Kendi - How to Be an Antiracist

Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Review:

In an interlacing of pedagogy and personal livelihood, Kendi has given a clear account of overt racism compared to the more dangerous subversive racism in the United States. They are both politically induced racist policies that propagate into the world of racist thinking styles. In this overview course on what it means to be an anti-racist, compared to a racist, compared to an assimilationist, Kendi gives precise introductory origins of each sector of racist ideologies and their backgrounds. The book is broken down into Dualing Consciousness, Power, Biology, Ethnicity, Culture, Class, Queer, and a few more topics. Each section delves into each other as intersectional as it must be, and has a clear focus on the elucidation of such issues. Each issue chapter with terms and definitions, to clearly solidify what grounds of truth that we will be standing on. Each section has a form of personal anecdote, which later finds to be very important in the formation of policies, histories, and self-consciousness of that topic.

Overall, an excellent introduction to race talk, because all people can be racist, asians can be racist, black people can be racist, whites can definitely be racist because we all have the power to be racist. We all have the power to be anti-racist. This book is a must-read for all Americans, and especially for the African Americans who have anti-black-thoughts, and especially for the majority of the whites, who think that they don't see color.

Reading Stats:

• Reading Date: 1/2/20 - 1/3/20

• Reading Level:

  • African American: 8th Grade Level

  • White Americans: Freshmen College Level

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• 5-10% What is racism - a marriage of racist policies and ideologies, that produces and normalizes racial inequalities?

  • Racial Inequality: when two or more racial groups that aren't standing in an approximately equal footing. Ex: 71 percent of white families live in owned homes in 2014, compared to 44 percent of African Americans, and Latinx.

  • Racial Equality: When the different racial groups would own similar percentages rather than having a 30 percent difference.

  • Racist Policy: Any policy that would reproduce racial Inequality based statistics.

  • Antiracist Policy: Any policy that would reproduce racial equality based statistics. And the strategy is written laws that rule the people.

  • Why use these terms rather than more abstract and overview based terms like systematic oppression? These terms are more tangible in understanding, especially for those who aren't normalized to these terms. Racist ideas: Any notion that says one group is better than another in any way.

• ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity.”

  • “ASSIMILATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group.

  • SEGREGATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a permanently inferior racial group can never be developed and is supporting policy that segregates away that racial group.

  • Since Reagan's agenda on "War on Drugs": from 1980 - 2000, 4x increase in the American prison population.

  • Whites are more likely than Black and Latinx to sell drugs.

  • African Americans are far more likely to be jailed than white Americans.

  • Non-violent Black drug offenders remain in prison for the same amount of time (58.87 months) as Violent white criminals (62.7 Month)

  • 2016, Black and Latinx people are grossly overrepresented in the prison population at 56%, while White People are grossly underrepresented at 30%. When looking at the national population of Black, Latinx, and White Americans, it's significantly off.

  • “Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America’s undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow. Despite the cold instructions from the likes of Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal to “become assimilated into American culture,” Black people have also, as Du Bois said, desired to remain N*gro, discouraged by America’s undeniable history of racist progress, from advancing police violence and voter suppression, to widening racial inequities in areas ranging from health to wealth.”

  • “The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.”

  • “The Black body in turn experiences the same duel. The Black body is instructed to become an American body. The American body is the White body. The Black body strives to assimilate into the American body. The American body rejects the Black body. The Black body separates from the American body. The Black body is instructed to assimilate into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.”

  • “But there is a way to get free. To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.”

• BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.”

  • “BIOLOGICAL RACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.

  • We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.

  • “Looking back, I wonder, if I had been one of her White kids would she have asked me: “What’s wrong?” Would she have wondered if I was hurting? I wonder. I wonder if her racist ideas chalked up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior, not distress. With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults.

  • The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.”

  • “We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups.”

  • “Where are you from?” - I am often asked this question by people who see me through the lens of ethnic racism. Their ethnic racism presumes I—a college professor and published writer—cannot be a so-called lowly, lazy, lackluster African American.
    ““Who do you think your fellow Ghanaian Americans got these ideas about African Americans from?” He thought much longer this time. From the side of his eye he saw another student waiting to speak to me, which seemed to rush his thoughts—he was a polite kid in spite of his urge to lecture. But I did not rush him. The other student was Jamaican and listening intently, maybe thinking about who Jamaicans got their ideas about Haitians from. “Probably American Whites,” he said, looking me straight in the eye for the first time.”

  • “Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups? - The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants.”

  • “all they saw were our dangerous Black bodies. Cops seemed especially fearful. Just as I learned to avoid the Smurfs of the world, I had to learn to keep racist police officers from getting nervous. Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.”

  • The so-called “first Black president” followed suit. “It isn’t racist for Whites to say they don’t understand why people put up with gangs on the corner or in the projects or with drugs being sold in the schools or in the open,” said President Clinton in 1995. - Indeed, I was irresponsible in high school. It makes antiracist sense to talk about the personal irresponsibility of individuals like me of all races. I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race. My problems with personal irresponsibility were exacerbated—or perhaps even caused—by the additional struggles that racism added to my school life, from a history of disinterested, racist teachers, to overcrowded schools, to the daily racist attacks that fell on young Black boys and girls.

  • -- while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy. This shouldn’t be surprising: One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary

  • Black people. the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. I had already forked over $1,000 for a preparatory course, feeding the U.S. test-prep and private tutoring industry that would grow to $12 billion in 2014 and is projected to reach $17.5 billion in 2020. The courses and private tutors are concentrated in Asian and White communities, who, not surprisingly, score the highest on standardized tests. My GRE prep course, for instance, was not taught on my historically Black campus. “The teacher was not making us stronger. She was giving us form and technique so we’d know precisely how to carry the weight of the test. It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength.” Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

• COLORISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequities between Light people and Dark people, supported by racist ideas about Light and Dark people.

  • COLOR ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between Light people and Dark people, supported by antiracist ideas about Light and Dark people. Dark Black men regardless of qualifications? Even Dark Filipino men have lower incomes than their lighter peers in the United States. Dark immigrants to the United States, no matter their place of origin, tend to have less wealth and income than Light immigrants. When they arrive, Light Latinx people receive higher wages, and Dark Latinx people are more likely to be employed at ethnically homogeneous jobsites. “To be an antiracist is not to reverse the beauty standard. To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups.

  • To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.”

  • Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea.

  • 50% ANTI-WHITE RACIST: One who is classifying people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating the entire race of White people with racist power.

  • When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer saw the United States as a democracy. When Gore conceded the next day, when White Democrats stood aside and let Bush steal the presidency on the strength of destroyed Black votes, I was shot back into the binary thinking of Sunday school, where I was taught about good and evil, God and the Devil. - this is similar to what we going through right now.

• To Be an Antiracist:

  • To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people.

  • To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people.

  • To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites.

  • To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

• Getting over Powerless Defense, „When a Black man stepped into the most powerful office in the world in 2009, his policies were often excused by apologists who said he didn’t have executive power. As if none of his executive orders were carried out, neither of his Black attorneys general had any power to roll back mass incarceration, or his Black national security adviser had no power. The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited.“

  • But according to the theory that Black people can’t be racist because they lack power, Blackwell didn’t have the power to suppress Black votes. Remember, we are all either racists or antiracists.

• CLASS RACIST: One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes. ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST: One who is opposing racial capitalism.

  • Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological.

  • In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti-Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.

  • White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

  • This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are. Racist Black elites thought about low-income Blacks the way racist non-Black people thought about Black people. We thought we had more than higher incomes. We thought we were higher people.

  • “The N*gro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” Du Bois projected. “Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.”

  • “In the forty years since Clark’s Dark Ghetto, dark had married ghetto in the chapel of inferiority and took her name as his own—the ghetto was now so definitively dark, to call it a dark ghetto would be redundant. Ghetto also became as much an adjective—ghetto culture, ghetto people—as a noun, loaded with racist ideas, unleashing all sorts of Black on Black crimes on poor Black communities.”

• SPACE RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces.

  • SPACE ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces, which are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized spaces.

  • “If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” She stared at me as she gathered her words. Not a woman of many words, it did not take long.

    “Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

  • Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”

  • The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea. And it is powerfully misleading. For instance, people steer away from and stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen.

  • Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion.

    • The argument: Black students are better served learning how to operate in a majority-White nation by attending a majority-White university.

    • The reality: A large percentage of—perhaps most—Black Americans live in majority-Black neighborhoods, work in majority-Black sites of employment, organize in majority-Black associations, socialize in majority-Black spaces, attend majority-Black churches, and send their children to majority-Black schools.

  • They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews. Why: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale.

    • HBCUs to HWCUs of similar means and makeup, HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates. Not to mention, Black HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely than their Black peers from HWCUs to be thriving financially, socially, and physically.

  • When black people create space, they see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.

  • Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught by an 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non-White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about 40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school. Low-income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29 percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low-income Black boys.

  • White spaces that hoard public resources, include some non-Whites, and are generally, though not wholly, dominated by White peoples and cultures. White majorities, White power, and White culture dominate both the segregated and the integrated, making both White.

  • Integration had turned into “a one-way street,” a young Chicago lawyer observed in 1995. “The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress.

  • “Antiracist strategy fuses desegregation with a form of integration and racial solidarity. Desegregation: eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces. To be antiracist is to support the voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity. Integration: resources rather than bodies. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate and nurture difference among racial groups.”

  • But antiracist strategy is beyond the integrationist conception that claims Black spaces could never be equal to White spaces, that believes Black spaces have a “detrimental effect upon” Black people, to quote Chief Justice Warren in Brown. My Black studies space was supposed to have a detrimental effect on me. Quite the opposite. My professors made sure of that, as did two Black students, answering questions I never thought to ask.

• GENDER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-genders and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-genders.

  • GENDER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-genders and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-genders.

  • To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism.

  • “The intersection of racism and sexism, in some cases, oppresses White women. For example, sexist notions of “real women” as weak and racist notions of White women as the idealized woman intersect to produce the gender-racist idea that the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak White woman.”

  • the opposite of the gender racism of the unvirtuous hypersexual Black woman is the virtuous asexual White woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the White woman’s sexuality (as it nakedly tainted the Black woman’s sexuality as un-rape-able).

  • Gender racism is behind the thinking that when one defends White male abusers like Trump and Brett Kavanaugh one is defending White people; when one defends Black male abusers like Bill Cosby and R. Kelly one is defending Black people.

  • For example, sexist notions of “real men” as strong and racist notions of Black men as not really men intersect to produce the gender racism of the weak Black man, inferior to the pinnacle of manhood, the strong White man.

  • Sexist notions of men as more naturally dangerous than women (since women are considered naturally fragile, in need of protection) and racist notions of Black people as more dangerous than White people intersect to produce the gender racism of the hyperdangerous Black man, more dangerous than the White man, the Black woman, and (the pinnacle of innocent frailty) the White woman.

  • These ideas of gender racism transform every innocent Black male into a criminal and every White female criminal into Casey Anthony, the White woman a Florida jury exonerated in 2011, against all evidence, for killing her three-year-old child. White women get away with murder and Black men spend years in prisons for wrongful convictions.

• QUEER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-sexualities.

  • QUEER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-sexualities.

  • "I thought about this hypersexuality and recklessness causing so many Black gay men to contract HIV. I thought wrong. Black gay men are less likely to have condomless sex than White gay men. They are less likely to use drugs like poppers or crystal methamphetamine during sex, which heighten the risk of HIV infections."

  • I watched, stunned, in awe of their intellectual attacks. I call them attacks, but in truth they were defenses, defending Black womanhood and the humanity of queer Blacks. They were respectful and measured if the victimizer was respectful and measured with them. But I call them attacks because I felt personally attacked. They were attacking my gender racism about Black women, my queer racism about queer Blacks, my gender and queer racism about queer Black women.

Additional Reference Links:

• Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X Kendi

• New York Times reading list for How to be an Antiracist

• GSU’s reading list for this book

• Kendi’s Talk at UC Berkley

• Kendi’s Commencement Speech at U of F

Lee - AI Superpowers China

Author: Kai-Fu Lee

Review:

The technological, cultural mindset of China is very different from the American mindset. That's an easy first sentence, for China has a history that spans to the 4000BC, and with it, a culture of Confucianism, Taoism, and, therefore, different styles of living and thinking. Then the last 100 years happened, Japan attacked China in WWII, then many internal conflicts also arose. Thus, in the 1990s, China was on the catchup for everything in the economic sphere, but all that has changed in the last 20 years. From what I've followed on the internet where the American mindset has a heavy bias against China, to the personal trip I took to China, I've noticed that if the United States ignore China as a worthy colleague or opponent in terms of technological progress, then China's sleeping dragon will soon dominate all things technology.

This book gives a reason as to why that is, why is China growing so fast? How do their culture allow for such growth? Why is the "copy cat" method of technology copying working? How are they using Copy Cat technology as a method of growth rather than copy? All of those questions are elucidated in the first section of Lee's book. In the later sections of this book, the assumptions made by Lee of the general AI future is are reasonable; nevertheless, there are many other people in the industry with more critical analysis of general AI. However, as I said, his analysis of China is magnificent.

I would heavily recommend this book for anyone who is in finance, technology or has an interest in Chinese culture. This book is meant for the understanding of how China operates, and not for how general AI research would operate in the future.

Reading Stats:

• 1/6/20 - 1/8/20

• Reading Level: Sophomore College, or Freshmen Level with Sino culture and business knowledge.

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2018

• Relevancy: Until 2022

Quotes and Notes:

• “They were on roughly parallel tracks, and the United States was slightly ahead of China. But around 2013, China’s internet took a right turn. Rather than following in the footsteps or outright copying of American companies, Chinese entrepreneurs began developing products and services with simply no analog in Silicon Valley. Analysts describing China used to invoke simple Silicon Valley–based analogies when describing Chinese companies—“the Facebook of China,” “the Twitter of China”—but in the last few years, in many cases these labels stopped making sense. The Chinese internet had morphed into an alternate universe.”

• * Chinese urbanites began paying for real-world purchases with bar codes on their phones, part of a mobile payments revolution unseen anywhere else. Armies of food deliverymen and on-demand masseuses riding electric scooters clogged the streets of Chinese cities. They represented a tidal wave of online-to-offline (O2O) startups that brought the convenience of e-commerce to bear on real-world services like restaurant food or manicures. Soon after that came the millions of brightly colored shared bikes that users could pick up or lock up anywhere just by scanning a bar code with their phones.

