Author: k4media

Peter Olszewski offers up his thoughts on Linda Geddes ode to the value of sunlight in our lives.

Just when you thought you were aware of just about all the potentially harmful pollutants, along comes news of light pollution, and new knowledge about the dangers of being deprived of good old natural light via our very own star, the sun.

We underestimate the importance of natural light and we make the seriously flawed assumption that the electric light that lights our homes and offices is just as good as the real thing – sunlight.

That is a simplified version of the message of a startling new book, Chasing the Sun: The New Science of Sunlight and How it Shapes Our Bodies and Minds by science journalist Linda Geddes.

Basically I think we all understand the basics about sunlight in that exposure to it can be both benevolent and malevolent.

But Geddes book concentrates of just how vital sunlight is and her observations are illuminating [ouch, bad pun Peter]. She points out that while we all know that  a  measured dose of sunlight makes us feel good, we  are only just beginning to fully understand  how vital sunlight is, how it can heal or prevent  a myriad  of physical and mental maladies and how deprivation of it  can cause  significant health and well-being problems.

And this comes with a warning about our urban lifestyles where much of our high-rise cities become sun-less shadow lands and our addiction to the new technology, which keeps us indoors looking at computers and hand, held devices for hours on end instead of being outdoors soaking up some sun.

To tell the new story about sunlight knowledge,  Geddes takes us back about 130 years ago, to the work of  Nobel Prize winner Niels Rybirg Finsen who dealt with the direct impact of the sun’s rays  on bacteria and on our skin,  and in doing so he  instigated a cure for lupus vulgaris or skin tuberculosis, a dreadful disfiguring  facial disease caused by flesh eating bacteria – Finsen  found the cure by directing ultraviolet rays on patients’ faces.

Finsen first became interest in the sun because as a student in Copenhagen he lived and worked mostly in a sunless room and suffered from anemia and tiredness.   But he noticed his health improved when he was exposed to sunlight. He began to experiment, established the Medical Light Institute and as Geddes writes, “He ushered in a new era of interest in the health benefits of sunlight, which continues to this day.”

And before Finsen, Florence Nightingale  in 1860 observed that dark rooms were anathema for patients:  “What hurts them most is a dark room”, she wrote, “And that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.”

AS well as thoroughly documenting the need for humans to be subjected to the right sort of light – sunlight –  author  Geddes, in her compact fact-packed compendium, also documents the  emergence of the wrong sort of light and how it causes havoc with the natural  order of things.

She cites a Cities at Night project, which documents the extent of light pollution and how it’s changing due to the popularity of LED street lights.

“Urban lights scatter photons in unwanted directions, including upwards into space,” she writes.

“This scattered light obscures drivers’ vision and wreaks havoc on wildlife.  Mesmerized by this apparent daylight in the night sky, insects life cycles are disrupted, birds migrations thrown off course and trees cling to their leaves longer in autumn – potentially shortening their lives.” 

Even the reproduction of flowering plants is affected by these artificial suns, by disrupting the behavior of pollinating insects, their daily appointment with flowers that open and close at specific times are missed.

And of course there can be no discussion about sunlight and what happens when the light of day fades into the dark of night: mostly we sleep, or we should sleep and once again, our sleep patterns, naturally triggered by the rise of fall of the sun, are vital to our health.

The tightly written book opens with the science of circadian rhythms, explained in not-too-technical terms, and ends on this note, “We spawned from a revolving planet, itself shaped by starlight. And although we create our own electric star to light the night, our biology remains tethered to a monarch mightier than them all: our sun.”

A good read that’s inducive to a good night’s sleep.

Peter Olszewski returns with a review of the Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book.

It was great to welcome Malcolm Gladwell into my home again, via his latest book, Talking to Strangers.

I’m a Gladwell fan. I’ve read two of his books, and serious adherents claim that this, his latest, is his weightiest – not necessarily good news in my view.

Gladwell, often described (and at times) dismissed as a pop-scientist or armchair philosopher, is also criticised because arguments laid out in his books are anecdotally driven.

