WHAT HUNGER, weirdly satisfying and thoroughly revolting at the same time

WHAT HUNGER
CATHERINE DANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nyugen, as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood, for fans of Jennifer’s Body and Little Fires Everywhere.

It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.

Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.

But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny’s Vietnamese lineage and her mother’s emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Adolescence is a time of Certainty covering terrified confusion, Outrage covering terrified hurt. The cultural Western headiness of slobbering pandering laser-focused attention on the adolescent, a malleable consumer/believer in the making, from all sides ignites the fuel into a solar-intensity conflagration of perspectiveless conviction that, unless *I* like/love/want it, it's a Plot to Ruin My Life.

I get lots of criticism for using Capital Letters in my writing. Here it's done, as it most often is, to highlight an emotional not a rational response evoked or intended by the author (me or other) to be evoked. Perspective needs to be earned and learned the hard way, so this is all perfectly understandable. It's also why so many of us can not stand coming-of-age stories, to the point where I recommend them to those most intensely averse to them in order to watch their manners pumps explode with the effort to say no without screaming at me. (Hiya Kath!)

In this story Ronny's ready-to-ignite rage goes critical in several incidents. The response to that criticality is, in keeping with the title, related to food choices...not unusual for adolescent females, but decidedly NOT the usual eating-disorder narrative I'm heartily sick of reading. It is if anything an inverted use of eating disorders I'm accustomed to. I've known no anthropophagic beings. Plenty of bulimics and anorexics.

What Hunger is a hilariously apt, darkly funny title for a deeply, darkly, eucharistically furious story. It's metaphor gone clear, in scientological jargon, and exteriorized. (Y'all, stick to Wikipedia to look up scientology stuff. DO NOT USE CHAT OR GOOGLE. The consequences are dire.) I'm not always interested in body horror used to explain rage, but this story worked the alchemy I need to get invested in the action. It was indeed gross at times.

Balancing that, and creating what felt to me an exquisite tension, was Ronny's family history of expressing love through gorgeously evoked meals that I damn near passed out from drooling myself into dehydration while reading. What a food vocabulary Author Dang has! It's a pleasure to read someone's upsetting writing when it then soothes me with food.

I'm easy. You might not be.

The most notable dissatisfaction I have is the pacing of the story after Ronny's, um, conversion? discovery? whatever, big change. Action slows to allow for introspection for quite a stretch, and it did not get back to work soon enough for this reader. There are developments that, in their absence of a world-building framework, just sorta...happen...which very seldom works out best for the narrative cohesion or character development. I mean, "ewwwww" is okay if it effloresces out of some Lovecraftian something, not so much done here.

The complexity of the family's internal dynamics are the source of the extra half-star on the three and a half I was planning to award this very good but not outstanding tale. Ronny, like any adolescent, is still molding her responses around her family. She, like the most bearable adolescents I've ever known, is adaptable in her responses still, not hardening into adamant certainty. She has a very touching relationship with her mother and her auntie, both still morphing as she develops.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy the horror bits, or want to experience them getting the good relationship development, but if your stomach is strong this is a contender for your summer reading.

ALGOSPEAK: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, Adam Aleksic..."@etymology_nerd" at his most informative

ALGOSPEAK: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
ADAM ALEKSIC
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Author Aleksik speaks to Taylor Lorenz about ChatGPT.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From linguist Adam Aleksic, known as @etymologynerd on social media, comes a captivating exploration of how internet algorithms are transforming language and communication in unprecedented ways.

“Packed with fascinating facts, of-the-moment observations, and a sparkling voice, Algospeak is a gift to any word nerd. Deftly covering everything from emoji etymologies and trendbait to Taylor Swift fanilects… Adam Aleksic is the wise, yet accessible internet linguistics oracle we need.” —Amanda Montell, author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Cultish

From “brainrot” memes and incel slang to the trend of adding “-core” to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and the way we use it: he knows the ways it has morphed and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues. As a social media influencer, Aleksic is also intimately familiar with the internet’s reach and how social media impacts the way we engage with one another. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform language as we know it. Our interactions, social norms, and habits—both online and in person—shift into something completely different.

