"For Nguyen, the point — and pleasure — of games is play, not efficiency; a person who simply wants to catch more fish would trade Nguyen’s feathery hand-tied flies..."

"... for a big net or a blast of dynamite.... Nguyen, whose day job is as a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, contrasts the delightful thrill of playing games like basketball, The Legend of Zelda and Dungeons & Dragons with the demoralizing pursuit of university rankings, page views and social media likes: 'Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?'... Nguyen, 48... brought out various toys...yo-yos, spin tops, a Japanese ball-and-cup thingumajig known as a kendama.... 'All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,' Nguyen said at one point. 'Every time you’re yo-yoing, you’re like, If I change my angle this much, or if I pull a little bit here, or if I drop it, oh, then it works!' The fact that the stakes are so low is not a deficit of the yo-yo (or the kendama, or D&D, or fly-fishing); low stakes are part of the point, allowing us to move from one game to another. Nguyen argues that problems emerge when the stakes become all-consuming, taking over our sense of self and dictating what we should value...."

I'm reading "Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore/In a new book, C. Thi Nguyen looks to his personal passions — from video games to yo-yoing — to illuminate the downside of our increasingly gamified world" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT)(gift link).

I see the connection to blogging. I'm going to read Nguyen's book, "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" (commission earned).

I thought the article was going to have something in it about how sports betting ruins the fun of spectator sports, but no. Is that in the book? I can tell you that the word "football" does not appear in the book and "baseball" only appears in the context of a baseball cap worn by Tsukasa Takatsu, "a minor saint, beloved of a very tiny sect of passionate yo-yo players."

ADDED: Nguyen sees low stakes as a positive force, but the most famous thing anyone ever said about low stakes is Sayre's law: Responding to "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake," Sayre quipped: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Usually restated as: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." 

"He keeps repeating the argument that 'purpose-related tools' can make 'our democracy more workable.'"

"The word 'workable' is used so many times in the book that it becomes a poignant refrain — that of an optimistic, pragmatic liberal jurist who wants to believe that if only he is clear enough, he can get his fellow justices to recognize that they are ultimately committed to the same thing. Does Breyer, who is so attuned to the irreducible complexity of the world outside the Supreme Court, truly believe that the world inside is so simple? Given his decades of experience, I find it hard to imagine he does — but then he still seems flummoxed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing turn. At his most baffled, he starts firing off strings of rhetorical questions, asking plaintively how anyone could ever want 'a world in which no governmental effort is made to cure environmental, medical or safety-related ills?'"

Writes the NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai, in "The Retired Justice Who Doesn’t Understand the Supreme Court/Stephen Breyer means well. Why is his new book, 'Reading the Constitution,'' so exasperating?"

Reasons why I'm not making an Amazon link for the book:

"At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual..."

"... has to dial it up to 11. 'Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,' he declares, 'civilization will never become multiplanetary.' There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean? Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger 'demon mode' — a mind-set that 'causes a lot of chaos.' She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done...."

Writes Jennifer Szalai, in "Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People. Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial 'man-child' with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match" (NYT).

"Gajda says that she used to be uncomfortable with the idea that courts could balance protections for an individual’s dignity and liberty with protections for a free press and free speech..."

"... as a journalist, she was worried that an overzealous judiciary might curtail the reporting of real news that powerful interests were keen to keep secret. Now she seems to see things differently, placing what seems to me a surprising amount of faith in the judicial branch and even Facebook’s Oversight Board, of all things, to generate norms that balance speech with privacy and 'unite the world as one.'"

From "‘Seek and Hide’ Grapples With the Complexity of the Right to Privacy/The law professor Amy Gajda writes about the tug of war between the right to know and the right to be let alone" — a NYT book review by Jennifer Szalai.

I hope someday you'll join us/And the world will live as one....

"This is a pattern in Barr’s book: He nitpicks his way to desired conclusions by carefully navigating a lawyerly path around finely drawn distinctions, all the while lobbing bomblets at anyone he defines as an enemy."

"'For all his urbane affect, Obama was still the left-wing agitator who had patiently steered the Democratic Party toward an illiberal, identity-obsessed progressivism,' Barr writes; no doubt actual 'left-wing agitators,' who have regularly denounced Obama for centrism, would like to have a word. Barr’s version of Trump, meanwhile, contains multitudes: The former president may have 'an imprecise and discursive speaking style,' even a tendency for 'madcap rhetoric,' but Barr also believes Trump has 'a deep intuitive appreciation of the importance of religion to the health of our nation.'