• Tying all these services together was the rise of China’s super-app, WeChat, a kind of digital Swiss Army knife for modern life. WeChat users began sending text and voice messages to friends, paying for groceries, booking doctors’ appointments, filing taxes, unlocking shared bikes, and buying plane tickets, all without ever leaving the app. WeChat became the universal social app, one in which different types of group chats—formed with coworkers and friends or around interests—were used to negotiate business deals, organize birthday parties, or discuss modern art. It brought together a grab-bag of essential functions that are scattered across a dozen apps in the United States and elsewhere.

• * “As a result, American companies, citizens, and politicians have forgotten what it feels like to be on the receiving end of these exchanges, a process that often feels akin to “technological colonization.” China does not intend to use its advantage in the AI era as a platform for such colonization, but AI-induced disruptions to the political and economic order will lead to a major shift in how all countries experience the phenomenon of digital globalization.”

• * Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.”

• * Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations. 

• * In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

• * Jarring as that mercenary attitude is to many Americans, the Chinese approach has deep historical and cultural roots. Rote memorization formed the core of Chinese education for millennia. 

• * “For years, the copycat products that emerged from China’s cultural stew were widely mocked by the Silicon Valley elite. They were derided as cheap knockoffs, embarrassments to their creators and unworthy of the attention of true innovators. But those outsiders missed what was brewing beneath the surface. The most valuable product to come out of China’s copycat era wasn’t a product at all: it was the entrepreneurs themselves.”

• * Combine these three currents—a cultural acceptance of copying, a scarcity mentality, and the willingness to dive into any promising new industry—and you have the psychological foundations of China’s internet ecosystem.

• * “That first act of copying didn’t turn into an anti-innovation mentality that its creator could never shake. It was a necessary steppingstone on the way to more original and locally tailored technology products.”

• * “Early Chinese tech entrepreneurs looking for mentors or model companies within their own country simply couldn’t find them. So instead they looked abroad and copied them as best they could.”

• * “It was a crude process to be sure, and sometimes an embarrassing one. But it taught these copycats the basics of user interface design, website architecture, and back-end software development.”

• * “They learned what worked and what didn’t with Chinese users. They began to iterate, improve, and localize the product to better serve their customers.”

• * “That strikingly fundamental difference in user attitudes should have led to a number of product modifications for Chinese users. On Google’s global search platform, when users clicked on a search result’s link, it would navigate them away from the search results page. That meant we were forcing Chinese “shoppers” to pick one item for purchase and then, in effect, kicking them out of the mall. Baidu, by contrast, opened a new browser window for the user for each link clicked. That let users try on various search results without having to “leave the mall.””

• * I’ve found Silicon Valley’s approach to China to be a far more important reason for their failure. American companies treat China like just any other market to check off their global list. They don’t invest the resources, have the patience, or give their Chinese teams the flexibility needed to compete with China’s world-class entrepreneurs. They see the primary job in China as marketing their existing products to Chinese users. In reality, they need to put in real work tailoring their products for Chinese users or building new products from the ground up to meet market demands. Resistance to localization slows down product iteration and makes local teams feel like cogs in a clunky machine.

• * Weibo, a micro-blogging platform initially inspired by Twitter, was far faster to expand multimedia functionality and is now worth more than the American company. Didi, the ride-hailing company that duked it out with Uber, dramatically expanded its product offerings and gives more rides each day in China than Uber does across the entire world. Toutiao, a Chinese news platform often likened to BuzzFeed, uses advanced machine-learning algorithms to tailor its content for each user, boosting its valuation many multiples above the American website. 

• * Underneath this transformation lay several key building blocks: mobile-first internet users, WeChat’s role as the national super-app, and mobile payments that transformed every smartphone into a digital wallet. Once those pieces were in place, Chinese startups set off an explosion of indigenous innovation. They pioneered online-to-offline services that stitched the internet deep into the fabric of the Chinese economy. They turned Chinese cities into the first cashless environments since the days of the barter economy. And they revolutionized urban transportation with intelligent bike-sharing applications that created the world’s largest internet-of-things network.

• * They aspire to the mythology satirized in the HBO series Silicon Valley, that of a skeleton crew of hackers building a billion-dollar business without ever leaving their San Francisco loft. Chinese companies don’t have this kind of luxury. Surrounded by competitors ready to reverse-engineer their digital products, they must use their scale, spending, and efficiency at the grunt work as a differentiating factor. They burn cash like crazy and rely on armies of low-wage delivery workers to make their business models work. 

• * Silicon Valley juggernauts are amassing data from your activity on their platforms, but that data concentrates heavily in your online behavior, such as searches made, photos uploaded, YouTube videos watched, and posts “liked.” Chinese companies are instead gathering data from the real world: the what, when, and where of physical purchases, meals, makeovers, and transportation. Deep learning can only optimize what it can “see” by way of data, and China’s physically grounded technology ecosystem gives these algorithms many more eyes into the content of our daily lives. As AI begins to “electrify” new industries, China’s embrace of the messy details of the real world will give it an edge on Silicon Valley.

• * By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments.

• * Given the extremely low barriers to entry, those payment systems soon trickled down into China’s vast informal economy. Migrant workers selling street food simply let customers scan and send over payments while the owner fried the noodles. It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. 

• * “Analysts dubbed the explosion of real-world internet services that blossomed across Chinese cities the “O2O Revolution,” short for “online-to-offline.” The terminology can be confusing but the concept is simple: turn online actions into offline services.” -- The O2O revolution was about bringing that same e-commerce convenience to the purchase of real-world services, things that can’t be put in a cardboard box and shipped across country, like hot food, a ride to the bar, or a new haircut. -- Silicon Valley gave birth to one of the first transformational O2O models: ride-sharing. -- After a day spent commuting on crammed subways and navigating eight-lane intersections, many middle-class Chinese just want to be spared another trip outdoors to get a meal or run an errand. Lucky for them, these cities are also home to large pools of migrant laborers who would gladly bring that service to their door for a small fee. It’s an environment built for O2O. 

• * From there the O2O models became even more creative. Some hair stylists and manicurists gave up their storefronts entirely, exclusively booking through apps and making house calls. 

• * “Chinese parents could hire van drivers to pick up their children from school, confirming their ID and arrival home through apps. Those who didn’t want to have children could use another app for around-the-clock condom delivery.”

• * “WeChat Wallet linked up with top O2O startups so that WeChat users could hail a taxi, order a meal, book a hotel, manage a phone bill, and buy a flight to the United States, all without ever leaving the app.”

• * “In effect, WeChat has taken on the functionality of Facebook, iMessage, Uber, Expedia, eVite, Instagram, Skype, PayPal, Grubhub, Amazon, LimeBike, WebMD, and many more. It isn’t a perfect substitute for any one of those apps, but it can perform most of the core functions of each, with frictionless mobile payments already built in.”

• * !!To Chinese startups, the deeper they get into the nitty-gritty—and often very expensive—details, the harder it will be for a copycat competitor to mimic the business model and undercut them on price. Going heavy means building walls around your business, insulating yourself from the economic bloodshed of China’s gladiator wars. These companies win both by outsmarting their opponents and by outworking, outhustling, and outspending them on the street.

