Do you often find yourself dancing the “reasonable tango”? This is what the sociologist Kirsty Sedgman, in On Being Unreasonable (Faber), calls the kind of polite argument that acknowledges the opponent’s point with a “Yes, but …” and carries on indefinitely, with no mutual agreement in sight. In this bracing manifesto for being just a little less civilised, she considers subjects such as what should count as bad behaviour in the theatre, what “reasonable” means in law, and why we should not “debate” with fascists. (Sunlight is not the best disinfectant, she points out; bleach is.) Does being meek ever bring about justice? Is performative “reasonableness” really a cloak for the “terrifying thrill of self-righteousness”? The pious tone-policers, she argues, are Unreasonably Reasonable; we could all do with pulling down a few more statues and in general being a bit more Reasonably Unreasonable.
你是否经常发现自己在跳 "合理探戈"？社会学家 Kirsty Sedgman 在《论不合理》（On Being Unreasonable）（Faber 出版社）一书中将这种礼貌性的争论称为 "合理探戈"，即在承认对方观点的同时说 "是的，但是......"，然后无休止地继续下去，看不到双方达成一致。在这本令人振奋的文明宣言中，她探讨了剧院中的不良行为、法律中 "合理 "的含义以及为什么我们不应该与法西斯分子 "辩论 "等问题。(她指出，阳光不是最好的消毒剂，漂白剂才是。）温顺能带来正义吗？表演性的 "合理性 "真的是 "自以为是的可怕快感 "的外衣吗？她认为，虔诚的 "调子警察 "是 "不合理的不合理"；我们都可以多推倒几座雕像，总之要更 "不合理的不合理 "一些。
What more reasonable way to investigate the weird misogyny of popular culture in the 2000s than via case studies of famous women? That is Sarah Ditum’s gambit in Toxic (Fleet), a furious and funny book about the public discourse around Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Jennifer Aniston and others. The febrile combination of social media with hungry paparazzi feeding a new ecosystem of online gossip sites gave rise to what Ditum calls the “upskirt decade”, a virtual cesspool of celebrity culture. From “Nipplegate” (Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Superbowl) to Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines and the singer’s pillorying as a poster boy for rape culture, Ditum always has something new and insightful to say about old scandals, and how they continue to reverberate in many current conversations, not least among the Unreasonably Unreasonable.
要研究 2000 年代流行文化中怪异的厌女症，还有什么比对著名女性进行个案研究更合理的方法吗？这就是萨拉-迪图姆（Sarah Ditum）在《毒药》（Toxic，Fleet）一书中所采取的策略，该书讲述了围绕帕丽斯-希尔顿（Paris Hilton）、小甜甜布兰妮-斯皮尔斯（Britney Spears）、詹妮弗-安妮斯顿（Jennifer Aniston）等人的公众讨论，充满了愤怒和幽默。社交媒体与饥渴的狗仔队相结合，为网络八卦网站提供了一个新的生态系统，这催生了迪图姆所说的 "上半身十年"，一个名人文化的虚拟污水池。从 "乳头门"（珍妮特-杰克逊在超级碗上的 "衣衫不整"）到罗宾-西克的 "模糊界限"（Blurred Lines），再到这位歌手被斥责为强奸文化的海报男孩，迪图姆总能对旧丑闻提出一些新颖而有见地的看法，以及这些丑闻如何继续回荡在当前的许多话题中，尤其是在 "不合理的不合理"（Unreasonably Unreasonable）群体中。
Viciousness towards famous women is also part of the story in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (Allen Lane), in which she becomes obsessed with her half-namesake Naomi Wolf, and the latter’s curious transformation from hip feminist to Covid conspiracy theorist and truther on the topic of contrails. It doesn’t help that Klein (author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine) is so often confused with her subject “in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media”. But as she continues “cringe-following” Wolf her themes widen and darken, taking in a cultural history of doubles and evil twins, conspiracy theories more generally, the rise of the populist right in the person of Steve Bannon, and a close reading of Philip Roth, whose Operation Shylock she reads persuasively as the key to many such mythologies.
