November 2025

I really didn’t need to be convinced that the radical distinction my cultural tradition has made between humans and nature is misguided. I don’t remember now when I had my first doubts about this distinction, but my conviction that humans are a part of nature rather than somehow outside or even above it has grown stronger over the decades. As this book’s subtitle suggests, the arrogant ape of the title is the human being.

The value of this book for me is how Webb develops the implications of the dethroning of human exceptionalism. And she develops her argument on the strength of her own and of others’ scientific research into all sorts of natural elements, including humans. Her scientific specialization is the field of primatology, and one of the more striking points she makes in the book is that she was well along in writing it before she recognized that the very name of her field of study is an example of such exceptionalism: the term primates came into common use in the 19Th century, referring to the prime, or highest, order of mammals. The term didn’t refer exclusively to humans, but it was commonly assumed that humans were the primary one among the primates.

Another crucial insight, I think, is that the fact that Darwin’s work appeared as industrial capitalism was coming to the fore shaped the expression of evolutionary theory in ways that Darwin didn’t intend. In fact, she reports, the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Darwin preferred the phrase “struggle for existence,” adding that he used this term “in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another” (pp. 198f). Darwin recognized the powerful threat of his proposals to humans’ standard self-image, writing to a friend that “writing On the Origin of Species was ‘like confessing a murder’” (p. 56).

Webb offers many examples to support her argument that the supposed qualitative distinctions between humans and other animals (and even plants) are merely that — supposed − and that they often depend on comparing humans and other organisms on uneven grounds. She details instances of other animals making and using tools. I’m especially impressed with crows, who take advantage of our busy streets by dropping walnuts on the pavement so that cars driving over them will crack the shells. The crows even take advantage of the rhythms of the traffic signals. She offers multiple examples of how other animals are more perceptive because they have evolved to have a greater variety of color-sensing cells in their eyes, or much stronger senses of taste and smell.

Another example: scientists have long argued that humans are unique in that we are self-aware. A young child can recognize themselves in the mirror. Others animals cannot. But the test depends on sight. More recently, researchers have shown that dogs also have a sense of self — they distinguish between their own odor and the odor of other dogs.

Webb shows how many indigenous cultures reject — or, perhaps, don’t even consider — the position of human exceptionalism, and argues that bringing the insights of many different cultures to bear on current issues would be fruitful for all.

Her point is not that humans aren’t different, and she’s not denying human intelligence, such as it is. Nor is she saying that we should value those animals whose level of intelligence is closest to our own more than other animals. Rather, it’s that every species is special in its own way. More importantly, it’s that every species is an integral part of a vast and interconnected network of beings. Discounting the myth of human exceptionalism is crucially important now if we are to dodge the risk posed by our own damage to the environment. Nature is not ours to tame and dominate; instead, it is the world in which we live and of which we are a part.

Though there was a time long ago when I thought I might major in math or physics, a time when I truly enjoyed working my way through complex mathematical puzzles, that part of my life is now long gone. I can do simple arithmetic in my head and I resist reaching for the calculator on my phone, but I’ve forgotten what I once knew about statistics. I picked up Robin Hood Math in part because I thought it would help me to remedy that deficiency. As Giansiracusa makes clear in his subtitle and develops in more detail in the first chapter, those seeking to manipulate and control our lives have developed sophisticated strategies — algorithmic strategies — to do just that. He suggests that understanding just how these things work can help us to fight back.

Along the way, he describes how to make difficult decisions or predictions by identifying significant factors and then using weighted measures of these factors. He explains how to judge relative risk, so that one might make a reasonable decision. For example, should one spend $200 on a medication that will prevent a long-term infection when it’s clear that there’s a 10% chance that one will get that infection? And he described Bayesian reasoning clearly enough that I can finally make sense of it.

Someone with a solid knowledge of statistics and Bayesian reasoning is unlikely to learn anything about math that they don’t already know. And someone who is familiar with the ways that Meta and other social media companies use algorithms to design a feed that will keep their eyes on the screen and exposed to still more advertisements won’t learn anything new either. But I found it helpful, not only to see some details about just how these algorithms work, but also to have fairly simple explanations of how I can use statistical reasoning to think more clearly.

I found the premise of this book to be rather unbelievable. Jonathan, a rather aimless writer living in 1988 West Germany, stumbles into the assignment to travel through still-Communist eastern Prussia to write a guidebook for others scheduled to take a tour there. When he hits the road, Jonathan leaves Ulla behind in the apartment that they share without really sharing. Ulla, a decade or so younger that Jonathan, works as a gallery assistant. She’s also working on an exhibition which will unpack the practice, or art, of cruelty. The fact that Jonathan’s tour is financed by a Japanese car company planning a car tour featuring their massive and powerful automobiles is symbolic of apparent wealth in countries shaped and still haunted by past tragedy and cruelty.

