Against an arsenal of exploitative technologies, understanding our vulnerabilities is our best shield.
The digital age makes us all more susceptible to grift from skilled charlatans.
Naím (The Revenge of Power, The End of Power, Illicit) and Toro team up to expose charlatans, which they define as those who convince others “to do things that go against their own self-interest”; it becomes dangerous when marks are separated from their families and their money. It’s important to understand how charlatans enchant us. They are not just good at identifying targets. The authors show how any one of us can easily fall prey, because what charlatans do best is reflect our dreams back to us—it is our attachment to our own dreams that clouds our judgment. Exacerbated by social isolation, victims are open to exploitation and new technologies such as artificial intelligence, which can feign the intimacy of a friend, enabling modern-day hucksters to play on our emotions, hopes, and dreams in wholly new ways. Identifying practitioners from a variety of fields—from AI and astrology to megachurches, crypto, and QAnon—the authors provide a tour of contemporary figures such as astrologer Walter Mercado, televangelist Kenneth Copeland, New Age spiritual leader Bentinho Massaro, spiritual influencer Teal Swan, alternative health practitioner Joseph Mercola, yoga practitioner Baba Ramdev, crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, and many more. Naím and Toro write: “If we have done this well, there will be at least one charlatan who might have taken you in.” Techniques such as offering social proof play into victims’ confirmation bias. In order to avoid becoming victimized, the authors advocate for common sense: critical thinking (such as slow thinking, from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow) and not relying on gut feelings or intuition. Hardly groundbreaking advice.
Against an arsenal of exploitative technologies, understanding our vulnerabilities is our best shield.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781541606517
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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
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