While to some ‘serious’ academics this is a negative, to me, as a reader, it’s a positive because Gladwell’s anecdotes are not only highly entertaining, they also perfectly illustrate what he is trying to say without the need for  reams and reams of  often-turgid scientific or analytic  ‘proof.’ 

Gladwell’s anecdotes are masterpieces because he digs up the most amazing material, including intriguing trivia about something we as readers thought we were familiar with, but after reading Gladwell’s brilliantly researched anecdote, the reader mutters, “Gee, I didn’t know that about that!”

And just for fun, here’s an example of classic Gladwell trivia: Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis.* 

Gladwell essentially is a contrarian,  in his David and Goliathbook  he  maintained that certain experiences and situations regarded as disadvantages are advantages—and vice versa.

In this his latest book, the sub-title reads: “What we should know about the people we don’t know.”

The book then argues that what we should know about the people we don’t know is that we will never fully know about them, despite lie detectors that don’t always work when they should work, and behavioral science analysis that stands up only until it is shot down by a new example emerging from the annals of reality  – or by an anecdote extolled by Gladwell.

 In other words, you never really know people even though you think you do, it’s almost impossible to always correctly ‘read’ all people, and its best to always question strangers. 

Getting it wrong about people and being fooled is not a failure, posits Gladwell, it the norm.  

The anecdotes Gladwell serves up to prove his points – his ‘default to truth’ – are simply brilliant. 

CNN and other media have run with Gladwell’s observation of Adolf Hitler in this book: an intriguing insight revealed is that in the period immediately before the outbreak of WWII, a lot of people got it wrong about Hitler’s intentions, and a lot got it right. 

Those who mostly got it wrong were those who met Hitler, and those who never met Hitler – such as Churchill – got it right. 

One amazing trivial fact is that when Lord Halifax first met Hitler in Berlin he mistook him for a footman and almost handed him his coat. And yes, Halifax also got it wrong about Hitler’s intentions.

As Gladwell points out, those who went to Berlin to meet Hitler would have been better served staying at home and simply reading Mein Kampf.

Although of course, in the contrarian nature of things, there also famous cases where events would have transpired more positively had people actually met the person in question, and not derived opinions from non-contact sources.

The rule is that there are no rules about getting fooled or not by people some of the time or all of the time, strangers or otherwise.

As Gladwell says, “Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.  We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers.” 

PS: Media reports state that Gladwell “recoils at the implication that Talking to Strangers has anything to do with President Trump.”

*Para praxis: a Freudian slip,a slip of the tongue or pen, forgetfulness, misplacement of objects, or other error thought to reveal unconscious wishes or attitudes.

Take a journey through the ‘game of empires’ with Jeremiah William’s review of Angelos Chaniotis newly published, Age of Conquests – The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrien.

In his latest book leading historian Angelos Chaniotis covers nearly 500 years of history across the ancient world, from Egypt to Britain; the volume providing readers with a brief, yet sufficiently detailed narrative of the major events occurring in the ‘oecumene’ (the known world) from the time of Alexander the Great (336 BC) until the death of Roman Emperor Hadrian (AD 138).

Angelos Chaniotis introduces the argument that Alexander the Great’s transformation of the world during his lifetime did not stop upon his death in 323 BC. 

Instead, everything starts with Alexander. 

Through his extraordinary conquests, he became assimilated with the gods and carved a brand new world out of the Mediterranean landscape. Yet he died before seeing the entirety of his accomplishments. 

The poem “Anno 200”, transcribed in the book’s first chapter, is used by the Chaniotis to provide a measure of the ‘man gods’ achievements:

“And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition
Triumphant, brilliant in every way,
Celebrated on all sides, glorified,
As no other has been glorified,
Incomparable, we emerged:
The great new Hellenic world.
We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians,
The Selefkians, and the countless
Other Greeks of Egypt and Syria,
And those in Media, and Persia, and all the rest:
With our far flung supremacy,
Our flexible policy of judicious integration,
And our common Greek Language
Which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.”

The territories conquered by Alexander endured a period of violence and war after his death, with several new dynasties emerging to battle for increasingly large portions of Alexander’s former kingdom. 

