I dived in anticipation into this book after finishing Educated because I figured it will encompass the very same tales of insularity and survival that I so liked. It’s little surprise then that I loved this book, maybe even more than Educated. Every tale Jeanette recounted sounds plausible; her parents not demonic spawns of Satan, albeit selfish, narcissistic and a huge lying scumbag at times. It’s not a warning tale or a series of vignettes told from the moral high-ground of a memoirist. Just a tale of a little girl growing up to a couple of parochial (and questionable) parents – how she adapted then triumphed the cards of life she has been dealt, escaping to New York City to carve out a new life for herself. There are no miracles, Deus ex Machina. However poor one may be, with hard work, grit and some bit of resourcefulness, anyone can stave off poverty. Although the Walls family is smart and white (read: therefore “privileged”), their poverty was self-inflicted. Both parents refused to work, disregarding their parental duties to engage in their individual vices – the Dad in women, booze and gambling; the Mum in her ‘passion’ in painting and a conveniently-placed “sugar addiction”, which reads to me more like a selfish indulgence in gluttony at the expense of her children’s hunger.

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.” Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town — and the family — Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents’ betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

Excerpts

Eventually, even Mom acknowledged that I’d done all right. “No one expected you to amount to much,” she told me. “Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.”

Shortly after the wedding, Mom’s brother, my uncle Jim, died in Arizona. Mom came to
the apartment to give me the news and to ask a favor. “We need to buy Jim’s land,” she said.
Mom and her brother had each inherited half of the West Texas land that had been owned by their father. The whole time we kids were growing up, Mom had been mysteriously vague about how big and how valuable this land was, but I had the impression that it was a few hundred acres of more or less uninhabitable desert, miles from any road.
“We need to keep that land in the family,” Mom told me. “It’s important for sentimental reasons.”
“Let’s see if we can buy it, then,” I said. “How much will it cost?”
“You can borrow the money from Eric now that he’s your husband,” Mom said.
“I’ve got a little money,” I said. “How much will it cost?” I’d read somewhere that off-road land in parched West Texas sold for as little as a hundred dollars an acre.
“You can borrow from Eric,” Mom said again.
“Well, how much?”
“A million dollars.”
“What?”
“A million dollars.”
“But Uncle Jim’s land is the same size as your land,” I said. I was speaking slowly, because I wanted to make sure I understood the implications of what Mom had just told me. “You each inherited half of Grandpa Smith’s land.”
“More or less,” Mom said.
“So if Uncle Jim’s land is worth a million dollars, that means your land is worth a million dollars.”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s the same size as his.”
“I don’t know how much it’s worth, because I never had it appraised. I was never going to sell it. My father taught me you never sell land. That’s why we have to buy Uncle Jim’s land. We have to keep it in the family.”
“You mean you own land worth a million dollars?” I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Had all those years, as well as Mom and Dad’s time on the street not to mention their current life in an abandoned tenement been a caprice inflicted on us by Mom? Could she have solved our financial problems by selling this land she never even saw? But she avoided my questions, and it became clear that to Mom, holding on to land was not so much an investment strategy as it was an article of faith, a revealed truth as deeply felt and incontestable to her as Catholicism. And for the life of me, I could not get her to tell me how much the land was worth.
“I told you I don’t know,” she said.
“Then tell me how many acres it is, and where exactly it is, and I’ll find out how much an acre of land is going for in that area.” I wasn’t interested in her money; I just wanted to know needed to know the answer to my question: How much was that freaking land worth? Maybe she truly didn’t know. Maybe she was afraid to find out. Maybe she was afraid of what we’d all think if we knew. But instead of answering me, she kept repeating that it was important to keep Uncle Jim’s land that had belonged to her father and his father and his father before that in the family.
“Mom, I can’t ask Eric for a million dollars.”
“Jeannette, I haven’t asked you for a lot of favors, but I’m asking you for one now. I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important. But this is important.”
I told Mom I didn’t think Eric would lend me a million dollars to buy some land in Texas, and even if he would, I wouldn’t borrow it from him. “It’s too much money,” I said. “What would I do with the land?”
“Keep it in the family.”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” I said. “I’ve never even seen that land.”
“Jeannette,” Mom said when she had accepted the fact that she would not get her way. “I’m deeply disappointed in you.

This book has a rather misleading title; it seemed to promise lessons in which one can become an outlier, but NO it does the exact opposite. The better title would be Determinism – The Role of Culture and Circumstance in Success.

I don’t mind it, but it sure surprise me that people actually like and praise such a defeatist book!

I liked that this book delved into quite a bit of statistics and examples to support the claims put forth in the book such that readers can better grasp and accept them. While some conclusions seem to have been drawn from tenuous bases, it’s nonetheless a good, fast read for those who enjoy nonfiction.