在纳奥米-克莱因（Naomi Klein）的《二重身》（艾伦-莱恩出版社）一书中，对知名女性的恶意也是故事的一部分，在这本书中，她迷恋上了与她同名同姓的纳奥米-沃尔夫（Naomi Wolf），而后者则从时髦的女权主义者变成了科维德阴谋论者，并在 "禁飞区 "这一话题上信口雌黄。克莱因（《无标志》和《休克学说》的作者）"在社交媒体这个拥挤而肮脏的全球厕所里 "经常与她的研究对象混淆，这对她的研究毫无帮助。但是，当她继续 "令人讨厌地追随 "沃尔夫时，她的主题也在不断扩大和深化，包括替身和邪恶双胞胎的文化史、更广泛的阴谋论、以史蒂夫-班农（Steve Bannon）为代表的民粹主义右翼的崛起，以及对菲利普-罗斯（Philip Roth）的细读，她将罗斯的《夏洛克行动》（Operation Shylock）解读为许多此类神话的关键，令人信服。
One chapter of Dasha Kiper’s Travellers to Unimaginable Lands (Profile) begins, almost Rothishly: “When Peter Harwell’s seventy-nine-year-old mother punched a doctor in the face …”, setting the tone for a deeply compassionate but often gently humorous investigation into the psychology of caregiving for those looking after people with Alzheimer’s. The psychologist author explains how ordinary human biases and foibles are ruthlessly exploited by the disease, so that caregivers too often feel terribly guilty at not doing better. As Kiper points out in her lucid explanations of what is known about memory and consciousness, and the brain biology of self-control, no one can be perfect in such a situation: the carers, too, are victims of the disease.
达莎-基珀（Dasha Kiper）的《前往无法想象之地的旅行者》（Profile）中有一章的开头几乎是罗斯式的："当彼得-哈威尔七十九岁的母亲一拳打在一名医生的脸上时......"，为这本书定下了基调，作者以深厚的同情心，但往往又不失幽默地探讨了照顾老年痴呆症患者的心理。心理学家作者解释了普通人的偏见和缺点是如何被疾病无情利用的，以至于照顾者常常因为没有做得更好而感到非常内疚。正如基珀在她对记忆和意识以及自我控制的大脑生物学知识的清晰解释中所指出的，在这种情况下，没有人是完美无缺的：照顾者也是疾病的受害者。
Therapy of an arguably less productive kind is the subject of Seamus O’Mahony’s splendid The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic (Apollo), an almost incredulous narration of how the cult of Sigmund Freud took hold in Britain and then the world as a hobby for “rich directionless strays” – largely thanks, in this telling, to the Viennese sage’s “bagman”, a sexually incontinent Welsh doctor named Ernest Jones. The latter made himself chief of the British Psychoanalytical Society and introduced Freudianism to the Bloomsbury set. “Being theoreticians of the passive, dividend-drawing and consuming section of the bourgeoisie,” as Prince DS Mirsky remarked acidly of that crowd, “they are extremely intrigued by their own minutest inner experiences and count them an inexhaustible treasure store of further more minutious inner experiences.” Let us give thanks, at least, for the titular “sceptic”, a surgeon named Wilfred Trotter who was superbly unimpressed on meeting Freud but did later coin the term “herd instinct” in social psychology.
西莫斯-奥-马霍尼（Seamus O'Mahony）的精彩作品《大师、皮包客和怀疑论者》（阿波罗出版社）讲述了西格蒙德-弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）的崇拜如何在英国乃至全世界流行开来，成为 "没有方向的有钱流浪者 "的嗜好--这在很大程度上要归功于这位维也纳圣人的 "皮包客"，一位名叫欧内斯特-琼斯（Ernest Jones）的性失禁威尔士医生。后者自封为英国精神分析协会会长，并将弗洛伊德主义介绍给布鲁姆斯伯里的一帮人。"作为资产阶级中被动的、拿红利的和消费的那部分人的理论家，"DS-米尔斯基亲王酸溜溜地评价那群人，"他们对自己最细微的内心体验极感兴趣，并认为这些体验是取之不尽、用之不竭的更细微的内心体验的宝库"。至少，让我们感谢这位名为 "怀疑论者 "的外科医生威尔弗雷德-特罗特，他在见到弗洛伊德时极度不以为然，但后来却在社会心理学中创造了 "羊群本能 "一词。
After the upskirt decade, might it be time finally to take the female body seriously? In Eve (Hutchinson Heinemann), Cat Bohannon takes a stylish scalpel to innumerable examples of the dysfunctional ways in which medicine and technology have been limping along according to an assumed “male norm”, and investigates the evolution of female anatomy all the way back to mammals that scurried around under the feet of the dinosaurs. Highly entertaining, and full of novel perceptions. “Bodies are basically units of time,” Bohannon points out. “What we call an individual ‘body’ is a way of bounding a series of cascading events that follow self-replicating patterns until finally entropy sets in and enough goes wrong that the forces that keep you from flying apart at the seams finally let go.”