• * “That willingness to go heavy—to spend the money, manage the workforce, do the legwork, and build economies of scale—has reshaped the relationship between the digital and real-world economies. China’s internet is penetrating far deeper into the economic lives of ordinary people, and it is affecting both consumption trends and labor markets. In a 2016 study by McKinsey and Company, 65 percent of Chinese O2O users said that the apps led them to spend more money on dining. In the categories of travel and transportation, 77 percent and 42 percent of users, respectively, reported increasing their spending.”

• * By enrolling the vendors, processing the orders, delivering the food, and taking in the payments, China’s O2O champions began amassing a wealth of real-world data on the consumption patterns and personal habits of their users. Going heavy gave these companies a data edge over their Silicon Valley peers, but it was mobile payments that would extend their reach even further into the real world and turn that data edge into a commanding lead.

• * Subsidizing both the client sides (worker and the client side payer) -- A large portion of cars on the leading Chinese platforms were traditional taxis driven by older men—people who weren’t in a rush to give up good old cash. So Tencent offered subsidies to both the rider and the driver if they used WeChat Wallet to pay. The rider paid less and the driver received more, with Tencent making up the difference for both sides.

  • * cheap pay to use bikes - those sensors generate twenty terabytes of data per day and feed it all back into Mobike’s cloud servers.

• “Chinese students of AI are no longer straining in the dark to read outdated textbooks. They’re taking advantage of AI’s open research culture to absorb knowledge straight from the source and in real time. That means dissecting the latest online academic publications, debating the approaches of top AI scientists in WeChat groups, and streaming their lectures on smartphones.”

• government Funding: Behind these efforts lies a core difference in American and Chinese political culture: while America’s combative political system aggressively punishes missteps or waste in funding technological upgrades, China’s techno-utilitarian approach rewards proactive investment and adoption. Neither system can claim objective moral superiority, and the United States’ long track record of both personal freedom and technological achievement is unparalleled in the modern era.

  • It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, one that runs on a peculiar alchemy of digital data, entrepreneurial grit, hard-earned expertise, and political will. To see where the two AI superpowers stand, we must first understand the source of that expertise.

• * One study by Sinovation Ventures examined citations in the top one hundred AI journals and conferences from 2006 to 2015; it found that the percentage of papers by authors with Chinese names nearly doubled from 23.2 percent to 42.8 percent during that time. That total includes some authors with Chinese names who work abroad—for example, Chinese American researchers who haven’t adopted an anglicized name. But a survey of the authors’ research institutions found the great majority of them to be working in China.

• * When Obama made plans for AI, there was no splash in the news pond, when China made similar announcements in 2018, it was a roaring success. This shows signs of political difference.

• * Between 2017 and 2020, the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone plans to put at least 3 billion RMB (around $450 million) into AI development. That money will go toward a dizzying array of AI subsidies and perks, including investments of up to 15 million RMB in local companies, grants of 1 million RMB per company to attract talent, rebates on research expenses of up to 5 million RMB, creation of an AI training institute, government contracts for facial recognition and autonomous robot technology, simplified procedures for registering a company, seed funding and office space for military veterans, free company shuttles, coveted spots at local schools for the children of company executives, and special apartments for employees of AI startups. And that is all in just one city.

  • * Contrast that with the political firestorm following big bets gone bad in the United States. After the 2008 financial crisis, President Obama’s stimulus program included plans for government loan guarantees on promising renewable energy projects. It was a program designed to stimulate a stagnant economy but also to facilitate a broader economic and environmental shift toward green energy.

  • * “For the past thirty years, Chinese leaders have practiced a kind of techno-utilitarianism, leveraging technological upgrades to maximize broader social good while accepting that there will be downsides for certain individuals or industries.”

  • * Difference between the self driving car ethical question - West: What should a self-driving car “optimize for” in situations where it is forced to choose which car to crash into? How should an autonomous vehicle’s algorithm weigh the life of its owner? Should your self-driving car sacrifice your own life to save the lives of three other people?|| China: Chinese political culture doesn’t carry the American expectation of reaching a moral consensus on each of the above questions. Promotion of a broader social good—the long-term payoff in lives saved—is a good enough reason to begin implementation, with outlier cases and legal intricacies to be dealt with in due time.

• * internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. Each of these waves harnesses AI’s power in a different way. 1, The first two waves—internet AI and business AI—They are tightening internet companies’ grip on our attention, replacing paralegals with algorithms, trading stocks, and diagnosing illnesses. Perception AI is now digitizing our physical world, learning to recognize our faces, understand our requests, and “see” the world around us. This wave promises to revolutionize how we experience and interact with our world, blurring the lines between the digital and physical worlds. Autonomous AI will come last but will have the deepest impact on our lives. As self-driving cars take to the streets, autonomous drones take to the skies, and intelligent robots take over factories, they will transform everything from organic farming to highway driving and fast food.

• ** Smart Finance’s deep-learning algorithms don’t just look to the obvious metrics, like how much money is in your WeChat Wallet. Instead, it derives predictive power from data points that would seem irrelevant to a human loan officer. For instance, it considers the speed at which you typed in your date of birth, how much battery power is left on your phone, and thousands of other parameters.

• * “OMO: online-merge-offline. OMO is the next step in an evolution that already took us from pure e-commerce deliveries to O2O (online-to-offline) services. Each of those steps has built new bridges between the online world and our physical one, but OMO constitutes the full integration of the two. It brings the convenience of the online world offline and the rich sensory reality of the offline world online. Over the coming years, perception AI will turn shopping malls, grocery stores, city streets, and our homes into OMO environments.”

• * The Confucian virtues is why Chinese is okay with follow culture: That type of data collection may rub many Americans the wrong way. They don’t want Big Brother or corporate America to know too much about what they’re up to. But people in China are more accepting of having their faces, voices, and shopping choices captured and digitized. This is another example of the broader Chinese willingness to trade some degree of privacy for convenience. That surveillance filters up from individual users to entire urban environments. 

• Shenzeng: * entire supply chain available for prototyping is in Shenzhen: At the city’s dizzying electronics markets, they can choose from thousands of different variations of circuit boards, sensors, microphones, and miniature cameras. Once a prototype is assembled, the builders can go door to door at hundreds of factories to find one capable of producing their product in small batches or at large scale. That geographic density of parts suppliers and product manufacturers accelerates the innovation process. Hardware entrepreneurs say that a week spent working in Shenzhen is equivalent to a month in the United States.

• * Xiaomi's smart appliance influence: It’s a constellation of price, diversity, and capability that has created the world’s largest network of intelligent home devices: 85 million by the end of 2017, far ahead of any comparable U.S. networks. 

• * the AI behind it. : Key to that incremental deployment will be the construction of new infrastructure specifically made to accommodate autonomous vehicles. In the United States, in contrast, we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars

• * At this point, we just don’t yet know where that bottleneck will be, and fourth-wave AI remains anyone’s game. While today the United States enjoys a commanding lead (90–10), in five years’ time I give the United States and China even odds of leading the world in self-driving cars, with China having the edge in hardware-intensive applications such as autonomous drones. In the table below, I summarize my assessment of U.S. and Chinese capabilities across all four waves of AI, both in the present day and with my best estimate for how that balance will have evolved five years in the future.

Reference Links:

• Wire Article: AI's real impact? Freeing us from the tyranny of repetitive tasks

• Youtube Interview: 'AI Superpowers': A Conversation With Kai-Fu Lee

• Kai-Fu Lee talk at Oxford University

• arXiv.org Free publication papers archive that was referenced.

