Book Reviews

The Evidence Stops Short There is little here that will feel groundbreaking to someone who is already a dad. The brain is plastic. Hormones will mess you up, though not in any linear or intuitive way. The science supplies mechanisms for experiences that fathers already know from the inside. A more interesting argument emerges underneath the neuroscience. Dad Brain becomes an argument about caregiving as a universal human capacity and desire that society has made increasingly gendered. Saxbe’s case for de-gendering care reminds me of Ruth Bader Ginsburg pursuing women’s equality through cases involving men: make visible how the same system constrains both sexes, then attack the distinction itself. The book is strongest when fatherhood becomes evidence that care was never naturally women’s work. ...

Thankful for the Theif Poetry is emotion distilled through the pen of another, and this collection offered glimpses across the narrowing edge of what I can still understand outside everyday discourse. I especially liked the introduction to Nizar Qabbani. The facing translations do not reproduce the Arabic so much as open a particular door into it. That is enough to encounter lines worth keeping. One example, the image of happiness as a phantom that exists in anticipation and dulls once possessed: وما السعادة في الدنيا سوى شبح. ...

No really, let’s talk about alternatives We should dream of a better world, but there are dreams that lead to action and others that keep us sleeping. Fisher’s is the latter. Capitalist Realism is persuasive about the extent to which capitalism has become normalized, shaping not only our institutions but the limits of what our generation can imagine. Yet diagnosis without alternatives is just complaint and for this topic, reifies the very subject of the essay! Feeling depressed? It is not your fault, it is capitalism’s fault. Perhaps. Now what? ...

American Jahiliyya It is a shame poetry has passed out of fashion. Our relationship with art has become so direct, pixel to dopamine, that the layers of human emotion between creator and consumer disappear. Yet poetry was the original TikTok: short enough to enjoy and ignore, but capable of compressing an entire perception into a few words. Language is our oldest compression algorithm, and I appreciate anyone who applies it earnestly. ...

History for the 10% The promise of the premise is what I want from ancient history: the anonymous many instead of kings and battles. You are a Greek soldier the night before battle, you are an Egyptian woman dressing for a party, are among the most interesting exercises history can attempt. But availability bias ascends the slippery slope upward. The sources are written by and about people wealthy enough to be recorded, and Garland follows them there: dinner parties, weddings, respectable households. This is not the 0.1% history, it is history for the 1% and 10%. ...