Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.
Deep state, shmeep state: a spirited rebuttal to the canard that federal civil servants are nest-featherers up to no good.
“The fact is that federal employees go to work every day with the explicit job description of making the lives of everyday Americans better.” So writes W. Kamau Bell, one of the writers drawn into this Washington Post project to explore the federal workforce and the things its members do in their daily labors. As volume editor Lewis notes, the Post series, although about eight times larger than the usual feature, saw a fourfold increase in readership—perhaps not so surprising, given that D.C. is a company town, but noteworthy in that the series painstakingly showed readers the myriad ways in which government is not the demonized bugaboo of Reagan and Trump supporters. What do the people of the Department of Agriculture do? Lewis asks and answers: “They preserve rural America from extinction, among other things.” Lewis, best known for his 2003 book Moneyball, profiles a mine inspector at the Department of Labor who, committed to making mining safer, developed protocols and technologies such as the “stability factor” to do just that, even though “industry executives…made it clear…that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.” The National Cemetery Administration, writes Casey Cep, may be unknown, but its 2,300-odd employees “bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members each year” while tending the graves of more than 4 million veterans. Dave Eggers visits the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is quietly asking questions about life in the universe, sending out spacecraft and monitoring the heavens while employing some of the best minds in the world—about a third of them women. All the contributions similarly press the point that the government’s work is useful—and no one else but government workers are likely to do it.
Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798217047802
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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