So no, listening to a book club selection is not cheating. It’s not even cheating to listen while you’re at your child’s soccer game (at least not as far as the book is concerned). You’ll just get different things out of the experience. And different books invite different ways that you want to read them: As the audio format grows more popular, authors are writing more works specifically meant to be heard.
Our richest experiences will come not from treating print and audio interchangeably, but from understanding the differences between them and figuring out how to use them to our advantage — all in the service of hearing what writers are actually trying to tell us.
There is plenty of alarm about the unprecedented aging of humanity. Since 1950, the median age in developed countries has jumped from 28 to 40, and is expected to reach 44 by mid-century. The percentage of citizens age 65 and older is expanding accordingly, from less than 10 percent in 1950 in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan to a respective 20, 30, and 40 percent by 2050. The fear is that, as baby boomers like me march lockstep into “retirement age” (the first of us crested that hill in 2011), there will be fewer young workers to support us old folk, which will curb spending, strain the healthcare system, and drain Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Yet it’s hard to reconcile this chilling prediction with my own experience. Thanks to genetic luck and some sensible lifestyle habits—I walk two miles every day, quit smoking decades ago, and have never set foot inside a fast food joint—I’m in as good or better shape than ever. I hike and travel, and still have the energy to work 50- to 60-hour weeks. I have a supportive network of family and friends, and a thriving career doing what I love. No longer crippled by the toxic insecurities of my youth, I’m the happiest and most fulfilled I’ve been in my life. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not even close to being put out to pasture.
There’s a photo that circulates on social media around the holidays of an American soldier in Afghanistan standing watch at an outpost. In the frame, you see his rifle, binoculars, and thermal scope resting atop the sandbags at his position, adjacent to an uneaten plate of holiday dinner. The photo was taken on Thanksgiving Day in 2009 in the northwest corner of Paktika province, but when flattened into a shareable image for social-media prayers and hectoring, it might as well be a Christmas dinner, too. If you don’t know which details to scrutinize, you might think it had happened recently.
I know the facts behind this image because I was in that same unit and on that same deployment nearly 10 years ago. And, in the intervening decade since that photo was taken, there hasn’t been a holiday season in which the United States was not at war. This is a fact so utterly banal that it barely warrants mention anymore. When that photo was taken, we’d been at war in Afghanistan for almost as long as the Soviet Union was.
If you’re in the military, holidays don’t matter. And it really doesn’t matter if your mission is feasible or sensible or justifiable, if you are serving under a Democrat or a Republican, you are equally hostage to symbolism and the expendability of bodies and lives in service thereof.
When General Motors laid off more than 6,000 workers days after Thanksgiving, John Patrick Leary, the author of the new book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, tweeted out part of GM CEO Mary Barra’s statement. “The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future,” she said. Leary added a line of commentary to of Barra’s statement: “Language was pronounced dead at the scene.”
Why should we pay attention to the particular words used to describe, and justify, the regularly scheduled “disruptions” of late capitalism? Published last week by Haymarket Books, Leary’s Keywords explores the regime of late-capitalist language: a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that he argues promulgate values friendly to corporations (hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies) over those friendly to human beings (democracy, solidarity, and scrutiny of new technologies’ impact on people and the planet).
Renton’s “Those Wild Wyndhams” is a dense but deliciously readable examination of the lives and foibles of turn-of-the-century British social and political elites. It succeeds mightily. Yet there is something else here. The book is a powerful reminder that when it comes to difficult parents, silly crushes, break-up angst, marital mistakes and victories, the joys and sorrows of having children and jagged career paths, privileged women are no less fortunate or unfortunate than their more ordinary sisters.