• CGP Grey’s videos

  • On Self Driving Cars

  • Visual video on Machine Learning

  • AI taking over jobs.

Reid - Such a Fun Age

Author: Kiley Reid

Review:

This book was a blast to read through, with nontraditional modes of finishing, I wouldn't go further than that to avoid spoilers. What the main character goes through with her experience as a black woman, clashing that with the intersection of being poor, with a college education, was cringy to listen to. The writing is done terrifically well, with cringes that most of us minorities feel when we felt as though the world has been treating us like a second rate citizen. This is the truth, for Americans can be very racist, for most times the liberal white Americans are the worst when they know not what they are. Subconsciously racist towards those they think they are helping. And this is a conversation that isn't easy to make, it's a conversation that should have been talked about for the last three hundred years, yet it's always postponed. Over and over again, the concept of a race for those in power is just not there, and it's not our job to teach them.

It is not the minorities' job to teach what they ought to act, how they should work, no. It's their own job to join communities, it's their own job to join clubs, it's their own job to join or make or feel vulnerable. It's not our job as minorities, and this book shows that really well. For many, like this book presents in the best of ways, sometimes, the best answer is to move on.

There were many intersectional topics, as I've stated, from race to sex, sex and class, and lastly, race and class. All of those topics were also flushed out in a way that didn't feel unnatural. That's, Kiley shows us most rather than directly telling us everything. This made the world felt like a journey to walk with, with references to social media and the current gossips.

Lastly, the dialogues in here are real, they are real people with struggles, conflicts, souls. Kiley Reid did a fantastic job, and I look forward to more of her proclamation in the future.

Reading Stats:

• 1/8/20 - 1/9/20

• Reading Level: For minorities - Sophomore High School, or Sophomore College Level if you’ve never met a minority before.

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2019

Quotes and Notes:

• * The main character was questioned by the security guard because she was nannying a child, and she's black.... so you know, white bs -- “He paused and ran his tongue over his front teeth. “Okay, that guy was a dick to you. Don’t you wanna get him fired?” Emira laughed and said, “For what?” She shifted in her heels and put her phone back in her purse. “So he can go to another grocery store and get some other nine-dollar-an-hour bullshit job? Please. I’m not tryna have people Google my name and see me lit, with a baby that isn’t mine, at a fucking grocery store in Washington Square.””

• * Emira didn’t mind reading or writing papers, but this was also mostly the problem. Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.

• * But Emira wiped the toddler’s chin and said, “That’s a really good question. We should ask your mom.” She honestly meant it. Emira wished that someone would tell her what she liked doing best. The number of things she could ask her own mother were shrinking at an alarming rate.

• * Emira was once followed by sales associates in Brooks Brothers while she shopped for a Father’s Day gift (her mother had said, “They ain’t got nothin’ better to do?”). And once, after a bikini wax was completed, Emira was told that because she had “ethnic texture,” the total came to forty dollars instead of the advertised thirty-five (to this, Emira’s mother had responded, “Back up, you got what waxed?”).

• * But more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job. This wouldn’t have happened if you had a real fucking job, Emira told herself on the train ride home, her legs and arms crossed on top of each other. You wouldn’t leave a party to babysit. You’d have your own health insurance. You wouldn’t be paid in cash. You’d be a real fucking person.

• * They had nothing interesting to say, their eyes had dead, creepy stares, and they were modest in a way that seemed weirdly rehearsed (Emira often watched Briar approach other toddlers on swings and slides, and they’d turn away from her, saying, “No, I’m shy”). Other children were easy audiences who loved receiving stickers and hand stamps, whereas Briar was always at the edge of a tiny existential crisis.

• * great writing of sex and consent!! “Uh-huh.” Emira laughed once as she moved forward to undo his belt buckle. “You’re like . . . really smart.” --“Okay, miss.” Kelley laughed. “I’m just making sure.”--In between strokes and kisses, Kelley pulled out a condom and placed it on the couch cushion to his left. It sat there like a peace offering or a panic button; a plastic symbol of consent. At one point, he lifted her hips and told her, “Sit up for me,” before he pressed her pelvic bone to his mouth. Emira said what she recognized as a very white expression, “Oh, you don’t have to . . .” By this she meant, I’d rather not return the favor when you’re done. Kelley seemed to understand her appeal. He laughed and said, “I know,” before he took her in his mouth again. He stopped once more to say, “Unless you’re not cool with it,” to which Emira quickly replied, “No, I am.” She balanced her hands and one knee on the back of the couch. For the second time that night she thought, You know what? Fuck it, and she took hold of the back of his head.-- On her way back down Emira reached for the condom. That she stayed on top seemed implicit and implied.

• * amazing writing of platonic relationship: Alix had developed feelings toward Emira that weren’t completely unlike a crush. She became excited to hear Emira’s key in the door, she felt disappointed when it was time for her to leave, and when Emira laughed or spoke without being prompted, Alix felt like she had done something right. The times when this happened were few and far between, which was why Alix kept peeking at her sitter’s cell phone. She would have just checked Emira’s social media channels instead, but from what she’d gathered from searching, Emira didn’t have any.

• * which Alix administered with one hand. “Are you a wine person or no?”

  “I mean, I like it,” Emira said. She set her glass at the other end of the table, then took the books from underneath her arm and set those down too. “But I’m used to drinking like . . . boxed wine, so yeah, I’m no connoisseur.” — There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like “Dope Bitch” and “Y’all Already Know,” and then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed. Alix completely knew these things, but only when she reminded herself to stop thinking them in the first place.

• * !!“I don’t care so much. Okay, listen . . .” Kelley sipped the top layer of his beer and bent his head lower to speak to her. “Emira . . . the fact that Alex sent you to a grocery store with her kid at eleven p.m. makes a lot more sense now. You’re not the first black woman Alex has hired to work for her family, and you probably won’t be the last.” -- "Okay . . . ?” Emira sat down. She didn’t mean to sound flippant, but she doubted that Kelley could really tell her anything she didn’t already know. Emira had met several “Mrs. Chamberlains” before. They were all rich and overly nice and particularly lovely to the people who served them. Emira knew that Mrs. Chamberlain wanted a friendship, but she also knew that Mrs. Chamberlain would never display the same efforts of kindness with her friends as she did with Emira: “accidentally” ordering two salads and offering one to Emira, or sending her home with a bag filled with frozen dinners and soups. It wasn’t that Emira didn’t understand the racially charged history that Kelley was alluding to, but she couldn’t help but think that if she weren’t working for this Mrs. Chamberlain, she’d probably be working for another one.

• * “Okay, first of all?” Emira turned to him. She threw her coat over her arm and held it close. “You don’t get to tell me where I should and shouldn’t work. You literally have a cafeteria in your office. You wear T-shirts to work. And you have a doorman, Kelley, okay? So you can one thousand percent go fuck yourself. The fact that you think you’re better than A-leeks or Alex or whatever is a joke. You will never have to even consider working somewhere that requires a uniform, so you can chill the fuck out about how I choose to make my living. And second of all? You were so fucking rude in there! At a Thanksgiving dinner!”