Jonathan has roots in eastern Prussia. In fact, his life and self-understanding have been shaped by stories of his parents’ death in the war. His uncle – an uncle who is now helping to bankroll Jonathan’s life — reports that his mother died while giving birth to him in the dead of winter as she sought to escape the advancing Russians. Jonathan’s father had died in the war in a battle on the Baltic coast. While on the tour, Jonathan finds himself in the setting of each of these life-shaping stories, visiting the church and graveyard where her mother’s body was left and the site of his father’s death.

The novel is not just about Jonathan’s personal story. It also paints bleak pictures of both Germany and Communist Poland just before the fall of the Soviet Union. Just as Jonathan’s personal stories have shaped him, the larger accounts of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism shape both Germany and Prussia. How does one live with the memories of such atrocities?

The context in which I read this book is significant. So much of my thinking and living now centers on the question whether we in the United States will survive the onslaught of terror. How will we live with the guilt of not having done more than we’ve done to resist?

I finished reading this novel sometime last spring, and I’m still haunted by it. It’s lurking in my mind for two reasons – first, because a depth here that I think I’ve not fully fathomed. It’s on my list of books to re-read at least once. There’s so much more to it than I’ve seen.

But the theme of the refugee that’s developed in so many ways, and Thien’s strategy of weaving factual details about historical refugees in with the rather fantastical world of her fictional characters is unsettling. I really don’t want to add spoilers here because I want people to read it for themselves, but this book has changed and deepened my understanding of Hannah Arendt’s life and thought, and it also has me thinking I really should find the definitive biography of Baruch Spinoza and read that. I read a good bit of Spinoza’s philosophy years ago, and along the way learned just a little bit about his life. Now I want to know more. And then there’s the Chinese poet Du Fu, about whom I knew absolutely nothing before reading Thien’s book.

There’s so much more to say about this book, but I think I’ll set that task aside until I find the time to read it again.

We’re all more or less accustomed to the fact that virtually everything we do in the world creates a data trail, and that there are governmental and commercial institutions interested in using those data in order to predict and in many cases control what we do in the world. But what if that data came to include the content of our dreams?

That’s the basic premise of The Dream Hotel. Sara, the protagonist, was having some difficulty sleeping after her first child was born, and so she had a chip installed in her brain that helped her to sleep. It’s worth noticing that she resisted this move initially, but she was relieved to find that it did indeed improve her sleep quality. However, she didn’t read through the terms of service (how many times have you clicked the button agreeing to such terms without reading the fine print?), and so didn’t know that the device recorded the content of her dreams and reserved the right to sell this information to others.

The book is set a couple of decades in the future, but it will seem familiar to those of us living today. The data tracking has become much more ambitious, and the government employs an AI engine to analyze each person’s data in order to generate what it calls a risk score, which the government thinks accurately reflects the possibility that you will create a crime. If a person’s risk score climbs above 500, then the government might lock that person away, continuing to monitor the situation until the risk score drops below 500. I say that the government might lock the person away because it seems that there’s some discretion, especially if the risk score is only a little above 500. What Sara discovers, though, is that the content of her dreams leads the AI engine to up her score. She learns this when she’s returning to the United States after attending a conference in England. Despite her protests — or perhaps in part because of the strength of her protests — she’s detained in what the book’s title refers to euphemistically as a dream hotel. She’s not imprisoned, say the authorities, because she’s not committed a crime. But she’s detained because the AI engine indicates that she might commit a crime.

But how can one lower one’s risk score when one is detained, especially if the private company handling the detention is paid based on the number and of those detained and the length of their detentions? Sara learns that it’s very difficult.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, except to say that I found the ending to be the most disappointing part of the book. It was a bit too contrived, and really didn’t resolve the tensions introduced over the course of the book — tensions that were heightened by how closely our own world anticipates the world of the novel.

A dystopian novel that some say is the current version of The Handmaid’s Tale. A group of 40 women — one of them much younger than the others — are detained in an underground cage. They are constantly guarded by men who walk around the outside of the cage, ready to punish with their whips any woman who deviates from the rules. Such “deviations” include, among other things, raising one’s voice in anger, touching another woman in the cage, and attempting to commit suicide. The women aren’t sure how long they’ve been there and have only vague memories of the lives they lived before being imprisoned and even fewer memories of how they came to be where they are.

