March 2026

This is a massive book, and I’m not going to attempt to describe the whole of his project. However, I think the basic story is relatively straightforward and can be told in several steps:

• Human beings evolved to be cooperative creatures. I find some of this to be rather speculative but still credible. For example, he argues that changes in the human shoulder joint allowed humans to throw objects like rocks or spheres more accurately, which made it easier for groups to resist the efforts of the biggest humans to achieve alpha status. “Even the largest, most imposing fighter could easily be killed by a spear or poison arrow during an ambush or while they slept” (pp. 38f). Kemp, like others, suggests that the need to navigate complex social environments was one of the factors driving the increase in brain size. Babies with larger brains couldn’t make it through the birth canal, which meant that babies were less developed at birth and therefore dependent on adults for much longer than other animals’ offspring. More cooperative communities who parented collectively had a survival advantage.

• This began to change with the development of what Kemp calls lootable resources:

  Lootable resources allowed for individuals and groups to become not just rich but also powerful. The four fundamental ways to gain power over others is [sic] to control valuable information (information power), to control by threat or force (violent power), to control the decision making (political power), or to control the critical resources (economic power). In an egalitarian forager group with few status differences, an ambitious status seeker could pursue one of these, but it was difficult if not impossible to achieve all of them. … What changed between the egalitarian ice age and the rise of inequality in the Holocene was the use of lootable resources. Once you had resources that others depended on, you could leverage them for other forms of power (p. 65).

  And this development, Kemp suggests, lead to an evolutionary backsliding from the cooperative (and civilized) world of early humans to a world of “dominance hierarchies organized primarily through authority and violence” (p. 6).

  However, these Goliaths are cursed — they contain within themselves the seeds of their demise. Inequality increases because those who have resources find it easy to accumulate even more resources by “extracting more wealth, energy, and labor from the rest of society” (p. 136). The inequality and extractive measures made a society less reliant and more likely to fall, whether by revolution from within or destructive forces from without.

  Kemp develops these points in excruciating detail by surveying many Goliaths that have emerged and collapsed over the millennia since the last ice age.

• Finally, Kemp argues that we are now living in an age of a global Goliath that could well be heading toward collapse, and collapse even more devastating than those that have come before because this Goliath is global. He closes the book with some advice on how we might avoid and/or respond to this collapse:

  • Avoiding the collapse (if it’s not too late)

    • Stay within planetary boundaries
    • Control AI
      • Limits on power grid
      • Price carbon
      • Whistle-blower protections
    • Eliminate/reduce nuclear weapons
    • Decreasing power is feasible

  • If we fail to avoid the collapse, those who survive will face the challenge of recreating civilization.

    • Democratize political power, and not just in government
    • Increase equality
    • Control both information and the military democratically
    • Control technology and production democratically

  • Finally, he has advice for those who feel helpless in the face of current challenges:

    • “Don’t be a dick” — “This is a pledge to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk. Don’t work for an Agent of Doom, whether it is an AGI lab, a fossil-fuel company, or an arms manufacturer” (442)
    • Be a democrat – i.e., practice democracy as a citizen and not just an occasional voter
    • Vote against the apocalypse – “you are first and foremost a citizen, not a consumer” (p. 443).
    • Don’t be dominated

I’ve read most of McEwan’s books, and I began reading this one with high hopes. This wasn’t only because I found his earlier novels to be very good; it was also because early reviewers praised this one. (Consider the title of Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times: Ian McEwan’s Latest Is the Best Novel He’s Written in Ages [gift link]). Simply put, the book more than met my expectations.

The book begins in the year 2119, and the world is something like a world that many of us today fear. Great Britain, now an island, in 2119 is an archipelago of islands because of rising seas. The political world as we know it, both within many countries and internationally, has more or less collapsed. I can’t say much about the book without revealing some significant spoilers. But I will say that the book’s title is particularly apt. What might scholars a century from now know about our day-to-day lives, especially since so much of our lives are recorded in digital databases? What might a person in an intimate relationship really know about the other person in that relationship? What might a person suffering from cognitive decline know about the world as it fades away? To what extent those of us living in privilege today continue to pretend we don’t know the disaster that we’re creating for those who follow us?

These are very pressing questions; as I read this book I was living in all of them.

This book has three major sections. The first is an extended reflection on the reading self — a celebration of the practice of deep reading and of the different ways in which reading enriches and changes the self. “The books that matter to me,” Birkerts writes, “are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself” (p. 102). Here Birkerts pushed me to think more deeply about the power of reading and also about the relationship between reading and writing. I especially appreciate several observations:

“knowledge was less a means to an end than a matter of self-cultivation, a way of transforming the experience of the daily. To be curious, to study, to find out — this was the path to the world. Knowledge exposed connections, imparting significance to the incidental” (p. 60).

“true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitements of film. But if we do read perseveringly we make available to ourselves, in a most portable form, an ulterior existence. We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times. We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment” (p. 76).

“The books that matter to me — and they are books of all descriptions — are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself” (p. 102).