Accumulative Advantage 

Youth hockey teams comprise a disproportionate number of players born earlier in the year because these are the same people who has developed physically more so than those born later in the year. This small advantage affords them the opportunity to learn and train under the professional guidance, thus improving their skills. This loop of reinforcement ultimately makes them the best at their field, not because they are the most skilled, but because they have had the most opportunity to train.

The same can be said of the Tech geniuses we know today, from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates, who had unparalleled access to mainframe computers at a time when even University professors from the major leagues do not.

Culture 

I cannot take him seriously when Gladwell explains that Asians are good at mathematics by dint of their ancestral rice agriculture background, particularly the fact that rice cultivation requires more work ethic than Western wheat agriculture. Umm, you’re forgetting the fact that many, if not most, Asians did not come from rice cultivation ancestry. Asians are just hardworking because their culture espouse diligence as a virtue, full stop.

Loved the chapter on Korean airline pilots, which shows us that success in the airline industry necessitates a non-deference culture. When the first pilot is the co-pilot’s superior in rank, the latter may not feel comfortable getting their say in. This culture of deference persists even in the face of mortal danger, which led to the multiple fatal crashing of Korean planes. The entire chapter was extremely heartbreaking, especially when the co-pilot uttered his last word in response to the air traffic control’s query on whether the plane has sufficient fuel to navigate a prolonged landing: “I think he’s angry.”

Fuck. 

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Excerpts 

Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still—and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.
The second implication of the hockey example is that the systems we set up to determine who gets ahead aren’t particularly efficient. We think that starting all-star leagues and gifted programs as early as possible is the best way of ensuring that no talent slips through the cracks. But take a look again at that roster for the Czech Republic soccer team. There are no players born in July, October, November, or December, and only one each in August and September. Those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of the sport. The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered.

If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age, then who would be in the best position to take advantage of it? The same principles apply here that applied to the era of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
“If you’re too old in nineteen seventy-five, then you’d already have a job at IBM out of college, and once people started at IBM, they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world,” says Nathan Myhrvold, who was a top executive at Microsoft for many years. “You had this multibillion-dollar company making mainframes, and if you were part of that, you’d think, Why screw around with these little pathetic computers? That was the computer industry to those people, and it had nothing to do with this new revolution. They were blinded by that being the only vision of computing. They made a nice living. It’s just that there was no opportunity to become a zillionaire and make an impact on the world.”
If you were more than a few years out of college in 1975, then you belonged to the old paradigm. You had just bought a house. You’re married. A baby is on the way. You’re in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit. So let’s rule out all those born before, say, 1952.
At the same time, though, you don’t want to be too young. You really want to get in on the ground floor, right in 1975, and you can’t do that if you’re still in high school. So let’s also rule out anyone born after, say, 1958. The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it. Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955.
There is an easy way to test this theory. When was Bill Gates born?
Bill Gates: October 28, 1955
That’s the perfect birth date! Gates is the hockey player born on January 1. Gates’s best friend at Lakeside was Paul Allen. He also hung out in the computer room with Gates and shared those long evenings at ISI and C-Cubed. Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates. When was Paul Allen born?
Paul Allen: January 21, 1953
The third-richest man at Microsoft is the one who has been running the company on a day-to-day basis since 2000, one of the most respected executives in the software world, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer’s birth date?
Steve Ballmer: March 24, 1956
Let’s not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates: Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Computer. Unlike Gates, Jobs wasn’t from a rich family and he didn’t go to Michigan, like Joy. But it doesn’t take much investigation of his upbringing to realize that he had his Hamburg too. He grew up in Mountain View, California, just south of San Francisco, which is the absolute epicenter of Silicon Valley. His neighborhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard, then as now one of the most important electronics firms in the world. As a teenager he prowled the flea markets of Mountain View, where electronics hobbyists and tinkerers sold spare parts. Jobs came of age breathing the air of the very business he would later dominate.
This paragraph from Accidental Millionaire, one of the many Jobs biographies, gives us a sense of how extraordinary his childhood experiences were. Jobs
attended evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists. The talks were about the latest advances in electronics and Jobs, exercising a style that was a trademark of his personality, collared Hewlett-Packard engineers and drew additional information from them. Once he even called Bill Hewlett, one of the company’s founders, to request parts. Jobs not only received the parts he asked for, he managed to wrangle a summer job. Jobs worked on an assembly line to build computers and was so fascinated that he tried to design his own…
Wait. Bill Hewlett gave him spare parts? That’s on a par with Bill Gates getting unlimited access to a time-share terminal at age thirteen. It’s as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani. And when was Jobs born?
Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955
Another of the pioneers of the software revolution was Eric Schmidt. He ran Novell, one of Silicon Valley’s most important software firms, and in 2001, he became the chief executive officer of Google. Birth date?
Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955
I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. Some weren’t, just as not every business titan in the United States was born in the mid-1830s. But there are very clearly patterns here, and what’s striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Interesting. I have nothing to say about this book because it is exactly what it proclaims to be. I found some of the facts laid out in the book quite interesting, and a small handful insightful. There’s nothing particularly deep about the book, just facts that you already know, buttressed by statistics and vignettes.

