Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976 [1996])

This book was rather disappointing. I came to it with high hopes. Paul Lachelier, with whom I'm working on an article about the role of capitalism in some of the current crises (rampant anxiety among the young, declining academic engagement and achievement, perhaps political disillusionment) had told me that the book had been pivotal for his early intellectual development. I can see why that might have been so. Bell's central argument - that by the 1970s, the work ethic necessary for capitalism to function was incompatible with a culture of hedonism - does not seem implausible. (Had Bell not written the book in the 1970s, but rather in the 1980s, one wonders whether he would have been equally struck by this putative incompatibility. In his 1996 afterword, Bell unfortunately doesn't address this question.) For me, though, the book was neither fish nor fowl. It didn't offer a grand enough hypothesis to make it seem like a worthy successor to the works of Schumpeter, Weber, or Durkheim. Nor did it offer enough specific evidence to seem persuasive, as somebody like Robert Putnam might have. Bell spent a lot of time discussing high culture and culture in holistic terms, rather than ordinary people's behaviors. In the end, Bell argues that our culture needs a return to the sacred, which he seems to think must come from religion. I'm not sure if that's the case.

Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (2025)

This is a delightful (Doctorow is a whimsical novelist/technologist who rarely pulls his punches) and informative book about the enshittification of the internet and, thanks to digital's colonization of the rest of the world - think the "internet of things" - of almost everything, as well. In its bare bones, Doctorow traces how and why the internet went from being initially "good" - i.e. we gained connections to nearly everyone in the world and to vast stores of previously difficult to tap knowledge and, crucially, we were able to choose how we wanted to use it - to the current enshittocene (one of Doctorow's many variants on the basic pun). This enshittification follows from the tech giants' essentially rigging the internet, first against individuals, i.e. "consumers," then against companies/publishers, i.e. "producers." In more technical economic terms, the tech giants have captured "rents" - profits above and beyond what they could achieve in a truly competitive market. Doctorow helpfully explains how this came about. Four guardians of the good internet were undermined: 1) competition 2) regulation 3) "self-help" 4) tech workers. Let me briefly explain 2 through 4. 2) Doctorow devotes considerable attention to what he considers the highly deleterious doctrine of the "consumer welfare standard" regarding monopolies. Promoted by jurists and scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner from the 1970s, this doctrine claimed that monopolies per se were not bad. One had to assess whether they, in fact, artificially jacked up prices. Doctorow shows how giant tech lobbying in the naive '90s led to federal regulations such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (1998), which perversely gave tech "digital locks" on their intellectual property. Even after a comsumer had purchased software or an app, for example, it was now a felony crime to tamper with the app. This statute alone opened the gates to massive rent capture. Previously, I had only been aware of Section 230 (I believe) of the 1996 revised Communications Act, which declared tech giants to be merely "platforms," and hence not responsible for the content published on said platforms. The mistakes of the '90s were more numerous and far-reaching than I had realized. 3) By "self-help" Doctorow means the ability of consumers or users to modify digital software and products they have purchased. When this was possible - i.e. before the DCMA - it helped to keep the tech companies honest. Doctorow adds that this self-help didn't rely only, or even mainly, on individual users, who were, of course, at a technological disadvantage vis-a-vis the giants. Rather, what he calls "adversarial interoperability" - the ability of, and incentive for, other companies to offer software that was interoperable - prevented the giants from gaming the system. 4) Finally, until the last couple of years, tech workers were relatively few in number, and hence had real leverage over their employers. Many of them were also genuinely committed to the lofty ideals promulgated by the giants - "connect everyone in the world" (Facebook), "make the world's knowledge universally and freely available" (Google). This allowed them to say "no" to at least some of their bosses' schemes. That leverage has been lost in recent years, for complex reasons. Interestingly, in this book, at least, Doctorow doesn't address AI's impact on tech workers' leverage or on the other aspects of enshittification. To learn more about that, one will have to read his latest, The Reverse Centaur, which I plan to do in the coming weeks.

Omer Bartov, Israel: What Went Wrong? (2026)

This book, by an esteemed Israeli-born historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust who has lived and worked in the US for decades, is good, though its origins in separately published academic and journalistic pieces sometimes gives it a disjointed feel. The book makes a compelling case that Israel - founded and conceived by many of its citizens and supporters as redemption for the sins of the Holocaust - is now itself, tragically, engaged in a genocide. Bartov makes interesting observations of parallels between the Nazi German and now Israeli cases - for example, the perception of earlier vulnerability at the hands of an outsider helps to justify extreme measures. I learned that Israel subjected its Palestinian subjects to military rule from 1948 to 1966; only six months later, upon the Six-Day-War, the current, six-decades long military rule recommenced. I learned how Old Testament stories - of Samson and the Gates of Gaza, of Amalek and the Israelites' extirpation of its population - have come to serve modern Israel's sense of its righteousness and its enemies' perfidy. How does Bartov answer the question in his subtitle? He makes a great deal of Israel's failure to adopt a constitution. This, he suggests, might have prevented Israel's brazen disregard for Palestinian rights. However, I don't think Bartov nailed this argument, or really even pursued it very systematically. For one, he shows that the attempts to give Israel a constitution starting in the 1990s under the influential supreme court justice Aharon Barak didn't preclude the same justice and court from partially endorsing Israel's apartheid system. More broadly, Bartov treats the issue of Zionism itself somewhat gingerly. He simply doesn't have that much to say about the period before 1948. When he speculates about what a constitution might have meant for Israel, he almost daydreams that it might have led to Israel losing its official Jewish character and becoming a regular liberal democracy. If that's what he wished had happened, though, does he think Zionism itself was a mistake? He doesn't say.

Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought (2019)

This is a rich book. I had been tentatively familiar with its central idea, that the foundation of thought was movement and action. Somebody I'd read thirty years ago, possibly Victor Vanberg, had written that "Denken ist Hantieren im Sich Vorgestellten Raum" - thinking is movement in imagined space. That idea - of chimps swinging from branch to branch, and us doing the same when we were contemplating something - has stuck with me. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's seminal Metaphors We Live By had explored the foundational role of metaphorical thinking. Recently, Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success had pointed out that the same regions of the brain involved in movement also light up when we think. So the basic idea was not totally unfamiliar. But Tversky, an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford, extends and deepens these ideas, showing their support in numerous psychological studies and connecting them to all sorts of aspects of our thinking, behavior and culture. Particularly interesting (and possibly relevant for my course Media & Minds) were Tversky's ideas about how we "put thought in the world," for example through gesture, writing, and graphic media of all kinds. Those outside products then become food for inside thought - for us and others. Spirals of thought ensue. In one reading, I'm sure that I didn't absorb everything from this book; I'll almost certainly return to it, perhaps repeatedly.