Category Archives: Reading

“The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions.”

–

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain

//

This reads like a thriller. The focus on the Sacklers humans involved make it very readable, and among others, the points made that stick out to me are: (1) the playbook for Librium in the 1960s – claiming that withdrawal is not a sign of dependence but intensification of the underlying condition, thus justifying a higher dose of Librium; abuse comes from using the drug in non-intended ways: blame the user, not the drug – was used for Oxycontin decades later. And it worked for the Sacklers again, for decades. (2) the timeline. Oxycontin came into the market in the early 90s, and it was only in 2018 that the more serious repercussions came in when the Massachusetts AG decided to personally name the Sacklers as defendants. The multi-district litigation eventually culminated in the Sacklers stepping down, and a settlement sum in 2021 from Purdue Pharma that exceeded $4b. But, and there is a but, Purdue Pharma had already pled guilty in 2008 for lesser offences (pertaining to how they marketed the drug) and yet, it continued to sell the drug and in the 2010s also entered various other markets.

The number of years this went on for is quite staggering. But investigation and litigation can take time, especially if a litigant manages to get a court order for documents to be sealed/ destroyed upon the resolution of a case. Richard Sackler’s deposition in a settled case was somehow unearthed, and reading a transcript may have less impact. Transcripts cannot convey tone or facial expressions. I was very amused to learn that John Oliver hired actors to play Sackler and read out the transcript.

Books here are only listed if I’ve completed them; recommended titles are in bold.

//

The Psychology of Money
Anxious People
The Midnight Library
Look Alive Out There
The Space Between Us
The Secrets Between Us
No Filter
Interior Chinatown
Bark
Goodbye Things
Klara and The Sun
26 Marathons
From The Belly of the Cat
The Happy Runner
Fashionopolis
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Boundless
Nomadland
Think Again
Running: Cheaper Than Therapy: A Celebration of Running
The Tyranny of Merit
Killing Commendatore
Kicksology
Lost Connections
Heaven
Anthro-vision
Simply Invest
The Anthropocene Reviewed
The Great Indoors
Did You Ever Have a Family?
Land of Big Numbers
At Home
Spy Family
The Practice of Not Thinking
Four Thousand Weeks
Practical Magic
The Book of Form and Emptiness
Up Close with Lee Kuan Yew
Blockchain Chicken Farm
How to Do Nothing

Total:
41 books: 16 fiction

“This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
―
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash

//

This book has never gotten on my radar. It is pretty cool that a book published in the early 90s speaks of augmented / virtual reality, a metaverse, and a virus pandemic that ties physical illness to a change in the brain structure. Is this caused by a virus, a drug or religion? Eerily relevant and still readable in 2021. The book abruptly speeds up towards the end, but overall, still a gripping book. Cyberpunk is quite a fun genre.

Repression is not silence, and is not “repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent and critique banal and ridiculous.”

Context collapse

“Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we’re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context.”

“In the last chapter, I try to imagine a utopian social network that could somehow hold all of this. I use the lens of the human bodily need for spatial and temporal context to understand the violence of “context collapse” online and propose a kind of “context collection” in its place. Understanding that meaningful ideas require incubation time and space, I look both to noncommercial decentralized networks and the continued importance of private communication and in-person meetings. I suggest that we withdraw our attention and use it instead to restore the biological and cultural ecosystems where we forge meaningful identities, both individual and collective.”
―
Jenny Odell
How to Do Nothing

//

The book meanders along in its own way, is not really trying to tell you how to do nothing, and instead examines how we have let the capitalist manager’s ideas of productivity taken over our attention. The book has somewhat of a misleading title or perhaps it is meant to attract attention. Odell does not mean for you to do nothing. Because if you withdraw entirely from society, you cannot make change or make things better for yourself. What Odell means by doing nothing is to disengage from attention economy, and engage in another framework e.g. speak to friends in person, engage in community, go take a walk and develop a sense of place. (She talks quite a lot about birds and birdwatching, which may or may not interest you.)

I especially appreciate the reminder that repression need not be by way of disallowing speech. Because living in this day and age, we know that by setting chatter atwitter, you can block discussion, create fatigue… It made me reconsider what I choose to read (Twitter, RSS, Reddit), and whether I have unwittingly withdrew too much. Perhaps this book started me back on keeping a blog.