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Excerpts

At an Apple event in January 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad:
What this device does is extraordinary . . . It offers the best way to browse the web; way better than a laptop and way better than a smartphone . . . It’s an incredible experience . . . It’s phenomenal for mail; it’s a dream to type on.
For ninety minutes, Jobs explained why the iPad was the best way to look at photos, listen to music, take classes on iTunes U, browse Facebook, play games, and navigate thousands of apps. He believed everyone should own an iPad.
But he refused to let his kids use the device.
—
In late 2010, Jobs told New York Times journalist Nick Bilton that his children had never used the iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use in the home.” Bilton discovered that other tech giants imposed similar restrictions. Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, enforced strict time limits on every device in his home, “because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand.” His five children were never allowed to use screens in their bedrooms. Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, bought hundreds of books for his two young sons, but refused to give them an iPad.

It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.

This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes? Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion? Many experts both within and beyond the world of tech have shared similar perspectives with me. Several video game designers told me they avoided the notoriously addictive game World of Warcraft; an exercise addiction psychologist called fitness watches dangerous—“the dumbest things in the world”—and swore she’d never buy one; and the founder of an Internet addiction clinic told me she avoids gadgets newer than three years old. She has never used her phone’s ringer, and deliberately “misplaces” her phone so she isn’t tempted to check her email. (I spent two months trying to reach her by email, and succeeded only when she happened to pick up her office landline.) Her favorite computer game is Myst, released in 1993 when computers were still too clunky to handle video graphics. The only reason she was willing to play Myst, she told me, was because her computer froze every half hour and took forever to reboot.

Goals

When you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure.” Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose—so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again.

Reward & Motivation (Gambling)

Before Zeiler could change the world, he had to work out the best way to deliver rewards. One option was to reward every desirable behavior, in the same way that some factory workers are rewarded for every gadget they assemble. Another was to reward those same desirable behaviors on an unpredictable schedule, creating some of the mystery that encourages people to buy lottery tickets. The pigeons had been raised in the lab, so they knew the drill. Each one waddled up to a small button and pecked persistently, hoping that it would release a tray of Purina pigeon pellets. The pigeons were hungry, so these pellets were like manna. During some trials, Zeiler would program the button so it delivered food every time the pigeons pecked; during others, he programmed the button so it delivered food only some of the time. Sometimes the pigeons would peck in vain, the button would turn red, and they’d receive nothing but frustration.
When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. If the button doesn’t predict the arrival of food perfectly, the pigeon’s motivation to peck should decline, just as a factory worker’s motivation would decline if you only paid him for some of the gadgets he assembled. But that’s not what happened at all. Like tiny feathered gamblers, the pigeons pecked at the button more feverishly when it released food 50–70 percent of the time. (When Zeiler set the button to produce food only once in every ten pecks, the disheartened pigeons stopped responding altogether.) The results weren’t even close: they pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.
Thirty-seven years after Zeiler published his results, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. Facebook has the power to run human experiments on an unprecedented scale. The site already had two hundred million users at the time—a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like” button. Anyone who has used Facebook knows how the button works: instead of wondering what other people think of your photos and status updates, you get real-time feedback as they click (or don’t click) a little blue-and-white thumbs-up button beneath whatever you post. (Facebook has since introduced other feedback buttons, so you’re able to communicate more complex emotions than simple liking.)
It’s hard to exaggerate how much the “like” button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking subsequently became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friend’s post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support—the online equivalent of laughing at a friend’s joke in public. Likes became so valuable that they spawned a start-up called Lovematically. The app’s founder, Rameet Chawla, posted this introduction on its homepage:
It’s our generation’s crack cocaine. People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions.
I’m talking about Likes.
They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.