In the second section of the book he offers his caution about the way that the move to electronic media is changing the world, and not in a good way. I found him less helpful here, in part because the book was published in 1994. Times have changed. In addition, in this section he paints with a broad brush, lumping all electronic media into the same bucket. He did, however, offer this prediction that is not very far off the mark:

Software codes are a sorting hopper; they determine what flies through the circuits and what doesn’t. We will see how the movement and control, the shaping of data will become a more central occupation. We will all (except the poor and the refuseniks) spend more and more of our time in the cybersphere producing, sending, receiving, and responding, and necessarily less time interacting in a ‘hands-on’ way with the old material order. Similarly, we will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time that our sustained face-to-face encounters diminish. It will be harder and harder — we know this already — to step free of our mediating devices. There will be people who will never in their lives have the experience that was, until our time, the norm — who will never stand in isolated silence among trees and stones, out of shouting distance of any other person, with no communication implement, forced to confront the slow, grainy momentum of time passing. The ways of being that ruled individuals since individuals first evolved are suddenly, with a finger-snap, largely irrelevant” (p. 215).

The third major section of the book is a set of three essays. The first is a discussion of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. The second is a discussion of Alvin Kernan’s Death of Literature; here Birkerts appends a note of hope to the demise suggested in Kernan’s title. The final essay, “The Narrowing Ledge,” offers a challenge to those who would be novelists:

If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous. That is, it must throw up a serious challenge to the emergent status quo; it must shake and provoke people even as it leads them back toward a reconnaissance of selfhood. The novel will not endure because it can entertain (although certainly it can), but because it offers an essential experience available nowhere else. Through language, which makes of the page a place of focus and immersion, the writer gives the reader the deeper picture of things, the picture he might assemble for himself if only he had the time, the concentration, and the imaginative penetration (p. 209).

The first section of the book is very much worth a careful read. I gather he published a second edition in 2006 with a new introduction and afterword. Perhaps I’ll find that someday. My library has only the first edition.

This is a relatively short book, but it’s also as bold as it is short. The authors propose a new law of nature that both counters and complements the second law of thermodynamics. They recognize the boldness of their proposal, and acknowledge that they could well be wrong. In a sense, the book is an invitation to others to engage in debate and further research. If they’re wrong, they say that they’ll accept that. I’m not a scientist, but I’m inclined to think that they have something well worth considering here. (I rather suspect that many with more training in science than I am would change the “but” in that previous sentence to “and.”)

Hazen and Wong begin the book with an overview of the currently held laws of nature, moving through Newton’s three laws of motion, the laws of gravity and electromagnetism, and the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is particularly important in their discussion. This law, they say, can be expressed in several different ways. The form that’s most relevant to their proposal states that “the entropy of an isolated system tends to remain constant or increase” (p. 31). And here’s their initial statement of their proposal:

…the breathtaking transformations from atoms to stars to planets to life — what has been called cosmic evolution — are manifestations of a universal imperative that has been at play since the Big Bang. Increased order is fully consistent with all the other natural laws, but it does not automatically follow from those laws. What is missing from our canon is a natural law of evolution — a second arrow of time related to increasing order that balances the well-documented first arrow of increasing disorder (p. 34).

Following this initial statement, they offer a brief overview of the evolution of the universe, beginning with the Big Bang, moving through the development and destruction of the first stars, leading finally to the emergence of many stars like our sun and then to the development and evolution of both non-living elements and life on earth. They argue that at each stage of development, the process is shaped by a preference for what they call “increasing functional information.”

In an evolving system subject to selection for function, it is functional information, not entropy, that describes adn explains how the system will change. And here we glimpse a possible path forward in our quest for a missing law of evolution: What if evolution obeys a law of increasing functional information? That increase would represent a second arrow of time — and arrow of increasing localized order and complexity. If our conjecture is correct, then time’s second arrow is completely consistent with entropy’s increasing universal disorder, but it is a different and independent phenomenon (p. 91).

They conclude this section of the book with a succinct statement of their proposed law:

The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system are subjected to selection for one or more functions (p. 94).

Again, Hazen and Wong don’t insist that they are certainly right about this. But they explore possible tests for the law’s validity that they think offer some reason to think that it’s valid.

I’ll admit again that I’m not a scientist, but I’m intrigued by this work. I’ll be interested to see how other scientists respond.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, the authors take up the question why someone else hasn’t come up with this proposal or one like it. They offer several possible reasons, but I wish that I had found there a discussion of Whitehead’s The Function of Reason. I think they would find there a kindred spirit if not a clear premonition of what they’re proposing here.

I think of this short novel as a comfort novel. It’s a series of seemingly independent sketches of encounters between different people, each offered from the perspective of different narrators. As the book develops one sees interconnections between the characters; together these characters and interconnections make up a world.

Lockhart begins by offering a straightforward definition of arithmetic. “Arithmetic is the skillful arrangement of numerical information for ease of communication and comparison.” He then fleshes out this definition by offering examples of different strategies for depicting and arranging numerical information — some of them factual examples from different cultures and others fanciful examples developed to flesh things out. After making his way through all of these examples, he provides informative analyses of different arithmetical operations like multiplication and division and discussions of the inventions of fractions and negative numbers. He does all of this with a light touch and a sense of humor.

I knew pretty much all of this, though I learned some of it so long ago that my knowledge was more implicit than explicit — I appreciated being reminded of these things. My favorite chapter in the book, entitled “The Art of Counting,” is far and away my favorite. Here Lockhart describes strategies for counting that rely on the identification of patterns and structures among the items counted. Here I learned some strategies, and I hope that I’ll still remember these strategies if and when I’m in a position to use them. Did you know, for example, that if one is asked to select 2 items out of a group of 6, there are 15 different pairs? And if one is asked to select 3 items out of a group of 6, there are 20 possible groupings?