As Aleksic uses original surveys, data, and internet archival research to usher us through this new linguistic landscape, he also illuminates how communication is changing in both familiar and unexpected ways. From our use of emojis to sentence structure to the ways younger generations talk about sex and death (see unalive in English and desvivirse in Spanish), we are in a brand-new world, one shaped by algorithms and technology. Algospeak is an energetic, astonishing journey into language, the internet, and what this intersection means for all of us.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's a really fine line between niches and ghettos. There is a very fine line between going mainstream and cultural appropriation, between mockery and normalization, between slang and neologism.

And each of these can be true of any language unit all at the same time. Because language is about *why* even more than *how* you use its units of meaning. The usual moral panics of every age are at work, making "rizz" and "-core" and the like horsebeings of the apocalypse that will utterly destroy critical thinking, education, and the fabric of society.

Prepare for Mad Max meets The Hunger Games, y'all. Uptalking girls and sigma males are going to displace us at the top of the tree no matter how long or how hard we cling to the power it's time we gave up. And yes, I hate uptalking as much as any other old man, plus the very idea of the alpha male let alone the incel spin that is a sigma make me queasy. Their use now has a context I'd never had before, the possession of which reassures ("sigma" is a humiliating appropriation of terrible peoples' slang) and concerns (uptalking is a worrisome signal of algorithmically reinforced misogyny by seeking approval in making questions of statements).

It's their world now. Let them make their mistakes. They literally can not do worse than we did, what with keeping our snouts in the trough while the lowest scum imaginable piled up playmoney and choked the entire planet on deadly gases.

So what Author Aleksic does here, and on his YouTube channel, is offer a guide for the perplexed among the different truths of language change, and thus what to watch out for (spoiler: harmful uses of language are bad). His analysis of how the acceleration of language change got turbocharged by the greed of capitalism is directly congruent to my take on things (read: prejudice), and his more-reassuring-than-alarming example of "unalive" as the youth culture's work-around for algorithmic idiocy targeting "dead" and "death" as markers of "sensitive content" reminds me that people are always going to come up with ways around overzealous nonsense.

What made this book by a linguist (past president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society) so absorbing and involving to me was that he has the formal, old-person-approved training and the business-model savvy of a content creator across multiple platforms. The distinctions he draws among normal language change, harmful appropriative theft, and highly concerning capitalist manipulations of identity for profit, are all backed up by actual research. Nothing's perfect...the notes are extensive but, in my DRC, not links so I had to type them into my browser to check them (oh, the pain! said in my best 1965-Lost-in-Space voice), and there were times I wasn't sure if I was reading a self-help for YouTubers book...but there was never a time I wanted to stop reading.

Anyone who's got grandkids ought to read it. Anyone who thinks the future will take care of itself, or is already doomed to failure and evil times, also ought to read this. Y'all're both right, and wrong, and here's why. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

CONTAINING BIG TECH: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy & THE PERENNIALS: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society, huge forces reshaping our lives

CONTAINING BIG TECH: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy
TOM KEMP
Fast Company Press
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The path forward to rein in online surveillance, AI, and tech monopolies

Technology is a gift and a curse. The five Big Tech companies—Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—have built innovative products that improve many aspects of our lives. But their intrusiveness and our dependence on them have created pressing threats to our civil rights, economy, and democracy.

Coming from an extensive background building Silicon Valley–based tech startups, Tom Kemp eloquently and precisely weaves together the threats posed by Big Tech:

the overcollection and weaponization of our most sensitive data

the problematic ways Big Tech uses AI to process and act upon our data

the stifling of competition and entrepreneurship due to Big Tech’s dominant market position

This richly detailed book exposes the consequences of Big Tech’s digital surveillance, exploitative use of AI, and monopolistic and anticompetitive practices. It offers actionable solutions to these problems and a clear path forward for individuals and policymakers to advocate for change. By containing the excesses of Big Tech, we will ensure our civil rights are respected and preserved, our economy is competitive, and our democracy is protected.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: We are, as a society, in serious danger. A lot of things that were once difficult to find effective ways to influence and manipulate are becoming trivially easy to do. The perpetrators of this violation of our essential freedom to be safe in our own heads have, in eight concise chapters, each been named and shamed, their tactics analyzed and the consequences of them sketched out, by one of their own.

