valuable than men’s, a notion that still prevails. It also gives primacy to the unpaid internship as a means of securing free labor. “The internship advanced alongside other forms of contingent work,” writes the author, “and alongside the idea that trading in security for enjoyable work was a deal worth making.” Even highly desirable jobs such as a tenured professorship have become precarious. In a nice turn of phrase, Jaffe writes that even as the vaunted “knowledge economy” came into being, “the labor of knowledge workers was being devalued and deskilled.” The book is long on description and short on solution, but Jaffe does suggest, soundly, that as the current economy cracks along its fissures, it affords room to imagine something better.
Working people of all stripes have much to learn from this book.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-56858-939-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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