I adored Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant.

One of the great things about books is that it lets you see the world from a different set of eyes and experiences.

I highly recommend, "Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates." It's worth every minute of your time.

How did you like Between the World and Me? I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list and I really enjoy TNC's writing.

You should check out Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me." It's an interesting discussion of the above -- and somewhat more nuanced than would be possible in Hacker News comments.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25489625-between-the-wor...

Fun coincidence, I’m reading “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and I just picked it back up and read:

“... young students like me who confused agitprop with hard study.”

I read Ta-Nehisi_Coates' "Between the World and Me" right after Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" and felt such shame that so little has changed in America between the two.

I felt like I read the same book twice.

Sounds like you're putting the blame on black people.

I recommend you read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisis Coates.

Between the World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Reading about the abject fear and death in which he grew up really helped me get a tiny insight into institutional racism's effects. I can't fully comprehend the entirety of the black American experience, but that book helped me gain a small glimpse.

On this note... the books I've found most interesting over the last couple years are ones that expand my mind to a viewpoint or a perspective of another people group that is different than my own.

Two very different books but, Between the World and Me, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia both made me think in ways I cant quite describe.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me

"It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States."

I started reading it and couldn't put it down.

Breaking news : the remaking of journalism and why it matters now – Rusbridger, Alan

From the editor of The Guardian for the last 20 years, a fascinating look at the move from traditional print to online news.

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The perfect weapon : war, sabotage, and fear in the cyber age – Sanger, David E.

The subtitle says it all. From that I’m now reading ‘Click Here to Kill Everybody’ by Schneier. Enjoying it so far.

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The world as it is : a memoir of the Obama White House
— Rhodes, Benjamin J.

Another obvious one based on the title.

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As a side note, join your local library, people. None of this cost me a penny. I hope you still have a library wherever you live. Ours (Melbourne City Library Service) is just magnificent.

Ok, this is fascinating. Even beyond escaping my own echo chamber, it's really neat to escape other echo chambers.

Let's escape the woke bubble:

  1. How to Be an Antiracist 
  2. White Fagility 
  3. Between the World and Me

The books it recommends are pretty diverse - Maya Angelou to Peter Drucker to Plato.

Or how about the Trump bubble:

  1. Time to Get Tough 
  2. Righteous Indignation 
  3. Going Rogue

Lots of religion here. What if we escape atheism?

  1. Letter to a Christian Nation 
  2. God is Not Great 
  3. The God Delusion

Hmm. Not so much religion here... but we got Aldous Huxley, Bruce Li and Richard Feynmann.

I think... I've got a lot of reading to do. I LOVE this tool.

"Between the world and me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"A people's history of the United States" by Howard Zinn

When there is a book that "everyone is talking about" (i.e Oprah or the New Yorker or whatever) it's usually a memoir of someone's difficult life, usually a member of a declared "oppressed" group. For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me."

I read that book. It's not even supposed to be enjoyable, and it's not really great writing or something that I feel like I need to tell my friends about. Essentially it's stuff you feel like you "should" read rather than you "want" to read. Like vegetables instead of ice cream. The ice cream is the page turning thrillers where some guy is beating up criminals in parking garages and chasing art thieves around the world.

The book industry puts its highest profile promotion on vegetables instead of ice cream.

Neither of those links/graphs show that inequality had decreased. His argument is based on the false assumption that one-hump is more equal than two.

Here are some graphs that argue the other way: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequali.... Note that the decrease in inequality after WW2 is due to the New Deal and other massive social welfare programs that redistributed wealth. The moment we stopped doing that inequality started growing again.

The only way to counter the Matthew Effect is to change the feedback loop. The post-WW2 programs and post-civil rights movement Affirmative Action programs (coincidentally affirmed by SCOTUS today) are examples of doing just that. I'll not make an argument for the merits of desegregating society here, but the Parable of the Polygons (http://ncase.me/polygons) is another example of how deliberate counteractions are the only way to change the "natural" course of things. Human culture (including evolving social mores, laws and science) is a prime example of changing the natural course of things. Laissez-faire doesn't always work.

How do such decisions cause the Matthew Effect? In so many ways! But here's one to get you started: Black Americans are clearly less advantaged than white Americans. That translates to white Americans growing up in a safer environment, being better educated, having more connections to other advantaged people, not being constantly violated (I highly recommend you read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me) the way blacks are -- I could go on and on. So of course whites will more often be "better hires" from a pure business perspective. So more whites get hired for better jobs. So guess whose children get to live in better neighborhoods, get to go to better schools, and all the other advantages I listed earlier? That is the Matthew Effect.

If you don't think DE&I is important, than of course you think it's "off the rails" to have 20 people spending time and effort on it. If you do think it's important, then there'd be nothing "off the rails" about having mass participation in it.

Oddly, according to the coverage, the owners had previously said publicly and internally that they thought it was important.

The owners had previously been very publicly and assertively taking very "liberal" and "progressive" positions. They have been on the "wrong" side of the "culture wars" for those who think it's "off the rails" to be spending signficant time and effort on DE&I. "Hansson had encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow... Both founders are also active — and occasionally hyperactive — on Twitter, where they regularly advocate for mainstream liberal and progressive views on social issues."

I wonder how it will feel to them to become the darlings of people very opposed to those positions they had been taking, as seen in these threads. I wonder if the owners will become born-again to the right-wing side of the "culture wars".

Best-selling authors seem to be aware of this trend, because I keep coming across excellent but very, very short non-fiction books. Among those I can remember reading and would recommend, these are published in the past <5 years and are <150 pages (or <5 hour audiobook):

- Discrimination and Disparities By: Thomas Sowell

- A Colony in a Nation: Chris Hayes

- Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates

(three very different takes on race relations in America)

- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: Neil deGrasse Tyson

- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics: Carlo Rovelli

- When Breath Becomes Air: Paul Kalanithi

- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: Timothy Snyder

- Requiem for the American Dream: The Principles of Concentrated Wealth and Power: Noam Chomsky

- Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: Jaron Lanier

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For all the people in this thread who don't feel like they have solid ground to stand on one way or another (more specifically, other me's, middle class white dudes who are bothered by this but don't even know how to start approaching the situation), this book is single-handedly the best resource I've ever come across - "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

https://www.amazon.com/Between-World-Me-Ta-Nehisi-Coates/dp/...

Give it a read/listen. It's incredible how many things will click into place, how drastically different you'll perceive the world before and after.

Between The World and Me spent over 100 weeks in the NYT bestseller list. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the other book cited, wrote another book, How To Be An Antiracist, which was a bestselling book in the U.S. 2020. Another bestselling book in this vein was White Fragility. Check out the sales figures from May-June here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/22/sales-o...