Technology writing with flair looking to a future that’s fast upon us, with China playing a leading role.
Engaging travels through a Chinese countryside in which high technology meets the old ways.
In this entry in the publisher’s new FSGO x Logic series, Wang, the creative director at Logic magazine, blends studies of agriculture, anthropology, tech, and digital art. The author opens with a modest protest that while it is easy to both romanticize and overlook the countryside, and especially Chinese farm villages, “many of them are sites of economies and agricultural practices that are foundational to our world.” China is now subject to the same market forces and consumer preferences as Western nations, so that everyone wants nice things such as high-quality organic food. That opens many doors to rural enterprises. As one entrepreneur observes, whereas big corporations such as Nabisco dominated the food world in the past, “hundreds of smaller, fragmented companies will dominate the future, catering to a continuum of different tastes and experiences.” One of the author’s recurrent themes is the use of technology to improve agricultural production, as with the farm of the title, which caters to “upper-class urbanites—people willing to pay a premium on food.” Along the way, Wang takes on science historian Joseph Needham’s famous observation that China ceased to innovate well before Western traders arrived. The author distinguishes innovation from adaptation to show that there is not only plenty of “disruptive innovation” occurring in China, but also an emerging “shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy.” In this case, shanzhai suggests the process of retooling outside products—an iPhone, say—to make affordable things for a less affluent local market and, in the bargain, “decolonize technology.” Wang’s whirlwind discussion, smart and well argued, turns to many other topics as well, from racism in high tech to microlending, trade wars, risk tolerance, and a rapidly changing rural China, with delicious recipes as a lagniappe.
Technology writing with flair looking to a future that’s fast upon us, with China playing a leading role.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-53866-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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