In contrast to VR, the physical realm is a long series of losses punctuated by occasional wins. Gamers have to lose from time to time. A game that pays out all the time is no fun at all. When I met with David Goldhill, the C.E.O. of the Game Show Network, he told me a story that illustrates the surprising downsides of winning all the time. Goldhill is a natural storyteller. He radiates competence and reveals an uncanny command of any topic that comes up in conversation. We discussed my hometown, Sydney, and by the end of the conversation I was scribbling notes like a tourist. Goldhill’s story involved a gambler who wins all the time. “The guy thinks he’s in heaven because he wins every single bet. Eventually, though, he realizes that he’s in hell. It’s absolute torture.” The gambler’s been chasing wins all his life, and now that they’re arriving one after another his reason for existing is gone. Goldhill’s story illustrates why variable reinforcement is so powerful. Not because of the occasional wins, but because the experience of coming off a recent loss is deeply motivating.
The best part of any gamble may be the millisecond before the outcome reveals itself. This is the moment of maximum tension, when gamblers are primed to see a winning outcome. We know this from a clever experiment that two psychologists published in 2006. Emily Balcetis and Dave Dunning told a group of Cornell undergrads that they were participating in a juice taste test. Some of them would be lucky enough to try freshly squeezed orange juice, but others would drink a “gelatinous, chunky, green, foul-smelling, somewhat viscous concoction labeled as an ‘organic veggie smoothie.’” As the students inspected each beverage, the experimenter explained that a computer would randomly assign them to drink a tall glass of one or the other. Half the students were told that the computer would present a number if they were assigned to drink the appealing orange juice (and a letter if they were assigned to drink the sludge), while the other half were told the reverse, that the letter spelled salvation and the number spelled doom. The students sat at the computer and waited, a lot like the gamblers waiting for a slot machine to display its outcome.
Eighty-six percent of them rejoiced. The computer had come through with a win!
As you’ve probably gathered, the figure is neither a number nor a letter, but instead an ambiguous hybrid of the number 13 and a capital letter B. The students were so intent on seeing what they hoped to see that their brains resolved the ambiguous figure in their favor. The number thirteen popped out to those who hoped to see a number, and the letter B popped out to those who hoped to see a letter. This phenomenon, called motivated perception, happens automatically all the time. It’s usually hidden to us, but Balcetis and Dunning were clever enough to find a way to unmask the effect.
David Goldhill’s story shows us that gamblers hate to win all the time—but even more than that, they hate losing all the time. If hapless gamblers and gamers and Instagram users saw the world as it really is, they’d see that they lose most of the time. They’d recognize that a string of losses usually foretells more losses, rather than an approaching jackpot, and that the figure above is just as likely to be a letter as it is a number. To make matters worse, many games and gambling experiences are designed to get your hopes up by displaying near wins.

Punishment

Adam Saltsman, who produced an acclaimed indie game called Canabalt in 2009, has written extensively about the ethics of game design. “Predatory games are designed to abuse the way you’re wired,” Saltsman said. “Many of the predatory games of the past five years use what’s known as an energy system. You’re allowed to play the game for five minutes, and then you artificially run out of stuff to do. The game will send you an email in, say, four hours when you can start playing again.” I told Saltsman that the system sounded pretty good to me—it forces gamers to take breaks and encourages kids to do their homework between gaming sessions. But that’s where the predatory part comes in. According to Saltsman, “Game designers began to realize that players would pay one dollar to shorten the wait time, or to increase the amount of energy their avatar would have once the four-hour rest period had passed.” The game ensnares you, like penny auctions and Shubik’s Dollar Auction Game do, and manipulates you into waiting or paying. I came across this predatory device when playing a game called Trivia Crack. If you give the wrong answer several times, you run out of lives, and a dialogue screen gives you a choice: wait for an hour for more lives, or pay ninety-nine cents to continue immediately.
Many games hide these down-the-line charges. They’re free, at first, but later you’re forced to pay in-game fees to continue.

If you’re minutes or even hours deep into the game, the last thing you want to do is admit defeat. You have so much to lose, and your aversion to that sense of loss compels you to feed the machine just one more time, over and over again. You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.

Beginner’s Luck

Many game designers know that beginner’s luck is a powerful hook. Nick Yee, who has a doctorate in communication and studies how games affect players, has written about the role of early rewards in online role-playing games.
One of [the factors that attract people to online role-playing games] is the elaborate rewards cycle inherent in them that works like a carrot on a stick. Rewards are given very quickly in the beginning of the game. You kill a creature with 2–3 hits. You gain a level in 5–10 minutes. And you can gain crafting skill with very little failure. But the intervals between these rewards grow exponentially fairly quickly. Very soon, it takes 5 hours and then 20 hours of game time before you can gain a level. The game works by giving you instantaneous gratification upfront and leading you down a slippery slope.