True, it wasn't like any of them were trying to fly under the radar about this...for a famous example, Jeff Bezos clearly said he wanted to control ecommerce way back when, but really only accidentally:

When his goals did slip out, they were improbably grandiose. Though the startup’s focus was clearly on books, Davis recalls Bezos saying he wanted to build “the next Sears,” a lasting company that was a major force in retail. {An investor who was also a} kayaking enthusiast...remembers Bezos telling him that he envisioned a day when the site would sell not only books about kayaks but kayaks themselves, subscriptions to kayaking magazines, and reservations for kayaking trips—everything related to the sport. “I thought he was a little bit crazy,” says {the investor}.

(source: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone)

What this immense ambition created was The Literal Everything Store, used by everyone even marginally online at some point for something they need or want. They might not even realize it's Amazon they're doing business with...how many of even the most committed Amazonphobes know who hosts their online commercial interactions? or where bricks-and-mortar stores buy their stock?...but their data is in some way harvested by Amazon. The other members of Big Tech's five brothers are dealt similar serious blows to their frequently protested innocence of maleficent intent and wrongdoing in the moral if not the legal sense.

It's part of their business plans to amass a chillingly immense digital dossier on every internet user by the entire tech industry. The purpose is to make them incomprehensible piles of money; they then use that money, extracted directly and indirectly from your pockets, to influence the course of world events on political and economic stages to benefit themselves and themselves alone. Refer back to 1953, when the famous kludged-up quote "What’s good for General Motors is good for America" was supposedly said by a GM exec being vetted by the Senate for a senior government job. (The truth is more nuanced, if less punchy.) The usual course of a person interested in the US's economic health is to consult the newspaper or equivalent's reporting of the stock market's performance. How this casino capitalism came to be conflated with the country's overall economic health is outside the book's or this review of it's scope, but is part of the larger picture painted herein of the actions taken by the surveillance economy's owners and drivers.

The means of information gathering and opinion-sharing are increasingly in the hands of the same few corporate entities that harvest your data and the windfalls it generates. The AI revolution we're relentlessly being told is coming has lifted the increasingly fragile casino economy's entirely notional values into new superstratospheric heights. Go look at Nvidia's stock prices then its history to see what I'm talking about. The way to make people believe something is inevitable is to tell them over and over again that it is, and that includes the inevitability of Big Tech's dominance. In these eight chapters, the author presents a very good case for what each player in the surveillance capitalism/totalitarian state apparatus's purpose is in pursuing its goals. In the appendices he outlines the personal, as well as the societal, steps one can take to corral the presently untrammelled ability these corporate actors have to present only information and opinion positively inclined towards them and their agenda.

A book that blares alarms at you without offering actionable items to prevent or mitigate the warnings taking place or effect isn't doing a service but simply further harm. I think the author here is doing a great service by performing both the warning function about the problems we're facing and the directions they're approaching us from, and outlining potential solutions on actionable on multiple fronts.

I'd like to stress that my use of "actionable" with such regularity is intentional and meant to convey my personal sense of urgency in addressing these issues. I think reading this book will convince many to stop wondering if it's even worth paying attention to these issues of surveillance and manipulation, and start taking steps to mitigate the harms being caused by the overreach of an identifiable coterie of bad actors.

That means I'd really like you to read it. Get it from the author's website linked above. Get it from Amazon, they sell it. Get your local library to buy one or two and check one out. Just get it and its ideas in your heads.

It's not exaggerating to say that, if the AI future being drummed into us as inevitable comes to pass, we're going to need the checks and balances in this book to survive with even a whisper of autonomy intact.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE PERENNIALS: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society
MAURO GUILLÉN
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In today’s world, the acceleration of megatrends—increasing longevity and the explosion of technology among many others—are transforming life as we now know it.

In The Perennials, bestselling author of 2030 Mauro Guillén unpacks a sweeping societal shift triggered by demographic and technological transformation. Guillén argues that outmoded terms like Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have long been used to pigeonhole us into rigid categories and life stages, artificially preventing people from reaching their full potential. A new postgenerational workforce known as "perennials"—individuals who are not pitted against each other either by their age or experience—makes it possible to liberate scores of people from the constraints of the sequential model of life and level the playing field so that everyone has a chance at living a rewarding life.