However, these hectic times also led to scientific, artistic, and intellectual achievements that are still with us today. 

Angelos Chaniotis demonstrates why combining the Hellenistic and Imperial periods into the ‘Long Hellenistic Period’ gives us a better understanding of the important social, cultural, economic, and geopolitical developments that shaped the beginning of the modern world. 

Covering five centuries of complicated history in sixteen chapters is no easy feat but under the steady hand of Chaniotis it is managed masterfully. The book’s layout certainly helps in this regard. Right after the table of contents, at the front of the book, are eight detailed maps in black and white. There’s also a full list of the figures used to illustrate the chapters. The narrative portion of the book is summarised down into twelve chapters, while the remaining four are dedicated to the overarching themes of socio-economic, cultural, religious, and global development. 

The narrative chapters generally follow a chronological order. However, for clarity, the author sometimes chooses to explain distinct episodes linearly, which requires him to jump back and forth through time.

Chapters Thirteen through Sixteen, the final chapters, focus on the main themes of the book, the author seeking to tie its anterior arguments into a concise understanding of the era.

Overall, the effect is one of an easy-to-digest account as well as a reference and guide for further research, with every section acting as a stepping stone to a specific topic. This is assisted by the detailed reference, chronology, and bibliography sections that are found at the end of the book.

Available at Monument Books.

Jeremiah William

Three Women – A Review

Author: Lisa Taddeo

We of the HOWL team welcome Ms. B to our esteem pack of eager reviewers. Describing herself as “bi-coastal”, “multi-faceted” and a woman who knows her way around a ménage àtrois,“even with the lights off” (her words, all), there could be no one better to review Lisa Taddeo’s much hyped ‘Three Women’. Over to you Ms. B.

“It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it’s the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever . . .”

Oh dear. I do not know if I want to continue reading or just throw the book at the wall . . . Lisa, please! No more. I know that you have worked eight long years on this tome; I know you are talented writer and that you have probably rewritten the above paragraph umpteenth times, but please, stop now!!!!

Okay. I’m back. It was a touch and go there; the question being, would I need to fish my review copy of Three Women from my landlord’s catfish pond? Or would I go on Tinder to see who was new in town? But there is a job to be done with a task, laid out before you, to share my critical thoughts on Ms. Taddeo’s new opus. So to the nuts and bolts, or maybe just the nuts given the topic in hand (all words and phrases are loaded in this review).

Lets start – Two-years shy of a decade in research and writing Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women does not simply announce itself, it kicks down the door. At least that is the impression left by the endorsements that flourish on its covers:

“This is one of the most riveting, assured and scorchingly original debuts I’ve ever read”(Dave Eggers). ‘Riveting’, ‘assured’, ‘scorchingly’, one wonders if Eggers was rewarded on the basis of how many superlatives he could include in his writer’s blurb. And is ‘scorchingly’ even a word? My spell check, in open revolt, says ‘no’.  

Ms. Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert, takes things up a notch or four . . . “ A masterpiece on the same level as In Cold Blood” 

Hold on a minute Liz. Have you engaged in a tantric yoga pose for too long? I mean no one! No one! Can challenge my man Truman when it comes to immersive, narrative non-fiction. 

[Ed. Disclaimer: While we at HOWL all regards Truman Capote’s seminal work with the highest esteem we accept that Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe might have something to say about its status in the pantheon of ‘new journalism’]

So what is the topic of Ms. Taddeo’s much-praised book? Its actually quite simple, one word in fact: desire. Although as the 300 pages of Three Women reveal, ‘desire’ is never simple. It is ‘nuanced’ as Lisa eloquently puts it. Me? I would choose a more colourful adjective. 

As a reviewer I do not favour the approach of picking over a book like a Moscow dissentient eating lunch in a Russian restaurant. Rather, I like to employ what I call the ‘alien test’. Here is how it works. Imagine you are an alien who has landed on earth and have absolutely no idea how humans function; in fact the only thing you know is how to read English (here I am thinking of a cute alien, something like ET, not one of those creatures that bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach so many Sigourney Weavers ago). Now, as an alien you pick-up and read Three Women, drawing conclusions about humankind at its end. Here are your observations:

Men trend towards being manipulative pedophiles, unkempt jerks and selfish voyeuristic no-bodies.