The Burden of Choice

In the summer of 2014, eight psychologists published a paper in the influential journal Science about how people respond when given an opportunity to embrace ease. In one study they asked a group of undergraduate students to sit quietly for ten or twenty minutes. “Your goal,” they said, “is to entertain yourself with your thoughts as best you can. That is, your goal should be to have a pleasant experience, as opposed to spending the time focusing on everyday activities or negative things.” It’s hard to imagine a psychology experiment being less onerous. (The first experiment I ran, almost fifteen years ago, was designed to measure how people behaved when they were sad. I subjected one hundred students to the scene in The Champ where a young Ricky Schroder cries as his dad, played by Jon Voight, dies in his arms. The scene is regularly voted the “saddest scene in film,” and even the bubbliest students were upset when they left the lab. So asking people to sit quietly with their pleasant thoughts isn’t so bad.)
The experimenters added a twist to the experiment. They hooked the students up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and gave them a sample shock to show them that the experience of being shocked isn’t pleasant. It isn’t agonizing, but it sits somewhere between the pinch of a syringe needle and a bad toothache. Just before leaving the room, the experimenter told the students that the electric shock would be available while they were thinking quietly, that they could experience it again if they wanted to, but that “Whether you do so is completely up to you—it is your choice.”
One student—a male, in case you’re curious—shocked himself one hundred and ninety times. That’s once every six seconds, over and over, for twenty minutes. He was an outlier, but two thirds of all male students and about one in three female students shocked themselves at least once. Many shocked themselves more than once. They’d all experienced the sting of the shock before the experiment, so this wasn’t just curiosity. By their own admission in a questionnaire just minutes earlier they didn’t find the experience pleasant. So they preferred to endure the unpleasantness of a shock to the experience of sitting quietly with their thoughts. In the experimenters’ words, “most people prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.” As thirty thousand books tell us, we may be looking for an easier life on some level—but many of us prefer to break up a period of mild pleasantness with a dose of moderate hardship.
David Goldhill explained why some degree of hardship is essential. “People don’t understand why movie stars are often miserable,” Goldhill said. “Imagine getting the girl every night, and never paying for a meal. A game in which you always win, for most people, is boring.” The game Goldhill described sounds appealing on its surface, but it gets old fast. To some extent we all need losses and difficulties and challenges, because without them the thrill of success weakens gradually with each new victory. That’s why people spend precious chunks of free time doing difficult crosswords and climbing dangerous mountains—because the hardship of the challenge is far more compelling than knowing you’re going to succeed. This sense of hardship is an ingredient in many addictive experiences, including one of the most addictive simple games of all time: Tetris.
That year I saved up and ultimately bought a Game Boy, which is how I came to play Tetris for the first time. It wasn’t as glitzy as some of my other favorites, but like Pajitnov I played for hours at a time. Sometimes, as I drifted off to sleep, I’d imagine the blocks tumbling down to form completed rows—a remarkably common experience known as The Tetris Effect, which affects people who have played any animated game for long periods of time. Nintendo was smart to include the game with their new portable console, because it was easy to learn and very difficult to abandon. I assumed I’d grow tired of Tetris, but sometimes I still play the game today, more than twenty-five years later. It has longevity because it grows with you. It’s easy at first, but as you improve the game gets more difficult. The pieces fall from the top of the screen more quickly, and you have less time to react than you did when you were a novice. This escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps the game engaging long after you’ve mastered its basic moves. Part of what makes this progression pleasurable is that your brain becomes more efficient as you improve. In fact, in 1991 the Guinness Book of Records recognized Tetris as “the first videogame to improve brain functioning and efficiency.” That claim was based on research by a psychiatrist named Richard Haier, who worked at the University of California.

Vygotsky explained that children learn best, and are most motivated, when the material they’re learning is just beyond the reach of their current abilities. In the classroom context, this means a teacher guides them to clear the hurdle presented by the task, but not so heavy-handedly that they feel their existing skills weren’t useful in reaching the task’s solution. Vygotsky called this the “zone of proximal development”.

Zone of proximal development

When adults play games, they aren’t led along by a teacher—but a well-designed game creates the illusion of being taught. (Remember the first level of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros., which coached novice players through the game’s basics.) People who play Tetris, regardless of their abilities, spend most of their time in the zone of proximal development. Like Richard Haier’s subjects, they struggle with the game’s slowest level until they slowly develop a sense of mastery that allows them to play the second level, and then the third, and so on. The difficulty of the game escalates, but their abilities keep pace—or rather fall just short of mastering the most difficult level they’ve managed to attain.
The zone of proximal development is deeply motivating. You don’t just learn efficiently; you also enjoy the process. In 1990, a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published Flow, his classic book on the psychic benefits of mastering a challenge. (One of my professors told me to pronounce Csikszentmihalyi’s name as “chick-sent-me-high,” which I’ve always remembered.) Csikszentmihalyi had noticed that many artists became deeply embedded in the business of making art—so deeply that they allowed hours and hours to pass without feeling the need to eat or drink. As Csikszentmihalyi explained, when people experience flow—also known as entering the zone—they become so immersed in the task at hand that they lose track of time. Some report a sense of profound joy or rapture when they enter the zone; a rare, long-lasting euphoria that only seems to arise reliably in these rare situations characterized by challenges and the ability to just barely overcome those challenges. (As Csikszentmihalyi acknowledged, flow has been a major part of many Eastern philosophies and religions for centuries. His major contribution was to refine and translate the idea for a new audience.)

Flow—the channel that runs from the bottom left to the top right of the diagram—describes the experience of tackling a moderate challenge with the skill to master that challenge. Both ingredients are essential. If the challenge is high but you’re less skilled, you experience anxiety; if you’re skilled but the challenge is low, boredom.
In the context of gaming, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll calls this sensation the ludic loop—from the Latin ludere, for playful. You enter a ludic loop when, each time you enjoy the brief thrill of solving one element of a puzzle, a new and incomplete piece presents itself. The ludic loop can be found in challenging video games, difficult crosswords, repetitive but stimulating work tasks, slot machines that grant you low wins among many losses, and countless other immersive experiences. Ludic loops, like all flow experiences, are very powerful.

