An informative and highly engaging exploration of an influential social status dynamic.
How a particular social phenomenon shapes our lives, prospects, and futures.
In modern society, according to UC Berkeley business professor Stuart, “anointment” refers to “a ubiquitous process in which a person or institution of high regard confers status on something or someone else explicitly or simply by association.” (The author readily acknowledges that he is one of the anointed himself.) A Rembrandt painting is considered magnitudes more valuable than an almost indistinguishable reproduction by a no-name artist. This is an example of the “Big Shift,” a term Stuart uses to describe one of the mental shortcuts that anointment allows us to make: We evaluate the worthiness of a person or object by the status or prestige of its affiliations rather than its inherent quality. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, anointment contributes to inequality. Graduates of a particular elite institution may favor candidates with the same credentials when considering potential job applicants. Individuals who earn reputations as visionaries, such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, are often protected from the consequences of their bad behavior and are granted far more benefit of the doubt about their failures. People with low status, frequently members of underserved racial and social groups, lack the networks of anointed individuals that would allow them to gain higher status. However, the myth of American meritocracy persists among individuals of all status levels despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In a passage describing humans’ proclivity for rankings, Stuart writes: “Tripadvisor ranks hotels and restaurants. People magazine seems to rank everyone.” The author’s boxed summarizations of key points and his academically tinged sense of humor contribute to the approachability of this slim but thorough work. Given his thoroughness, Stuart’s rosy predictions in the closing chapter about how artificial intelligence will revolutionize and democratize human decision-making feel relatively underbaked. Still, his book on the whole ably outlines the necessity for deeper understanding of an intuitive and powerful human behavior.
An informative and highly engaging exploration of an influential social status dynamic.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668001875
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
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
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