The youngest – a teenager? — knows even less about the past, but she’s eager to learn what she can from the other women. For the most part, they are not eager teachers.

The book, like the lives of the women, has no breaks — no chapters, no blank lines separating one passage from another. The writing, rather spare, works in concert with descriptions of the tedious lives of the women to immerse the reader in the dreary world.

The book takes an abrupt turn when the men abandon their positions just when they are delivering food into the cage, allowing the women to escape confinement. However, it’s not at all clear what the women are escaping from; nor is it clear where they are escaping to.

There’s obviously much more to say about this, but I’ll stop here so as not to spoil it for other readers. I will say, though, that while I found the reading tedious at times, I certainly felt myself to be living in a dystopian world.

It seems to me that I think the best book I’ve read on writing is usually the book on writing that I’ve read most recently. That’s probably an overstatement, but it’s true that I find something new and insightful in virtually every book unpacking the writing task. But a version of this general claim seems particularly apt in this case: I think that Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story is the best book I’ve read on writing the personal essay.

I’ve already noted the central point that gives the book its title:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say (p. 13).

Gornick adds to that gem the point that the person writing a personal narrative needs to find a way somehow to step out of the stream of experience in order to find the narrator capable of capturing the insight to be shared. “How does the writer of personal narrative pull from his or her own boring, agaitated self the truth speaker who will tell the story that needs to be told?”

What I liked best in this book is the collection of deep dives into essays by writers who managed this particularly well: essays by writers like Joan Dideon, Harry Crews, and Edward Hoagland. (As an aside, I’ll say that it was also great to learn about essayists like Crews and Hoagland whose work I hadn’t known before reading this book.) She also includes extended quotations from essayists to illustrate the points that she makes.

All in all, I think this is the best book I’ve read that focuses on how to write an effective personal essay. (Or did I already say that?)

I’m combining my notes about these two essay collections. Though they are quite different from each other in style, both of them exhibit the power of Erpenbeck’s use of language.

Things that Disappear is a collection of brief newspaper columns that Erpenbeck wrote in 2009. As the title indicates, she’s writing about the contingent and the ephemeral. Earlier this fall I wrote a post incorporating her account of a story about leaving possessions behind. While I focused in my post on the value of letting go of possessions, Erpenbeck starts with the observation that she seems to lose something almost every time she takes a trip or moves from one house to another. In another essay she observes that useful objects seem to disappear when they are discarded — the Berlin Sanitation Department designates a discarded wardrobe as “wood” and a bicycle as “steel,” indicating that the object’s place in the world has changed. She writes about the distance between her and her young child when she leaves on a work trip. She writes about the surprise of disappearing youth, and how losing those whom we love, one friend at a time, reminds us of our approaching death. The last essay in the collection, entitled “The Author,” is especially brief, so brief that I can include all of it in these notes: “Surely you’ve also heard the theory that the author is disap…”

Not a Novel is a collection of longer essays, organized under the three major headings “Life,” “Literature and Music,” and “Society.” The headings work well enough, though I find the organization a bit uneven. Isn’t “life” much more broad than “Literature and Music”? Isn’t the latter part of the former? (I see that this English collection omits essays and categories included in a much larger German collection. Perhaps the organization made more sense in the German edition.) Setting that minor quibble aside, Erpenbeck’s powerful langauge comes through in these pieces. I found her account of immigrants and associated controversies particularly interesting, and not only because much of this writing is based on the interviews of immigrants she conducted while writing the novel Go, Went, Gone. The fact that I’m reading this novel now made her account of immigrants in these essays particularly striking.

Several of these essays are speeches that Erpenbeck in response to various literary awards she’s received. In those, she reflects on particular novels and short stories that she’s written and makes larger points about rhetorical practice and style. Consider, for example, that the fiction writer leaves many things unsaid, expecting the writer to construct the larger world in which the fictional characters live and act. “As paradoxical as it may seem: The untold side of a story can weigh even heavier in a reader’s mind than its twin, the hollow form of a story that is actually told.”

She raises questions about the nature of freedom — I say, for example, that these are the things that I believe, but I have to acknowledge that those beliefs have been shaped by my upbringing, by many conversations with friends, family members, teachers, and others. Where does their influence stop and my independent will begin?

It’s no surprise to me that I’ve included several quotations from Erpenbeck’s writing as commonplace entries in this blog. Reading her work — both her fiction and her essays — forces me to think alongside her.