"In his illuminating book 'The Ministry of Truth' a biography of '1984' and its influence, Dorian Lynskey makes a persuasive case that..."

"... the novel is structured in a way that heightens its ambiguity. Yes, the brute force of totalitarianism is an inextricable theme, but the novel’s narration — with its texts within texts — also enacts its own phantasmagoria, a world where both everything is true and nothing is true. Lynskey credits Orwell with anticipating what Hannah Arendt would describe in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism,' published a year after Orwell died: 'The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.'"

From "How ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose Insult" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT). 

The top-rated comment over there is: "To accuse the opposition of being Orwellian while actually being Orwellian has become the stock and trade of the right. How Orwellian." 

Does it make sense to refer to a "biography" of a book? Well, first, it's in the book's subtitle, "The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." Second, "bio" means life, so we can understand the extended use of the term: It means that the book has a life. Third, I suspect the usage is explained in the book, and it's my blogging practice to buy the book in Kindle form so I can do a search when I have a question of this magnitude. 

But, wait. I'm reading the OED definition of "biography": "A written account of the life of an individual, esp. a historical or public figure; (also) a brief profile of a person's life or work. Later more generally: a themed narrative history of a specific subject in any of various written, recorded, or visual media." An example of that more general use is the 1999 book title: " H2O: a biography of water." And there's an 1848 book title: "The plant; a biography." 

So I don't have to buy the book, but I will. Such is my dedication to this blog. Here's the closest thing to an explanation for the use of the concept "biography" to refer to a book about a book:

There have been several biographies of George Orwell and some academic studies of his book’s intellectual context but never an attempt to merge the two streams into one narrative, while also exploring the book’s afterlife. I am interested in Orwell’s life primarily as a means to illuminate the experiences and ideas that nourished this very personal nightmare in which everything he prized was systematically destroyed: honesty, decency, fairness, memory, history, clarity, privacy, common sense, sanity, England, and love....

"Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry..."

"... but we’re also the only species that has consciously perpetrated genocides. Cats, unlike humans, don’t trick themselves into believing they are saviors, wreaking havoc in the process. 'When cats are not hunting or mating, eating or playing, they sleep,' Gray writes. 'There is no inner anguish that forces them into constant activity.'...We are human supremacists whose vanity and moralism and tortured ambivalence make us uniquely unhappy and destructive. 'While cats have nothing to learn from us,' he writes, 'we can learn from them how to lighten the load that comes with being human.'...  Liberals like to think that empathy is a great virtue, he says, and that progress is not only possible but morally necessary, but people would be better off cultivating a catlike indifference.... He marvels that cats are 'arch-realists' who know when not to bother: 'Faced with human folly, they simply walk away.'"

From "Want the Good Life? This Philosopher Suggests Learning From Cats" by Jennifer Szalai, reviewing "Feline Philosophy/Cats and the Meaning of Life" by John Gray.

The neutrality of cats. I'll call it mewtrality. And, no, it's not cruel mewtrality. From the book:

"His almost zealous commitment to moderation rankled some progressives, who had assumed that his soaring campaign rhetoric meant he was a visionary bent on overturning the status quo."

"Whenever he felt stuck, he fell back on empathy and 'process.' They sound like incommensurate traits — one is inventive and literary, the other is bland and technocratic. But for Obama — who in this book demonstrates an almost compulsive tendency to imagine himself into the lives of others (whether it’s Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or, in one passage, a Somali pirate) — a sound process 'was born of necessity.' Decisions that were made after taking into account a variety of perspectives reassured him that he wasn’t blinkered by his own...."

I'm reading "In ‘A Promised Land,’ Barack Obama Thinks — and Thinks Some More — Over His First Term" (NYT). This new book review, by the regular NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai. 

The book is 700 pages long and only goes up to May 2011 — which means it includes "his roasting of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30 and the killing of Osama bin Laden the day after" but does not reach "the 2016 election, his abdication of his own 'red line' in Syria, the entrenchment of the surveillance state and a discussion of drone strikes." But, Szalai assures us, "This isn’t to say that 'A Promised Land' reads like a dodge." Ironically, that reads like a dodge. Szalai could be thinking that cutting off at May 2011 was a dodge, but the dodge was well-shrouded in contemplative prose so that it doesn't read like a dodge.

John Bolton's book "has been written with so little discernible attention to style and narrative form that he apparently presumes an audience that is hanging on his every word."

According to the review in the NYT, written by Jennifer Szalai.

... Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies, both abroad (Iran, North Korea) and at home (the media, “the High-Minded,” the former defense secretary Jim Mattis). The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged....