I am not qualified to author immigration policy. However, I am not convinced that those who are writing immigration policy are any better at it than I would be. I know the view is different from the top, and balancing the inordinate number of competing interests is nigh-impossible (heavy head, crown, etc). However, in many cases there seems to be a complete absence of basic human kindness. And again, I know that national policy is sometimes a numbers game; adjusting conditions so that there is less overall suffering even if some people still do suffer. I can hear the argument forming already, “to speak of kindness at such a scale is naive”. To which I say, read this book. There is no world in which this sort of suffering is necessary. And to enable, to facilitate, to engineer such suffering is immoral.
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Escape from Manus Prison by Jaivet Ealom
Beaverland by Leila Philip
Leila Philip gives us a brief history of beavers in the United States. For those of you who have not yet heard, beavers were a kind of a big deal before the white man nearly wiped them out to make a buck. They are still a big deal, environmentally speaking, but these days they occupy more of a subculture in the popular consciousness. In any case, Philip provides a personal tour of some beaver-relevant sights and figures: modern trapping, Johann Jacob Astor, Dorothy Richards, Grey Owl, indigenous stories and traditions, a little genocide (no tour of US history is complete without it), and some effluvial geomorphology.
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Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson partakes of that particular style of travel wherein one checks into a hotel and then just goes for a walk with minimal, if any, guidance. Passing judgement on any place that rates as a city or even a large town based solely on what you encounter within walking distance of wherever your lodgings happen to be strikes me as miraculous. It also sounds, to me, like an entirely unpleasant way to see a place, but Bryson is a seasoned traveler, and I will defer to his experience. The tour that is the subject of this book is a rather unusual one, so perhaps I am being unfair in my judgement.
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Nudge, the Final Edition by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
This is a welcome revision to a hugely influential book. If by some chance you’ve escaped its influence, this is one of the works that brought many (and the concept of) standard biases to the popular consciousness, and more importantly, explained some practical applications of that knowledge. These applications have become the defaults (see what I did there?) for many companies and governments.
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Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara
If, upon learning about some awful episode in the history of Western Colonialism, you take comfort in the fact that that age has passed, then this book is for you. That age hasn’t passed, and even in 2024, your life is built upon the exploitation of people whose only crime is where they happen to have been born. Welcome to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If you are willing to look past corporate platitudes and can stomach some unpleasant truths, Siddharth Kara will take you on a tour.
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Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson
I wish there were more books like this. In fact, I wish most books were like this. You can find any number of volumes about meditation, but these are mostly guides and personal stories that extoll the benefits of a certain practice. This book is different. This is a summary of meditation research written for a popular audience. It explains what exactly has been tested scientifically and what hasn’t. This is a catalog of evidence. The authors go down the list of claims made about what meditation can do and provide a simple reality check. They also provide some essential details, clarifying the differences between different types of meditation, and which types have been associated with which results; breaking up the monolith of “meditation” in the popular conversation.
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I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán
This is a curious book. On the one hand, it is a pithy self-help book, riddled with acronyms and buzzwords, and continuously padded with “we’ll talk about that in a later chapter” and “like we talked about in a previous chapter”. On the other hand, it is an effortless and engrossing read. Ironically, Guzmán’s conversational tone betrays her professional expertise. Here is a journalist of high caliber; someone who is experienced and expert at talking to anyone.
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
What is most striking about these sorrows is not their obscurity but rather their specificity. Koenig has tapped the well of human experience and amassed a sizable collection of, what are usually, deeply personal moments. For each of these, he has assigned a name, generally a portmanteau of words from an assortment of languages, and composed a description of the feeling that is utterly dripping with sorrow and nostalgia and… there’s probably a word for it in here somewhere…
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Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern
This is the particular kind of science that ought to be encouraged and supported. It’s one thing to expand humanity’s understanding and knowledge in a general sense. It’s another to investigate competing claims about causes of and solutions to the ills of society. Public policy must be subject to scientific scrutiny. We shouldn’t guess, we shouldn’t appeal to emotion. We should do what works, or we will be overtaken by those that do. Colburn and Aldern have done the math, made some conclusions, and written them up for broad consumption.
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