• * Emira and Kelley talked about race very little because it always seemed like they were doing it already. When she really considered a life with him, a real life, a joint-bank-account-emergency-contact-both-names-on-the-lease life, Emira almost wanted to roll her eyes and ask, Are we really gonna do this? How are you gonna tell your parents? If I’d walked in here when they were still on the screen, how would you have introduced me? Are you gonna take our son to get his hair done? Who’s gonna teach him that it doesn’t matter what his friends do, that he can’t stand too close to white women when he’s on the train or in an elevator? That he should slowly and noticeably put his keys on the roof as soon as he gets pulled over? Or that there are times our daughter should stand up for herself, and times to pretend it was a joke that she didn’t quite catch. Or that when white people compliment her (“She’s so professional. She’s always on time”), it doesn’t always feel good, because sometimes people are gonna be surprised by the fact that she showed up, rather than the fact that she had something to say when she did.

• * Back in high school, Kelley wanted status, and at Alix’s expense, that’s what he’d got. But what did Kelley think he was getting from Emira? How many times had he proudly told the story of how they met? Acting performatively flustered and suggesting that he shouldn’t have? As she sat on the ledge of her bathtub, Alix’s iPad became so warm that it started to burn her legs.

• * On her own and at her best, Briar was odd and charming, filled with intelligence and humor. But there was something about the actual work, the practice of caring for a small unstructured person, that left Emira feeling smart and in control. There was the gratifying reflex of being good at your job, and even better was the delightful good fortune of having a job you wanted to be good at. Without Briar, there were all these markers of time that would come to mean nothing. Was Emira just supposed to exist on her own at six forty-five? Knowing that somewhere else it was Briar’s bathtime? One day, when Emira would say good-bye to Briar, she’d also leave the joy of having somewhere to be, the satisfaction of understanding the rules, the comfort of knowing what’s coming next, and the privilege of finding a home within yourself.

Reference Links:

• Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people

• It's Not Our Job: An Open Letter To Well-Meaning White People Who Might Be Racist But Aren't Sure

• 12 Books to Keep Your Feminism IntersectionalarXiv.org Free publication papers archive that was referenced.

• Movie Recommendations:

  • The Hate U Give

Stoker - Dracula

Author: Bram Stoker

Review:

I rarely read old books, and for me, anything that is before the year of my birth is old. I loathed reading them, not due to their content, but rather, the pseudo-prestige that comes with them. Another term for old books are the classics, they're classics due to the cultural zeitgeist of their time, and that has been turned into a form of save point for us to look into.

This, in turn, points to a significant problem that other people of color and I have noticed about the classics, they're a representation of the white culture that they came out of. As a Chinese reader, with an always critical race, gender, sexuality, and linguistic lens that is continuously on, it's counter-intuitive for me to read without those lenses on. It's counter-intuitive not only to the act of storytelling but rather, the ways in which cultural thoughts are being diverted. That being said, here is how I felt about this book.

Dracula was recommended to me after the first two episodes of Dracula on Netflix. The first two episodes of the show were great and so great that I looked into Dracula's books and origins. I've always known about the premise about this vampiric influence of our culture, and yet, I've never actually read the original book, nor do I know about much content within the primary text. But once I started the book, I've noticed that the adaption (of the first two episodes) was very well done, and I began to actually enjoy the read.

The book takes place similar to the style of the show, the narration was through a set of letters from each character to the other, or by their diary entree. Somehow they were able to recall everything that they have seen or saw, hear or spoken, and moved. Aside from the obvious sexist remarks of the book, with every other paragraph that talks about traditional roles of masculinity, and the subjugated women's body, the book shows a high level of culture snapshot in the Victorian England times. As a book that studies the primary culture at that time, each of the letters/chapters in this book is excellent. Excellent not in the sense of justice and morality, but rather in the sense of teaching us how screwed up those periods were when one is not a privileged white male of a proper Christian upbringing.

Most importantly is the teachings of what it means to be Dracula and the origins of Dracula mythos in our time today. The raise of vampires that we see in white media today are from this book, even though vampires have been throughout many cultures across the world. Overall, this book would be recommended for someone who wishes to learn about Victorian England and for those who don't have issues with the incredibly sexist and racist supra-tones within this text.

Reading Stats:

• 1/5/20 - 1/10/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 1897

Quotes and Notes:

• * ‘Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!’ He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice – more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said: ‘Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely. 

• * “His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.”

• * These friends’ – and he laid his hand on some of the books – ‘have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak.’

• * “That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not – and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say, “Ha, ha! a stranger!” I have been so long master that I would be master still – or at least that none other should be master of me.”

• * “Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, ‘Good morning.’ I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed;

• * When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.”

• * This is a terrible thought; for if so, what does it mean that he could control the wolves, as he did, by only holding up his hand in silence? How was it that all the people at Bistritz and on the coach had some terrible fear for me? What meant the giving of the crucifix, of the garlic, of the wild rose, of the mountain ash? 

• * We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa, too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come.

• * What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?’ He held up his arms. ‘Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; 

• * Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.’

• * ‘But,’ said he, ‘I could be at liberty to direct myself. Is it not so?’ 

• * ‘Of course,’ I replied; ‘and such is often done by men of business, who do not like the whole of their affairs to be known by any one person.’ -- ‘Good!’ he said,

• * Let me advise you, my dear young friend – nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. 

• * “I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.”

• * for now, feeling as though my own brain was unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.

• * Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

• * I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.

• * ‘How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! 

• * Dracula's room: The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one corner – gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. 

• * Count! He was either dead or asleep, I could not say which – for the eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death – and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor, and the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart. 

• * ‘ “Little girl, I hold your hand, and you’ve kissed me, and if these things don’t make us friends nothing ever will. Thank you for your sweet honesty to me, and good-bye.” He wrung my hand, and taking up his hat, went straight out of the room without looking back, without a tear or a quiver or a pause; and I am crying like a baby. Oh, why must a man like that be made unhappy when there are lots of girls about who would worship the very ground he trod on? I know I would if I were free – only I don’t want to be free. My dear, this quite upset me, and I feel I cannot write of happiness just at once, after telling you of it; and I don’t wish to tell of the number three till it can all be happy. – Ever your loving

• * He disgusted me much while with him, for when a horrid blowfly, bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room, he caught it, held it exultingly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and, before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and ate it. I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it was very good and very wholesome; that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him. 

• * My homocidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way.

• * “But I am captain, and I must not leave my ship. But I shall baffle this fiend or monster, for I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with them I shall tie that which He – It! – dare not touch; and then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain. I am growing weaker, and the night is coming on. If He can look me in the face again, I may not have time to act.”

• * Some of the ‘New Woman’ writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that. 

• * a few days later: “I looked at her throat just now as she lay asleep, and the tiny wounds seem not to have healed. They are still open, and, if anything, larger, than before, and the edges of them are faintly white. They are like little white dots with red centres. Unless they heal within a day or two, I shall insist on the doctor seeing about them.”

• * ‘I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?

• * He was lying on his belly on the floor licking up, like a dog, the blood which had fallen from my wounded wrist. He was easily secured, and, to my surprise, went with the attendants quite placidly, simply repeating over and over again: ‘The blood is the life! the blood is the life!’

• * This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements: the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat – the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown. How then are we to begin our strife to destroy him? How shall we find his where; and having found it, how can we destroy? My friends, this is much; it is a terrible task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder. 