This multigenerational revolution is already happening and Mauro Guillén identifies the specific cultural, organizational and policy changes that need to be made in order to switch to a new template and usher in a new era of innovation powered by The Perennials.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm well into my geezerdom. I think this gent's insight is a corker. Not just because he acknowledges the role of experience in a functioning world but because he says it's really the only way out of the looming crises of employment, productivity, and collapsing ecology. Well, I added the last one, but it seems to me that the problems the planet is facing are best faced with all hands on deck.

Most people don't live in the way I grew up, or likely that my readers did: A mother, a father, some siblings, one house, a couple cars; some orbiting family from the parents' siblings, closer or farther from us with whatever degree of connection our families could/chose to maintain; maybe grandparents on big family occasions. Life was preordained to follow that pattern through our generation, and we thought beyond it, too. Varying political movements and social pressures began to change the tiny, nuclear-family model...not least a reality of the nuclear world is that fission is easier and more common than fusion, and produces very, very toxic waste with a hugely long lifespan.

As a result of demographic realities the huge boost of living standards after World War II across most of the globe produced a gigantic population bubble. Better lives for "all" keep coming about, and all meant so many more than ever. The sociological changes wrought by the various liberation and empowerment movements around the world meant that there were huge numbers of people who needed jobs that had little or no family component. University educations became necessary (in theory anyway) to get ahead, to make a decent living. Maybe, if you wanted to, have a family of your own. It was the choice of many not to do so much of that old model, but the world's picture of school then work and then finally retirement...the whole structure of the twentieth century's body politic...has changed very little. Our lives within it are, however, being lived in a more flexible and inclusive way than ever.

What the author propounds in his fascinating look at how we could all benefit from adapting our model to lived reality is the acceptance that people live longer and need to live better. All of us need challenges and face the reality that those challenges ae changing. He proposes the deeply pragmatic solution of adopting a life-long learning model. This means we're not In A Job for life but in a habit of honing skills we have and acquiring new ones.

Addressing the looming labor shortages as people get older and stay fit longer means second, third, or fourth careers for many of us will have to be planned for by employers. Age discrimination is very much a reality. The companies that emulate BMW in their age-blended team models will make a big bonus for their shareholders. The entire landscape of work will need to change (see my review of THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN for some background on this; also that author, Mohammed El-Erian, approves of this book and its thesis) to accommodate different needs and desires, like the work-from-home lifestyle that most people prefer and Big Tech is leading the charge to reverse in the wake of the pandemic's accidental proof of concept that it works.

Possibly the most resonant part of the book to me was its model of exchanging skills among the generations. I know that, in my own life, my Young Gentleman Caller has helped me remain more comfortable with information technology and its many nuances than almost all the people I live among. I know also that my experience has alerted him to some less-than-honorable intentions among his acquaintance. It's a joy to be able to both learn and be taught. And I don't exaggerate when I use the word "joy." In my own life, as in his, learning stuff is a source of real joy for each of us...it's one reason we remain in relationship in supervention of the challenges we face.

The author's thesis is particularly informative of th challenges the world being summoned into being by Big Tech (see review above) being met with effective control. It will take an intergenerational conversation of great depth and serious intent to prevent the dystopic possibilities of surveillance capitalism and totalitarian governance from happening.

Reading these books together was one of the most challenging emotional rides of 2023 for me. There's a lot to be deeply concerned about in the direction that our present system of inaction and wasteful misdirection of energy is following. There are ways to solve it, and this read's author has one of the best structural models for directing growth into sustainable channels I've read. This is largely, I suspect, because I already implement the lifelong learner model of being. It's paid such huge dividends in my own life. Not least by giving me the mental framework and the emotional push needed to recover faculties many like me lose when they have the multiple strokes that I had in January 2023. I'm slower, and quicker to tire, than before my problems got worse; but unlike those whose retirements or simply aging lifestyles aren't focused, I had something to recover for and get back to doing: This. Reading. Thinking about what I've read. Thinking about how to support the changes I want to see and resist the ones I don't want to see effectively. Communicating those thoughts on this little blog I've run for ten years, that still attracts about two hundred viewers on an average day.

I think more people would find ways to do what I've done if they read these two books: the first to learn what's at stake and how to get a handle on it; the second to learn why it's a good use of your time to overcome inertia and restart your mind's journey.