在经历了 "上裙十年 "之后，现在是否终于到了认真对待女性身体的时候？在《夏娃》（Hutchinson Heinemann）一书中，凯特-博汉南（Cat Bohannon）用一把时尚的手术刀，剖析了医学和技术在假定的 "男性标准 "下一筹莫展的无数例子，并对女性解剖学的进化进行了研究，一直追溯到恐龙脚下窜来窜去的哺乳动物。该书极具娱乐性，充满了新奇的感悟。"身体基本上是时间的单位，"博汉南指出。"我们所说的个体'身体'是对一系列级联事件进行约束的一种方式，这些事件遵循自我复制的模式，直到最后熵开始出现，出了足够多的问题，使你不至于在接缝处飞散的力量最终放手。
You could say much the same for planetary bodies, for example Earth, which began as a fiery lava ball and will probably end up incinerated by an expanding Sun. In a short window in between, human civilisation, miraculously, has arisen. In The Earth Transformed (Bloomsbury), Peter Frankopan reads the history of Homo sapiens as inextricable from the history of climatic and ecological change, whether naturally abrupt or anthropogenically gradual. Was Genghis Khan’s success made possible by unusually heavy rains? Were the Norse myths inspired by the sun-blotting ash of a huge eruption? One worrying lesson is that, even today, we are not doing nearly as much as we should to increase our resilience against the awakening of large volcanoes.
行星体也可以这样说，比如地球，它最初是一个炽热的熔岩球，最后可能会被不断膨胀的太阳焚毁。在这之间的短暂时间里，人类文明奇迹般地出现了。在《被改造的地球》（布鲁姆斯伯里出版社）一书中，彼得-弗兰科潘将智人的历史解读为与气候和生态变化的历史密不可分，无论是自然突变还是人为渐变。成吉思汗的成功是否得益于异常的暴雨？北欧神话的灵感是否来自于大喷发后遮天蔽日的火山灰？一个令人担忧的教训是，即使在今天，我们在提高抵御大型火山苏醒的能力方面做得还远远不够。
As destructive as a lava flow but more terrifyingly mobile was the apocalyptic forest fire that engulfed parts of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in 2016. John Vaillant’s riveting account, Fire Weather (Hodder), draws on interviews with officials, firefighters and other citizens to provide a minute-by-minute disaster-movie narrative of the inferno, while also pointedly remarking on the fact that Fort McMurray is an oil town, devoted to processing the products of the Alberta tar sands. It is fossil-fuel-induced global heating that is making such “natural” disasters both more frequent and more intense, while modern houses filled with fossil-fuel byproducts (vinyl, plastics, etc) burn more quickly and completely than ever. A deserved winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize.
与熔岩流一样具有破坏性，但流动性更可怕的是2016年席卷加拿大阿尔伯塔省麦克默里堡部分地区的末日森林大火。约翰-瓦兰特（John Vaillant）在《火灾天气》（Fire Weather，霍德出版社）一书中，通过对官员、消防员和其他市民的采访，以灾难电影的方式逐分钟讲述了这场大火，同时还尖锐地指出，麦克默里堡是一个石油小镇，致力于加工阿尔伯塔省的焦油砂产品。化石燃料引发的全球变暖使得此类 "自然 "灾害变得更加频繁和剧烈，而充满化石燃料副产品（乙烯基、塑料等）的现代房屋比以往任何时候都烧得更快、更彻底。本年度贝利-吉福德非虚构作品奖得主，实至名归。
And even if plastic doesn’t burn, it pollutes the environment in many other ways: 20,000 plastic water bottles are sold every second, and 4 trillion cigarette butts are chucked away every year. Oliver Franklin-Wallis’s Wasteland (Simon & Schuster) is a book about all our rubbish: a travelogue around dumps, scrapyards, disposal and recycling facilities, from giant machines that shred TVs and other electronic devices to vast landfill sites in India: the all-too-solid hinterlands of our obsession with buying and throwing away so much stuff.
