Category Society books

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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life

From Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

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Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí billed itself as the “treasure of the world” and “envy of kings”. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China. The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as “the mountain that eats men”.

The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism: extravagant wealth, immense suffering, complex international networks, a world transformed. The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium. Like its subject, the book has a “tendency to grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity”. Fredric Jameson famously said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. At times during these 1,100 pages, I found it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.

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How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation

From superintelligent AI to the climate and democracy, three leading thinkers discuss how to navigate the future

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct. And the challenge was always that people who think they have the absolute answer to what is a good life try to impose it on others, partly because, unfortunately for many ideologies, an inherent part of the good life is attempting to make everybody live it. And even more unfortunately, in many cases, it seems that it is easier to impose it on others than to do it ourselves. If we take the original crusade in medieval Christian Europe, you have all these people who can’t live a Christian life of modesty and compassion and love your neighbour, but they are able to travel thousands of kilometres to kill people and try to force them to live according to these principles. And what we are witnessing in the world right now is more of the same.

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A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries review – comfortably dumb?

From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many forms

Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.

In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.

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Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower

Some people spend their lives feeling out of place in groups – but it comes with unique opportunities

‘I can’t explain it. He is a sweetheart. A beautiful boy inside and out, and so brilliant.” This was how a session with N, a longtime patient of mine, began some years ago. Her son, A, was a young teenager, and in spite of coming from a warm, loving family with attentive parents, he had started having social  difficulties.

He wasn’t being bullied or left out at school. He wasn’t depressed, moody or anxious. In fact, he was popular, well liked and constantly being invited to parties, to basketball games, and to hang out with groups of young people. The problem was, he turned all these invitations down, and N couldn’t understand why.

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The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist

At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy millieu

AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.

Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.

Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys

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