Wiener - Uncanny Valley

Author: Anna Wiener

Review:

What does it mean to work in Silicon Valley post-2010? What does it mean to work in a world where the evolution of all aspects of life had been privileged, accelerated, and even "Optimized"? I disliked the term optimized, like Anna's observations too, I used to love it (and to an extent today, I still use that term in my life, as I manage different To-Do list, and optimizing strategies of delegation and GTD). I used to love the world of silicon valley and their holistic everything. How going down the streets of SF, I saw a techno-utopia rather than dystopia. I read the last chapter of this book sitting in the heated room of my company, on the massage chairs that my bosses put in for funsies. I love working in my work environment. I like a lot of things I do as a data analyst that covers the flow of traffic and how to find points of contention in our data-driven company. But the discontent and my relationship to the technopolitical world that we live in right now means that I have to be critical of everything that I do, everything that I write, many aspects of my life since most of them are on the internet.

This book isn't a revolution, or in theory, it's not a revolution in memoir, but it is a must-read for those who are coming into the adolescent world of the current technopoly. It's a tremendous holistic insight into the nature of technological change for the iGeneration (born post 1998ish), and Millenials, and even those who inspire or aspire into viral fame. It's a sad, yet revelatory insight into what the postmodern thinkers have projected, but actualized, and what how that effects us today. What I see in the online space is different than the real world, and yet I don't know what's real or not anymore. I no longer understand the power of Twitter trends as truth, compared to the racist incident that I had a few weeks before reading this book. When I said, wait, this guy was racist to me (saying that I looked like Randall Park), and yet, on the online world, this would never happen to me. I know where to go online, and however, in the physical meat spaced world, I had no idea most of the time.

A great read and a must-read for those growing up that aspire into silicon valley. An excellent read for me, because with all due respect, as a male, I can traverse into those tech worlds.

Reading Stats:

• 1/20/20 - 1/22/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2020

Quotes and Notes:

• Pivoting meant they were worried about runway. Pivoting meant they were a cautionary tale. Only the two cofounders were left, tucked off to the side. Everyone else had been let go once funding ran out.
• The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
• I began to wonder why it was, exactly, that they had hired me. I had been operating under the vain premise that it was because I knew something about books: I could be a bridge between the old and new guards. I had fancied myself a translator; I had fancied myself essential. Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in promoting women in tech—if not up the ranks, then at least in corporate marketing materials—I would allow myself to consider that perhaps I was more important to the aesthetic than critical to the business.
• “We host full-time,” he said. “I guess you could say we work for a startup, too.” -- Could I? He and his wife had both quit their day jobs, in the nonprofit sector, to provide the trappings of an authentic urban experience—different enough to be interesting, -- They slept in the basement. They weren’t employees. They were part of the product.
• When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition
• I was selling out. In reality, I was not paying attention: those who understood our cultural moment saw that selling out—corporate positions, partnerships, sponsors—would become our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.
• Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.
• Anything an app or website’s users did—tap a button, -- stored, aggregated, and analyzed in those beautiful dashboards. Whenever I explained it to friends, I sounded like a podcast ad.
• Data could be segmented by anything an app collected—age, gender, political affiliation, hair color, dietary restrictions, body weight, income bracket, favorite movies, education, kinks, proclivities—plus some IP-based defaults, like country, city, cell phone carrier, device type, and a unique device identification code.
• The culture these inhabitants sought and fostered was lifestyle. They engaged with their new home by rating it. Crowdsourced reviewing apps provided opportunities to assign anything a grade: dim sum, playgrounds, hiking trails. Founders went out to eat and confirmed that the food tasted exactly how other reviewers promised it would; they posted redundant photographs of plated appetizers and meticulous restaurant-scapes. They pursued authenticity without realizing that the most authentic thing about the city was, at this moment in time, them.
• Even so, the enemy of a successful startup was complacency. To combat this, the CEO liked to instill fear. He was not a formidable physical presence—he had gelled, spiky hair; he was slight; he often wore a green jacket indoors, presumably to fight the chill—but he could scare the hell out of us. He spoke in military terms. “We are at war,” he would say, standing in front of us with his arms crossed and his jaw tensed. Across the world, Syria and Iraq and Israel raged. We were at war with competitors, for market share. We would look down at our bottles of kombucha or orange juice and nod along gravely.
• there was always an opportunity to accelerate straight into management, like skipping a grade, skipping three. We dressed however we wanted. We were forgiven our quirks. As long as we were productive, we could be ourselves. Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us. Small failures and major successes were equally reflective of our personal inadequacies or individual brilliance. Momentum was intoxicating, as was the feeling that we were all indispensable.
• Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization—or maybe nihilism, but fun. It made me feel like I had just railed cocaine, except happy. It made me feel like I was going somewhere.
• He asked us to write down the names of the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged. --I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I missed them, how bad I’d been at returning phone calls and emails. I wondered how I’d stopped making time for the things and people I held dear. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. “Okay,” the solutions manager said. “Now tell me, why don’t they work here?”
• Everyone was sorting out a way to live. Some of the women instituted systems of gender reparations with their male partners. Staunch atheists bought tarot decks and fretted over how best to infuse them with powerful energy; they discussed rising signs and compared astrological birth charts. They went to outposts in Mendocino to supervise each other through sustained, high-dose LSD trips, intended to reveal their inner children to their adult selves.
• Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool, impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work.
• Much as we tried, we were not the CEO’s friends. We were his subordinates. He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings; dangled responsibility and prestige, only to retract them inexplicably. He was not above giving employees the silent treatment. He micromanaged, was vindictive, made us feel inessential and inadequate. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.
• I felt very protective of the CEO—or, at least, of my idea of him. For a long time, I would harbor a free-floating sympathy for people I imagined hadn’t had the opportunity to experience their youth the way I had. He never had space to fuck up. He’d been under pressure—and a certain degree of surveillance—from venture capitalists and journalists and industry peers since he was twenty. At the age when I was getting drunk with friends on bottles of three-dollar merlot and stumbling into concerts, splitting clove cigarettes and going to slam-poetry open mics, he was worrying about headcount, reading up on unit economics. I was exploring my sexuality; he was comparing health insurance providers and running security audits. Now, at twenty-five, he was responsible for other adults’ livelihoods. Some of my coworkers had families, even if they tried not to talk too much about their children in the office. Surely, he felt that weight.
• Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.
• I wanted to avoid, at all costs, being the feminist killjoy. -- I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter’s stream of strange and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if I were a piece of furniture. A chair without a brain. A table with shapely legs. -- Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace—but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air.
• The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: value prop, first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization. Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail. It was garbage language to my ears, but customers loved him. I couldn’t believe that it worked.
• I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: -- to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory vacation, mandatory fun. Though it was a reward, a treat, the company trip was scheduled for a three-day holiday weekend, what others in the workforce might have considered personal time.
• Despite the family-friendliness, however, we lacked the natural ease of blood relatives choosing to vacation together. The housing groups had been preassigned, without employee consultation. I liked some of my coworkers better than others, but was largely indifferent to the sleeping arrangements. There was one person I hoped not to bunk with
• The CEO came in and announced that he was flipping the script: to allow the support team some leisure time, the engineers were to do our job instead. We’d spent the morning on the road and the day on the mountain, and the queue of customer tickets stretched out for hours. Already, most of us were drinking. Some had been drinking all afternoon. Though it wasn’t clear if we were working as we partied or partying as we worked, the scene in the condo was one of good-natured frustration as the engineers struggled to explain their own product to our users.
• didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to correct him. It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia, my sense of security, that I was not thinking about data collection as one of the moral quandaries of our time. For all the industry’s talk about scale, and changing the world, I was not thinking about the broader implications. I was hardly thinking about the world at all.
• As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.
• The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate.
• At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.
• Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle.
• human. The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.
• At the very least, I figured, employees would be talking about sexism openly. Sexism had to be part of the internal conversation. I’d read Foucault, a million years ago: discourse was probably still power. Surely, in the fallout, women would have a place at the table.
• This was peak venture capital, the other side of the ecosystem. The company appeared to be spending its hundred million dollars in venture funding the way any reasonable person would expect founders in their twenties to spend someone else’s money: lavishly. I didn’t need to compare the office to the austere, fluorescent-lit tundra of the analytics startup, or even to Ian’s cool, industrial-chic robotics warehouse, to appreciate the novelty of the work space. It was a fever dream, a fantasy, a playground. It was embarrassing, too giddy; more than a little much.
• For nearly two years, I had been seduced by the confidence of young men. They made it look so simple, knowing what you wanted and getting it. I had been ready to believe in them, eager to organize my life around their principles. -- an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.
• To ensure that all employees were on equal footing regardless of geography, the majority of business was conducted in text. -- All internal communications and projects were visible across the organization. Due to the nature of the product, every version of every file was preserved. The entire company could practically be reverse engineered.
• But also—it was complicated. “On the one hand, if we have a problem with sexism or sexual harassment, then that problem needs to be addressed,” a teammate told me. “On the other hand, this hurt everyone.” I asked what she meant, and she pushed her hair to the side. “I don’t know if the company will ever recover from this,” she said. “And, to put things bluntly, she wasn’t the only one with equity.”
• Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.
• I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted.
• “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.” -- Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.
• The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.
• Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to.
• It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.
• On any given night in America, exhausted parents and New Year’s–resolution cooks were unpacking identical cardboard boxes shipped by meal-prep startups, disposing of identical piles of plastic packaging, and sitting down to identical dishes. Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.
• My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick;
• Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.
• But using male pseudonyms wasn’t just useful for defusing or de-escalating tense exchanges. It was useful for even the most harmless support requests. I was most effective when I removed myself. Men, I saw, simply responded differently to men. My male pseudonyms had more authority than I did.
• I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity. I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise.

Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Review:

This book is gorgeous, it's a story of Barcelona during the early days of the 1900s. With such wonderous translations from the original Spanish, the translated copy provided me with a dreamy atmosphere as I journey through this book. The start, a retelling of the youth of the main character, recounted the lack of memory of his mother. The father then took the child to the cemetery of forgotten books, the start of this creative fiction. Reading this book was similar to me walking down Valencia a few years back. It was 11pm at night, where the roads of Valencia were twisting and turns in the classical parts of the city. Everything was real, the beauty of the Spanish night in the local streets, with the sounds, the commotion, and yet, the mysteries.

To produce magic without incantation, to conjure worlds without sigils, to mystify without gesture.

This book reads like a thriller novel, but dreamy, the hangover fog, and hazy. It's gorgeous for sure, but much like this review, a bit convoluted. It's broken into the perspective of a few characters and meant for those who love prose. This novel reminded me of my journey and has given me many new proses to study. Read this if you like the way Proust wrote, dreamy, dreamy, dreamy.

Reading Stats:

• 1/3/20 - 1/6/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Quotes and Notes:

• “HEARD A REGULAR CUSTOMER SAY that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”

• * “A SECRET’S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST be kept.”

• * “Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”

• * “Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them,” said my father. “Besides, it can’t be returned. Open it.”

• * The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,” he would remark. “And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there’s no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.”

• * Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”

• * “Let me see. This afternoon, about an hour or an hour and a half ago, a gorgeous young lady came by and asked for you. Your father and yours truly were on the premises, and I can assure you without a shadow of doubt that the girl was no apparition. I could even describe her smell. Lavender, only sweeter. Like a little sugar bun just out of the oven.”

• * The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.” I clapped solemnly at his discourse. “You’re a poet, Fermín.” “No, I’m with Ortega and I’m a pragmatist. Poetry lies, in its adorable wicked way, and what I say is truer than a slice of bread and tomato.

• * The man came up to the counter, his eyes darting around the shop, settling occasionally on mine. His appearance and manner seemed vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t say why. Something about him reminded me of one of those figures from old-fashioned playing cards or the sort used by fortune-tellers, a print straight from the pages of an incunabulum: his presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in Sunday best.

• * The caretaker gave me a guarded look. When he smiled, I noticed he was missing at least four upper teeth.

• * "I imagined Julián Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps in the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.”

• * “Not evil,” Fermín objected. “Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced that he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or, as in the case of Don Federico, his leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.”

• * "if you see my father, tell him I'm well. Lie to him."

• * Few years separated her from the hospice’s guests. “Listen, isn’t the apprentice a bit young for this sort of work?” she asked. “The truths of life know no age, Sister,” remarked Fermín. The nun nodded and smiled at me sweetly. There was no suspicion in that look, only sadness.“

Reference Links:

• Forgotten books: 17 years since ‘The Shadow of the Wind’

• Readers Guide by Penguin Random House Books

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto by Suketu Mehta

By: Suketu Mehta

Review:

Suketu Mehta, a first-generation immigrant's open manifesto on what it means to be an immigrant in this country and some other countries as well. This book backs up the personal narrative from those seeking to cross the borders with statistics about them, making his arguments much more convincing both on moral grounds and on statistical grounds. The first part of this book hit me hard. Many times it triggered me due to how close I was personally to these migrants journeys. Thankfully the second part of the book was a lot easier for me to digest due to the more global ideas on migrants. For example, he covers much about colonialism, war, global warming, and various factors that aren't covered by the Trump administration.

The last part of the book, however, gave some impressive stats on why immigration is a good thing for many first-world nations. Notability that the more immigrants there are (whether legal or illegal), the better the crime rates become (lower crime rates). There is an increase in social security benefits for the older generations since most of the new migrants are younger influx.

The hardest part that one ought to think about is the cost of the first immigrant communities. Because once the migrants are set in, the following generations provide financial, social, and educational improvements to the culture around it.

Overall, a fantastic statistically filled book on what the cost of immigration, whether legal or illegal is, that covers the full map of immigration issues.

Stats:

• Reading Date: 12/9/19 - 12/9/19

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• "It’s astonishing that the multiculturalism is lower Manhattan had some of the lowest crime rates since 1950s due to the amount of immigrants there."

• "Among the various themes I've learned from this book so far, on why migration exist in many third world countries is, global warming. Migrants can't eat because the lands are dry, where the only source of jobs is the militias. Also with 1.5 raise in global temperature, there's a 15 percent lost of corn in India."

Chen - Here and Now and Then

By: Mike Chen

Review:

Time traveling novels are tricky businesses. There are so many holes that you have to be aware of. For the many fantasy novels of time traveling I've read, one rule is apparent. It must obey within some relevant laws of physics, and it mustn't take the audience for ignorant fools who won't gauge at the idea of different types of loopholes. Thus, every time-traveling book must have those basics covered. This book has all of that done, whether it's in the foreground or background, the basics are covered.

This novel is overall okay, nothing grand, nothing terrible, basics covered. It's like watching a very typical summer flick about a time-traveling father who would span time and space to meet and save her daughter across time. An agency going to catch this agent of time, and like most normal summer flicks, it's done.

There's no more to this review. It's okay, very functional.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️