Cliffhangers

Aminibus veers off a mountain road and teeters on the edge of a cliff. The minibus is an empty shell without seating. Inside are eleven thieves and their pile of stolen gold. The men hug the back wall as the gold slowly slides away from them, tipping the minibus toward oblivion. One of the men crawls slowly toward the gold. The only sounds are his shuffling, the creaking minibus, and the whistling of alpine winds. He moves within two feet of the gold, but the bus tips farther forward and it slides beyond his reach. Then, he rolls onto his back, faces his companions, and says calmly: “Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea.” The story ends.
In the summer of 1969, thousands of cinemagoers enjoyed the first ninety-four minutes of The Italian Job, but many hated this, the final ninety-fifth minute. In their own words, the ending was “ridiculous,” “pretentious garbage,” “horrible,” “crap,” “frustrating,” “not funny,” “without morals,” “without heart,” “a turkey,” “like a soft drink that’s gone flat,” “enjoyable maybe if you’ve had a lobotomy.” It takes a special ending to inspire this sort of vitriol, and that ending turns out to have been no ending at all: a literal and metaphorical cliffhanger. The problem here was that viewers had committed an hour and a half to the story, and like all humans they were wired for closure. If you’ve ever been denied a joke’s punchline, you’ll know that it’s better to hear no story at all than to hear all but the story’s final beat.

 In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

I’m conflicted. Granted, kids with special powers is itself an entire genre of YA, but this book reminds me quite a bit of Stranger Things, yet definitely does not match up to it (not by a long shot) – which is why I cannot fully enjoy this book.

Essentially, the Institute is a network of secret deep state organizations created by governments all over the world and staffed by ex-military officials, where young children with special talents are kidnapped and used to kill those who might threaten world peace. I have seen this cliche used so many times, I will balk if it ever appears before my eyes again. 

There are multiple references to the Back Half and the Back Back Half, but we don’t see much of it even through til the end. And when we do, I don’t see anything particularly strange or tortuous about it. Similarly, the fact that Luke awake in a room that is an exact replica of his doesn’t seem to play a part in the story-line either. These are some of the devices employed to create a dark, spine-chilling atmosphere but fails to hold up. It plays into every cliche of the genre. Sinister Director. The nice adult whose motivation to help the poor kids are tenuous. Little Avery dies. Kids all around the world connect to triumph over the evil adults.

The children are given computers with internet access. Why on earth would any kidnapper give their victim a device with internet access? Sure, they can only access a limited number of websites, but kids aren’t stupid, especially not those living in the fucking 20th century. Surely, someone before Luke would have downloaded a VPN of sorts and scaled the firewall. It also seems that nobody bothers to monitor the activities of these little kids. 

Oh, did I mention that Luke escaped from the fucking military prison by digging a hole under the fence surrounding the Institute??? Wtf. The tracking chip within each child also happens to be located in the earlobe (the most harmless organ to sever). It brings to mind a bootleg The Promised Neverland. 

The novel opens with a former cop making a sudden decision to give his plane seat to a government official in exchange for a hefty sum of money and hitchhike north. He eventually arrives in a very small town deep in the sticks, where he gets the job of a night knocker. Cool. I wonder what’s going to happen to him… Then the book takes a 180 turn and left the poor night-knocker’s storyline hanging for the best part of the book, bringing him back to light only in the third-quarter of the book. Like, I did not need to know about him. At all. Why the fuck did we need to read about him in the first couple of chapters of the book??? I don’t get it.

I don’t get this book.

I’m giving it 3 stars only because a small part of me feels like a 2 stars would be me judging the book too harshly in the vein of Stranger Things and The Promised Neverland (the manga, not anime). Would definitely not recommend this book, though. At all.

No visitors. No nights spent away from the apartment. No disturbing the other residents, all of whom are rich or famous or both. These are the only rules for Jules Larsen’s new job as an apartment sitter at the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan’s most high-profile and mysterious buildings. Recently heartbroken and just plain broke, Jules is taken in by the splendor of her surroundings and accepts the terms.

As she gets to know the residents and staff of the Bartholomew, Jules finds herself drawn to fellow apartment sitter Ingrid, who reminds her of the sister she lost eight years ago. When Ingrid confides that the Bartholomew is not what it seems and the dark history hidden beneath its gleaming facade is starting to frighten her, Jules brushes it off as a harmless ghost story—until the next day, when Ingrid disappears.

Searching for the truth about Ingrid’s disappearance, Jules digs deeper into the Bartholomew’s dark past and into the secrets kept within its walls. Her discovery that Ingrid is not the first apartment sitter to go missing at the Bartholomew pits Jules against the clock as she races to unmask a killer, expose the building’s hidden past, and escape the Bartholomew before her temporary status becomes permanent.

