"Sunday Morning Reading - A Selected Section Of The Newspaper"

Today’s focus being the New York Times Sunday “Book Review” section, September the 9^th, 2018.  (I am nothing if not untimely.  Call it “Warm off the Presses”, and leave it at that.)

I have mentioned before that the thoughts and beliefs we take inare crucially significant.  You know “You are what you eat”?  Well, in my unscientific but my hopefully not entirely dismissible opinion, you are also what you mentally absorb.  And I mean totally.

Where else would our ideas come from?  We are born with “Goo goo.”

“Newborn baby, how did we get to this sorry state of political affairs?... Ooh, you just spit up. Was that a coincidence or ‘non-verbal communication?’”

Will Rogers famously observed, “All I know is what I read in the papers.”  If he were alive today, he’d have added the Internet.  And then skillfully circled his lasso, and winked.

Our “Library of Wisdom” comes comprehensively from “outside.”  Nothing we believe is internally derived.  

What is “internally derived” is our inherent “filtering system.”

Let me (necessarily) explain.

As with the foods we consume, there is something internally programmed about us, allowing us to absorb some “intellectual nutrients” and reject others. This natural selection process is what makes us, individually, who we are.  

I know this from experience. I see a guy on TV talking about Physics – I “remote” away fast as my fingers can carry me.  I find a guy talking about the Battle of Gettysburg, and I stay for the entire lecture, plus the following “Q & A.”     

That is simply the way I am. And – who knows? – possibly others are, as well.  Something about the subject matter generically holds our attention, or sends us scrambling for something that will.  

Okay, so I am perusing the “Book Review” section of the Sunday New York Times.  I check the “Table of Contents”, skimming the “Fiction” section, for recognizable authors – otherwise, I’m off to “Non Fiction”, where I am more comfortably at home. 

Meaning, my personalized “filtering system” is already at work.

Though not entirely.

Casually scanning the “Fiction” listings – to confirm my visceral disinterest – the name Yazmina Reza suddenly catches my attention.  I recognize that name.  Yazmina Reza wrote two plays I saw and semi-enjoyed – Art and The God of Carnage.

I turn to the review of her book, Babylon(Reviewed by Erica Wagner), about a social gathering that ends in catastrophe.  There is no chance I will ever read Babylon.  Still, I am powerfully drawn to a line from it quoted in the review’s final paragraph, which says:

“People who think there’s some orderly system to life – they’re lucky.”

Why does that line intrigue me?  

Because the author and I hold similar beliefs – that people who believe there’s some orderly system to life (as well as other helpful beliefs) make no deliberate decision to do so.  They’re just chromosomally lucky. 

Moving on…

Boom Town, by Sam Anderson (Reviewed by Will Blythe.)

Boom Town chronicles the history of Oklahoma City.  I enjoy history, and I am further attracted by the book’s subtitle:  “The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dreams of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis.”  So I read the review.   

Again, I recall very little about the book (other than the author’s calling OKC “… the great minor city of America.”)  What I more dominantly recall is the included mention of the term “Sooners.”  

The settling of Oklahoma was famous for its precipitating “Land Rush”, where, on a signaling cannon shot, thousands of people tore off to stake claims to free land.  (Taken from the Indians.)  Skullduggerous sneaks who left early were pejoratively called “Sooners.”

Now “Sooners” in the Oklahoma football team’s celebrated nickname.

How did that happen? They’d never call them the “Oklahoma Land Grabbers.”

I had always wondered about that curious transformation, where, as the author reports, the appellation “Sooner”“… had been whitewashed into a folksy moniker and team nickname.” It felt vindicating, knowing authorized historians were equally perplexed.

And then finally…

“21 Lessons For the 21^stCentury”by Yuval Noah Harari, which captured the coveted front page of theTimes “Book Review” section, partly because it’s an “important” book, and – perhaps more significantly – because the book’s reviewer was Bill Gates.

I also recall very little about thatbook.  I read the review.  But not a single lesson for the 21th century stayed with me.  

Although this included paragraph did.

Quoting from Gates’s review:

“Here’s another worry that Harari deals with:  In an increasingly complex world, how can any of us have enough information to make educated decisions?  It’s tempting to turn to experts, but how do you know they’re not just following the herd?  ‘The problem of group-think and individual ignorance besets not just ordinary voters and customers’, he writes, ‘but also presidents and C.E.O’s.’  That rang true to me from my experience at both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation.  I have to be careful not to fool myself into thinking things are better – or worse – than they actually are.” 

With his troubling concern about knowing “how things actually are”, Gates summarizes half of my blog posts.  (The other half being about when I actually did things, and not, less excitingly, thought things.)  

The above-cited paragraph readily jumped into my head, where it was enthusiastically received by a like-minded contention.

Leading me finally to wonder…

Did I learn anything, reading the Sunday Times “Book Review” section?

Or had I spent forty-five minutes, 

patting myself on the back?