Women, in contrast, veer towards victimhood, complicity, desperation and varying levels of obsession. Revenge is, on occasion, employed.

Moving to the matter of sexual congress—which to an alien would probably appear, well, alien—such acts are mostly illicit and awkward, while best undertaken in the back of a pick-up, in a school classroom or in the family basement. 

Clearly we are not in Kanas here (‘right Truman?’) so where are we? 

The answer is embedded—as much as a writer and by default a reader can ever be—in the lives of three women (yes, the title keeps it simple) and their contrasting experiences in the spotlight of ‘desire’. We have Maggie, a high school student who finds herself entwined in an emotional and physical (think hands, lips and fingers) relationship with her school’s most popular teacher. There is Lina, an unhappily married housewife, who fines salvation in the arms—and the rear seat — of an old school flame. And Sloane, the most callow of Taddeo’s informants, who has a voyeuristic complex that is complemented by her husband, who enjoys watching her have sex with other men (and women). 

Complicated? Likely. Messy? Most definitely! For all of Taddeo’s lead characters—and remember we are talking non-fiction here—suffer for their desires and the actions they trigger, with only Lina surfacing from her story with any form of satisfaction. Still, even for Lina you feel her life could collapse at any moment, her passions backstopped by clouds of looming darkness. 

As a writer Taddeo has the skill to transform copious reels of audiotaped interviews into chapters that flow coherently across multiple story and time-lines. She also has the emotional disconnect of an Idaho potato farmer; so while her subjects flounder under the raw emotion of the pain, guilt and ardors of their experiences, she remains calm and neutral, a recorder not a counselor. Behind this craft you feel there is another story, an account of how she came to find and choose Maggie, Lina and Sloane as subjects; the steps taken to encourage them to tell their stories; and how she, as an author, was able to retain her neutrality throughout the book’s gestation. 

So where does Three Women stand? 

Timing can mean everything when it comes to the reception of a piece of art, and as the ‘alien test’ suggests, the behavior of men in Three Women falls very much into the narrative of the #MeToo age. Thus inadvertently—for the author could hardly have anticipated this movement when she started writing in 2011—Three Women feeds into its zeitgeist. 

And here I think Taddeo encounters her biggest conundrum, for there is a sense that the power and reverberations of #MeToo suck some of the force from her work – the movement’s rise robbing the book of its potency, the revelations in Three Women no longer original. It’s a shame. If the ground that Three Women covers had been less crowded it may have raised sufficient steam to match its hype. Instead it comes to the party late – less clarion call, more an addition to an orchestra well into its second movement.

The discerning reader might have gathered that I am not completely taken with Ms. Taddeo’s oeuvre. Let me be honest here: Yes the book is well written. Yes it does shine light into the corners of female emotion less explored and written of by woman themselves. And yes, eight years is a bloody long time to research and write a book (and one feels that Taddeo was not the sort of person to stop for a year or two to smell the roses). It’s an accomplished work, but it falls short of its embellishments. Capote can rest peacefully; his most celebrated work remains unchallenged.

Yours, Ms. B 🙂

For an alternative take on Ms Taddeo’s Three Women, click here

Author: Oliver Bullough

Welcome to Peter Olszewski’s review of the 2018 Economist ‘book of the year’ 

I don’t understand the exotic fiscal intricacies employed by the rich, which is possibly why I’m not rich.

I don’t really understand shell companies, companies within companies, offshore trusts and some such, which is why I don’t have any.

Hence it was with trepidation that I began reading Oliver Bullough’s startling book, Moneyland, which explains how the super-rich stay super rich.

Happily, the book promptly put me at ease, because the author stressed that the whole point of the machinations the super-rich undertake to hide their money is an unparalleled complexity that few can understand,  apart from a tribe of high-priced lawyers paid to create and hide dosh behind said complexity.