I really liked the setting of this book. For some reason, I imagined it as a an exquisite Suite Life of Zack & Cody hotel but with creepy residents, gothic undertone and a deep, dark atmosphere. The pace was acceptable and did not leave me frustrated as did Final Girls. The protagonist is also fairly well-defined and not the meek, helpless flibbertigibbet that thrillers love to employ. She’s inquisitive and doesn’t mind getting herself into trouble to decipher the truth.

The fact that she literally has no money and friends is also justifiable enough reason for her to remain in the Bartholomew despite having found out its insidious, Ouroboros occcult past. And her search for Ingrid in the tunnels of the homeless. Wow. A thriller that actually makes logical sense? I’m impressed.

I also really liked the revelation and the ending. Instead of leaving us with a cliffhanger or an abrupt ending following the revelation, we get to watch as Jules experience and overcome the twist. And that twist – organ trade ring for the rich – sure makes sense too lmao. I can actually imagine this shit occurring in real life. The victims of real-life organ trade would also comprise the very same group of people the book covers.

I think this is my most poorly-written review yet but I do love this book quite a bit. 4.5 stars.

Don’t get the title, though. Hmm.

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and emerged the sole survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre with her white dress completely soaked in her friends’ blood. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls.

Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy’s doorstep. Blowing through Quincy’s life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past. When Lisa’s death is revealed to be a murder, Quincy has to dig into her repressed memory to unravel the mystery behind the Final Girls.

I did not enjoy this book because about 80% of the book takes place in the aftermath, with trivial banalities and mundane baking escapades. More than anything, I wished the book would just give us a flavour of the mysterious Pine Cottage but the damn book just wouldn’t go there. We only got to see more of Pine Cottage somewhere in the third-quarter of the book, and it immediately gut-punches us with the red herring (being that guy she had ‘rebound’ sex with) and the twist (being the cop – whom she also had sex with).

With a genre as exciting as slasher being its premise, Riley Sager could have given us a more visceral, heart-racing thriller. I’m disappointed.

Literally Marie Kondo for your life. Be a ‘no’ man. Say no to anything you don’t really want to do. A new project that you’re not interested in? Say no. Urgent project that your boss slams on your desk at the last minute? Say no. People seeking help? Say no. Because you’re worth it *L’Oréal hair flip* He author came across, to my Asian, collectivism mind, a huge asshole.

Just like Marie Kondo, we are left to determine what “sparks joy”. Terming these activities as ‘critical / essential activities’ affords readers as much help in determining activities we should say yes to as holding personal effects to ones chest and feeling the figurative joy spark through your entire being. Lmao.

Bullshit much.

He also name drops quite a lot as if to lend his book some credibility. No, bro. Didn’t work.

For a book about cutting the crap, I surely did not expect it to be so full of shit.

Astronaut Mark Watney was the eleventh person to walk on Mars, but he will be the first to die there if no one rescues him.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

But fear not — luck is on his side. From the mission control who just happens to catch sight of his survival, to the numerous supplies left behind, as well as his humour and ingenuity, this man ain’t got nothing to fear. In fact, the entire book feels like one smooth sail, featuring his random “Muskian” (inspired by the cringe of Elon Musk’s meme-lord status) quips.

The book affords the same intrigue as the lifeform on Mars: non-existent.

Just, why?? Why does this book exist?

This has become one of my favourite books ever; an easy 5 stars.

I went into the book thinking that it was going to preach about the importance of education, as well as a cautionary tale against its absence. However, what I got was a peek into the life of one ordinary child, subjected to the insularity and horrors of the conspiracy theorists she calls her parents.

I have always wanted to dive into the minds of the religious and question the motivation behind their devotion. Isn’t it obvious that you have been indoctrinated with faulty logic? Hasn’t it occurred to you that almost every tale in the Bible runs contrary to science and progress. How do you reconcile your faith with science? Or do you not?

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara prepared for the prophecised Y2K doomsday by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”; shivering in fear from her father’s tale about the Government’s conspiracy to lead them astray. In the summer she stewed herbs and stirred up homeopathic remedy for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard. 

Dad called it Y2K. On January 1, he said, computer systems all over the world would fail. There would be no electricity, no telephones. All would sink into chaos, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.
“How do you know the day?” I asked.
Dad said that the Government had programmed the computers with a six-digit calendar, which meant the year had only two digits. “When nine-nine becomes oh-oh,” he said, “the computers won’t know what year it is. They’ll shut down.”

This family is truly the quintessential provincial Mormons, a picture of detrimental ignorance, and I loved it! I really, really love reading about ignorant people and the bullshit they get themselves into, because I know that I will never be able to experience their lives – what with all the constant rationalisation my mind compels against my will.

Indeed, their lives are eventful, to say the least. When Shawn fell from a great height and injured himself, his father gave zero damns. They started tackling him to the ground when he got riled up, ultimately knocking him clean out and giving him a concussion.