即使塑料不会燃烧，它也会以许多其他方式污染环境：每秒钟售出 20,000 个塑料水瓶，每年丢弃 4 万亿个烟头。奥利弗-富兰克林-沃利斯（Oliver Franklin-Wallis）的《荒原》（Simon & Schuster）是一本关于我们所有垃圾的书：这是一本关于垃圾场、废料场、处理和回收设施的游记，从粉碎电视机和其他电子设备的巨型机器到印度广阔的垃圾填埋场：这是我们痴迷于购买和丢弃大量物品的一个太过坚实的腹地。
Can there be a science of history? Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series proposed an elite cadre of “psychohistorians” who could predict the future; in Peter Turchin’s End Times (Allen Lane), the proposed science of “cliodynamics” (after Clio, the Greek muse of history) is less confident of precise prediction but nonetheless makes much of the author’s own forecast, in 2010, that by the 2020s there would be a surge in political instability and violence in the US. He got that right. Surveying the rise and fall of empires and parliaments through global history, Turchin argues that civic upheavals become due when “popular immiseration” (eg, the stagnancy of real wages) is combined with “elite overproduction”: the number of people qualified (via PhD or otherwise) to high social rank exceeds the number of spaces available, leading to dangerous disgruntlement in both camps. Pumping wealth upwards, from low to high in the social hierarchy, eventually leads to “state collapse and social breakdown”.
历史可以科学化吗？艾萨克-阿西莫夫（Isaac Asimov）的 "基金会"（Foundation）系列中提出了一批能够预测未来的精英 "心理历史学家"；在彼得-图尔钦（Peter Turchin）的《末世》（艾伦-莱恩出版社）中，所提出的 "克利奥动力学"（cliodynamics）科学（以希腊历史缪斯克利奥的名字命名）对精确预测的信心不足，但作者在2010年曾预测，到2020年，美国的政治不稳定和暴力事件将激增。他说对了。图尔钦回顾了全球历史上帝国和议会的兴衰，他认为，当 "大众不稳定"（如实际工资停滞不前）与 "精英生产过剩 "相结合时，就会出现公民动荡：有资格（通过博士学位或其他途径）获得较高社会地位的人数超过了可用空间的数量，从而导致两个阵营都出现危险的不满情绪。财富从社会阶层的低端向高端攀升，最终导致 "国家崩溃和社会瓦解"。
Another source of state collapse and social breakdown might be artificial intelligence, at least if you believe the most gloomy prognostications from a year in which OpenAI launched GPT-4 and pioneers of the field, such as Stuart Russell, warned that superintelligence might just decide to kill everyone. The Coming Wave (Bodley Head), by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar (the former a co-founder of Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind), though, focuses not on the existential scenario of AI exterminating all humans, but nearer term and more plausible threats of bad actors using AI in concert with synthetic biology or drone weapons.
国家崩溃和社会瓦解的另一个根源可能是人工智能，至少如果你相信这一年里最悲观的预言的话，因为在这一年里，OpenAI 推出了 GPT-4，而斯图尔特-罗素等该领域的先驱警告说，超级智能可能会决定杀死所有人。不过，穆斯塔法-苏莱曼（Mustafa Suleyman）和迈克尔-巴斯卡尔（Michael Bhaskar，前者是谷歌人工智能子公司 DeepMind 的联合创始人）合著的《即将到来的浪潮》（The Coming Wave，Bodley Head 出版社）并不关注人工智能灭绝全人类的生存场景，而是关注坏人利用人工智能与合成生物学或无人机武器协同作战的更近期、更可信的威胁。
There are more hopeful stories of biotechnology, of course. Modern practices of vaccination, rather than being a conspiracy of mind control by the deep state as per Naomi Wolf, were in fact developed by heroic outsiders who themselves had to battle the forces of hostile bureaucracy. Such is the lesson of Simon Schama’s magnificent work of medical history, Foreign Bodies: Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster). Its central protagonist is a Jewish microbiologist from Ukraine, Waldemar Haffkine, who became a hero of the Raj by vaccinating millions of Indians against bubonic plague and cholera. As thanks, he was subsequently blacklisted by the British academic establishment, a victim of the virus of antisemitism – for which no vaccine has yet been invented.
当然，生物技术还有更多充满希望的故事。现代疫苗接种方法并非如娜奥米-沃尔夫（Naomi Wolf）所说的那样是深层国家的精神控制阴谋，实际上是由英勇的局外人开发的，他们自己也不得不与敌对的官僚主义势力作斗争。这就是西蒙-沙马（Simon Schama）的医学史巨著《异物》（Foreign Bodies）所带给我们的启示：疫苗与国家健康》（Simon & Schuster）。该书的主人公是来自乌克兰的犹太微生物学家瓦尔德马-哈夫金，他为数百万印度人接种了鼠疫和霍乱疫苗，成为拉贾斯坦邦的英雄。作为感谢，他随后被英国学术机构列入黑名单，成为反犹太主义病毒的受害者--至今尚未发明出任何疫苗。
