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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
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