When Tara’s mum got into a car accident and broke her crown, revealing signs of her fucking brain, her dad forced her to bring her mum home. Not to the hospital. Home. Because the power of God compels him. Because he is the prophet. He is miracle. Wtf.

While I loathed Tara’s parents, a small part of me feels for them, because people cannot possibly be born nihilists and wary of the world, can they? It makes me curious: what brought them there? Tara seemed to hint at her father’s plausible DID, but it seemed to me a convenient rationalisation of his behaviours. I feel like people aren’t just a product of one mutated gene or a singular event in their lives that led them astray. There must be more, but I wouldn’t expect Tara to excavate the truth – it’s just too momentous a task for an estranged child. Nonetheless.

Tara’s father’s obsession with with profits (and control) in his junkyard, as well as his blatant disregard towards his children’s safety pierced my heart. The siblings were constantly put into harm’s way, and the dad never once bothered to apologise. While I do feel that Tara’s narrative might have been filtered through multiple lens – of love, hatred and confusion – everything still feels so real, so raw; it’s entirely believable.

Multiple times, she has tried to leave her family. Multiple times, she acquiesced to their demands and insularity to preserve the close, albeit abusive, familial bonds she shares with her family. Had she not left the clutches of her family to explore the vastly different lives of the secular, it is likely she would forever remain a child of fear and abuse.

Education doesn’t seem to be the thread that weaves through this book, experience and the willingness to broaden one’s mind to ruminate and accept points of view that contradicts one’s conviction is. Education just happens to be the vessel through which Tara found enlightment. I would have loved to know how Tara’s brother, Tyler first stepped into the world of education. The inspiration to the inspiration.

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Excerpts

The younger class had just finished, and the store was flooded with six-year-olds, prancing for their mothers in red velvet hats and skirts sparkling with sequins of deep scarlet. I watched them wiggle and leap through the aisles, their thin legs covered only by sheer tights. I thought they looked like tiny harlots. By calling it “dance,” he had convinced good Mormons to accept the sight of their daughters jumping about like whores in the Lord’s house.

He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark.
But God withheld the flood.

Just a quick mouth swab and soon you’ll be matched with your perfect partner—the one you’re genetically made for. The very same premise has been explored in Black Mirror to a not-so-satisfying degree. As such, I thought I would be able to get my fix of Black Mirror in this book, and it does live up to expectations, albeit not a very high one but alas I’ll take what I can.

What is interesting is that the author explored the concept on five different matched couples matched, each with vastly different experiences with the software. 

We see a serial killer, two straight couple broken up by the unexpected fact that they’re gays, the creator of the Matched software, a woman who found that her match has died, as well as a woman who realised that she felt no connection to her match.

None of the stories were very well-explored and left much to be desired. Nonetheless, the premise and its execution were sufficient to lend credence to the book as a potential bible to the dystopian future when genetic matching becomes a reality.

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Excerpts

The only bright spot in each Groundhog Day was talking to the man she’d been paired with on Match Your DNA.

Mandy felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention. “They wanted you to have his baby?” she asked quietly.
“Wanted? They became pretty bloody insistent. It was the most awkward conversation I’ve ever had in my life.”
Mandy clenched her fists. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She tried to control her breathing so she didn’t break into a panic attack.
“When I said no, they got a bit…I don’t know…pushy about it, and even offered me money to do it and cover the cost of everything,” Michelle continued. “They’d really thought it through and said I could move in with them until I had it. It went on for weeks—calls, texts, emails…in the end I threatened to go to the police if they didn’t leave me alone, and they finally stopped. It weirded me out, though, and that’s why I was reluctant to meet you at first.”
“I guess that’s understandable,” Mandy said, and desperately tried to justify the actions. “They probably weren’t thinking straight and were still grieving Richard’s death.”
“Death?” Michelle looked confused. “Who told you Rich was dead? He’s still very much alive.”

“The only way to successfully engage in a relationship with a psychopath is to achieve a balance in power and control,” he continued reading. “Psychopaths make intense, talented and passionate lovers, but if they begin as the dominant partner, this is a pattern that will continue. When they understand they can dominate their partner or if their partner has relinquished control, they frequently lose interest and look elsewhere for sexual contact. There are, however, some psychopaths who enjoy sharing their partners with friends. For them, a partner is an acquisition whom they can lend as they see fit.”
Tori was like that, Christopher recalled. She’d reluctantly attended a swinger’s club at his insistence, and he watched as, one by one, seven men had sex with her that evening. He’d begged her to do it, informing her it would arouse him and strengthen their relationship. Tori was so young and naive, she’d believed him. Afterwards, in the car outside her house, he’d called her a filthy slag and ended it.

She’d read that a person’s hearing can be one of the last things to go, so she’d talk to him about nothing in particular. She didn’t want him to leave the world with a melancholic silence for a soundtrack.