Breathing Just a Little

This book is enlightening and depressing, but also suffers from an excess of repetition, which contributes to it feeling over-long, and is less compelling in its conclusions that I think the author intended it to be. That said, I think it is an important text, and perhaps will become even more so in the coming years. Doctorow knows what he's talking about, and paints a compelling picture of why everything feels a little to a lot shittier than it used to do - the Internet, of course, but not just that, all the tech we use and have to use in all aspects of our lives.  He provides a forensically detailed and meticulous analysis of the stages of how all things with a tech component (which these days is many to most things) get worse as competition is degraded - first user interests are deprecated, then business customers are also victimised, and finally the only real winners in the game are the mega-middlemen that can, and do, monetise frantically at the expense of all of our privacy, ...

  “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird I've been ruminating (again) this week on the ethics of creating art that is clearly and identifiably about living people, especially when that art is scathing, revelatory, or born from a place of pain.   The immediate catalyst of this thinking has been listening on repeat to an album that will end up being one of my top albums of this year for sure: Lily Allen's West End Girl. If you are unfamiliar, the album charts the catastrophic breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things actor, David Harbour, and zero punches are pulled. Allen is explicit, raw, and so clearly hurt by what she says Harbour did, that IF the album is an accurate or even semi-accurate narrative, the conclusion is clear - the Harbour who emerges from the connected web of songs is an irredeemable shit. Of course, there is (as always!...

This is an outstanding reflection on the complex and often surprising things that happen when humans completely destroy a landscape and then abandon it, for reasons as diverse as "used up all the resources", "irradiated it ooops", "poisoned it ooops again", "political structures collapsed so we didn't need it anymore", "economic forces shifted away", and "failed to account for natural disasters in a compellingly obtuse human way". Flyn, herself a resident of a remote Scottish area, takes us on a journey through places as diverse as the blaes (huge spoil tips) of West Lothian, the "Green Line" DMZ in Cyprus, the vast abandoned collective farms of the former Soviet Union, and of course the Chernobyl exclusion zone (what book about humans brutalising the environment would be complete with it?) We visit the Place a Gaz in France (which is polluted by war detritus heavy metals), the contaminated mouth of the Passaic R...

Well, after saying this was going to be a light month for new books, four audiobooks I had been waiting on landed in my apps! Happy days, and the reading pace immediately accelerated as I listen to audiobooks while driving, shopping, exercising, cleaning and cooking (usually at least 3 hours a day between all those activities). The first cab off the rank was John Safran's latest book, Squat, which, being only 8 hours or so long, I knocked over in 3 days :-) This book is an enjoyably out-there piece of gonzo journalism from Safran, whose reputation as a talented but unpredictable enfant terrible of the Australian docu-art scene endures despite the fact that he is now (like me) 52 years old. I have been a fan of his work since his late 90s debut as part of the ABC documentary-making competition, Race Around the World, and this book did not disappoint. The set-up is quite simple: Safran, having heard Kanye West's increasing forays into public anti-semitism, decides to travel to LA...

I have just finished reading Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, Careless People, about her time working with the upper echelons of Facebook (2011-2017). I have more detailed thoughts (see below), but the summary version: it is a very readable and deeply troubling journey through a worsening landscape of dysfunction. I rate it 8.5/10. Caveats : First up, it's Wynn-Williams' memoir, and she paints herself in the best possible light - there isn't much taking accountability for the ways in which she also enabled, and in some cases actively engineered, some of the shadier stuff she talks about.  It's absolutely the case that she was the victim of a lot of truly execrable behaviour and decision-making, but one can be both a victim and a participant in the victimisation of others at the same time. Wynn-Williams was literally in "room where it happens", and her plaint that she thought she could do more good by staying and trying to influence people wears thin once things ...

Sooooo. We all know about the tariff situation, right, unless we have been living under rocks (which, frankly, doesn't sound unappealing right about now). The Trump administration has imposed a wide swathe of tariffs are variable levels on trading partners both large and small, ranging from what seems to be the baseline (10%) up to much higher levels. Australia has been put on the baseline level, with a 10% across the board tariff imposed. Many people more economically versed than me have written about the tariffs and their possible broad impact on trade, markets and the global economy, so I am not going to try to reinvent that particular dreary wheel. Instead, I wanted to reflect on one significant impact that is already starting in Australia and is likely to get much worse quickly unless this situation is resolved - the absolute fire and destruction it is raining down on Australian superannuation investment. For the non-locals, superannuation is Australia's answer to self-fun...

I picked up my monthly immune therapy injectable medication from the pharmacy today.  Take a look at the pricing label. Full cost: $1604.77. Cost to me on the PBS (Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, for non-Aussie readers, which heavily subsidises medications for all Australian citizens and residents): $31.60. This is a medication that has had a strongly positive effect on my health overall, and will probably act to extend my "healthspan" (years I remain fully functional). At $1604 a month, I could not afford it, and I just wouldn't get it. I wouldn't die without it, this is not an insulin situation, but it would impede my quality of life, especially as I age and my autoimmune issues become more prominent. Protect Medicare and the PBS, folks. Think about how affordable that top number would be for the vast majority of people (certainly for those without private insurance). Think about how it is in fully privatised healthcare systems, where whether you get...

  I have been an admirer of the work of Canadian thinker and social critic, Naomi Klein, since her 2007 ground-breaking book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . That book changed permanently how I read news, interpret events (and political responses to them), and think about the world. In that sense, it would be fair to describe Klein as a key influence in the development of my own political, social and even historical thinking. (On that note, I have not yet read the book that first brought her into prominence, 1999's No Logo , but one thing I intend to do this year is to rectify that). Doppelganger is clearly cut from the same intellectual and philosophical cloth as Klein's earlier works (especially The Shock Doctrine and her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate ), but takes a different, and more personal, approach to the big questions and big problems that beset the present moment. Klein's entry point, shaping theme, and key hoo...

On Fridays, I plan to refresh a post from one of my older blogs that still seems material or relevant. I'm calling it "Everything Old is New Again Fridays", because why not? This piece appeared on my blog Too Fond of Books in December 2015 (nine long years ago now). Although my circumstances have radically changed since then, I stand by the ideas. ---------------------------------- The Guardian is re-running links to some of its more popular pieces from 2015 as the year wends to an end. They've just relinked one about working mothers, which I remember well as it was published on my very last day of salaried employment - the very day, some would argue, that I ceased to be a role model of working motherhood to my three girls. As luck would have it, I have been able to build up a good freelance clientele since then and am close to fully employed (I average 4 days a week) in my own business. I didn't know that this would happen when I left my job, though, and I took t...