Bullough writes, “The physicist Richard Feynman supposedly once said: ‘if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’

“I feel the same about the way offshore structures have warped the fabric of the world. But if this dizzying realization sends me out of the house and away from the screen, there’s no escaping it.  The building where I buy my morning coffee is owned in Gibraltar.”

Gibraltar of course being one of those countries dubbed an offshore haven, and Bullough gives an easy-to-understand example of the concept of offshore – of being legally absent while being physically present.

He discusses the pirate radio stations that began emerging in the UK in the 1960s when the BBC had the only radio licence and writes that these radio stations, 

 “…moored their vessels outside British territorial waters, set up radio equipment, and broadcast pop music back into the UK. Many people called these radio operators pirates, but others called their stations something else: offshore.”

Bullough notes that the concept of offshore was useful, and the term started to be employed to describe financial transactions as well.

Bullough also cynically notes,  “If we spent all of our time trying to puzzle out what is really happening, we’d have no time to do anything else.  It’s no wonder most sensible people ignore what the super-rich get up to.” 

And what the super-rich get up to is amassing so much money that the amounts can make heads spin, and that there is so much money sloshing around looking to be spent that it has created a new field of economic study, plutonomy 

According to Investopedia, plutonomy is an economy that exhibits massive income and wealth inequality, and where the spending and consumption activity of an extremely wealthy minority have an outsize impact on the economy.  

And according to Bullough, plutonomy also leads to, or creates, a new world.

“I call this new world Moneyland,” he writes, “Maltese passports, English libel, American privacy, Panamanian shell companies, Jersey trusts, Liechtenstein foundations, all add together to create a virtual space  that is far greater  than the sum of all their parts.”

Moneyland is the province of the world’s new ruling class, a global super-rich society interested only in amassing super wealth.

The inhabitants of Moneyland broadly fall into two categories: those who earned their wealth legally and wish to hide it, and those who earned their wealth illegally and need to hide it.

The latter includes criminals as well as sundry despots who head countries and strip the country’s coffers bare via corruption and other means, while spending, for example, $1.04 million on a wrist watch when their ordinary citizens struggle to live on $10 a month.

As Bullough writes, “It is remarkably easy to loot a country providing you are in charge of it.”

Author Bullough presents his case in a tightly and sparely written book, dense with information that shocks.

He avoids the tabloid trap of describing how disgusting the behaviors of rich people can be, although he does give an example of traveling first class with a super-rich woman who wore diapers because she couldn’t be “bothered” going to the toilet, and who became embroiled in an argument with the flight attendant as to who would change the diaper.  The flight attendant ended up doing the dirty work.

But Bullough does give plenty of examples of the disgusting amounts people spend on things, such as the aforementioned $1.04 million watch, and he bemoans the fact that some of the best real estate in some of the best parts of the world’s best cities   sits mostly empty – London apartments, for example, worth figures like $55 million that are used only a couple of weeks a year by wealthy wives who drop into town for shopping sprees.

On the obscenity of  such property, Bullough quotes another author,  New Yorker Michael Gross and his 2014 book, ‘House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the world’s most powerful address.’

Gross writes,  “Fifteen Central Park West is more than an apartment building. It is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically-tycoon- stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century…it represents the resurrection and the life of our era’s aristocracy of wealth.

“No longer dignified, unified, well-born, or even well-bred, they enjoy unheard-of-incomes and the most extraordinary standard of living in history.”

And yes, Trump and his cohorts do get mentioned in the book.

And yes, Bullough does ultimately sound the warning that this inequality, this profligacy must end, will end, and the end will probably be messy.

He quotes Brooke Harrington, author of books such as Capital Without Borders, and Pop Finance.

She lays out what can eventuate in the wake of money launderers and super-clever deviant lawyers working for the super-rich stuffing up the global system.

 “Their work radically undermines the economic basis and legal authority of the modern tax state,” she writes, “Using trusts, offshore firms, and foundations, professionals can ensure that inequality endures and grows in a way that becomes difficult to reverse short of revolution.”  

Moneyland is a great must-read – but be prepared to be disturbed. Be prepared to be angry, very angry.

Peter Olszewski