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It sounds a worthy idea, doesn’t it? In a volatile society, to draw on findings that promise to help ordinary people to coexist? If your idea of credible scientific methodology is for researchers to codify their own prejudices and then strive to promulgate and prove the resulting slapdash hypotheses through prematurely declared Theories and in unintentionally but laughably rigged experiments (rather than to test through attempts at disproving), the writing of Jonathan Haidt may be for you!!

Like Simon Baron‐Cohen is for him! “I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by men who may have had Asperger’s syndrome,” writes Haidt, after invoking the spectre of Those Insensitive Autistics totally out of the blue for no other apparent reason, and while continuing to diligently lay out precisely the argument on which he claims not to want you to think he is relying (across pages 136–141, all‐inclusive). Presumably the key word was “just”, but it’s pulled tenuously thin by the masses of import that he makes it bear here.

Consistently full of a love to snap pathologise and shove aside whatever minds and whatever ethics to which Haidt personally has not come to relate, this book about humanity regularly betrays an intellectually fatal hypocrisy. Haidt is only at pains to insist that dedicated conservatism among voters (particularly within the United States of America) must not be considered misguided or malevolent. Policies of liberalism, he cautions, often undermine their own aims. Conservatives, he asserts, have a more sophisticated, complete grasp of human morality.

For instance, both ends of a left‐right spectrum dislike harm. We know this because chucking a tantie over not quite getting to possess everything you possibly can, is fundamentally equivalent to being upset about folks refusing necessities to anybody denied their society’s established survival tokens. This example also demonstrates that everybody values this other one same irreducible thing we all call fairness: the perniciously disadvantaged do not work nearly as hard as the hypercushioned, hence proportionate punishment and reward; every body is equal, hence uniform entitlement to all protections.

(Haidt may employ different phrasing, but the tenor of the logic remains. Does this parade of absurdity encourage people to take each other more seriously?)

But right‐wingers attend quantifiably more comprehensively to The conveniently prepackaged, shrinkwrapped foundations of morality — here’s some he prepared earlier! — which all things U.S.A. left neglect. By way of demonstration, we can presuppose what preachers of contrasting Christian denominations talk about (at page 188). Liberals wouldn’t be invoking concepts of sanctity more through words like “peace” than firey Baptists; they would just outright care less for the sacred.

It is immensely disheartening to read as over and over Haidt endorses dictionary‐definition rigidity, saucer‐shallow readings, and the misappropriation of mathematics to the most simplistic of measures in order to determine that an assumption aligns with itself. As though this supplants the work of genuine philosophical enquiry, literary analysis, theological examination, political study, or, heaven forbid, interview.

For most of its length, The righteous mind tries very hard to obfuscate its author’s political sympathies. Despite my criticisms, amicability and a kind of hopeful thoughtfulness do shine through Haidt’s words much of the time, but the caution can come off a touch manipulative. Haidt lowers his ineffectual guard in stages, where confident that reactive, partisan readers will have been pacified by his deliberate progression through dopey self‐help metaphors and naïve, self‐defeating anecdotes.

Finally, he pretends to legislative insight. Examples of where three partisan traditions ought to follow their opponents are given, along with a vague blessing of a Moral Science.

So take freely of such edicts as a libertarian moment (from pages 353 through 356), in which we (presumed Americans all, now) are asked to imagine a can of peas attracting a vertiginous price, after the fashion of basic medical needs in the U.S. Wouldn’t it be a preposterous burden, he steams, for “all of us [to be] paying” a 25% tax on income to cover a complete food insurance system! That getting even remotely adequate nutrition for such small portions of their money is currently impossible for many Americans does not, in this moment, occur to him. Indeed, he selectively forgets the notion of externalised costs and quite possibly has no clue whatsoever about, say, food deserts. That the wealth and ready thrift of those whose 25 percents constitute higher dollar figures has been subsidised by the actively imposed starvation of masses of unwaged, disenfranchised, and enslaved people across nonstop hundreds of years, just maybe affecting consumer and corporate expectations? No, no, the limited‐access cheap canned pea economy has all been effortlessly “arranged for [humanity’s] benefit”. Somehow he decides that the allegory of the grocery store has comprehensively destroyed the legitimacy of health insurance and not implicated the profit motive. “Success in the supermarket and insurance industries depend[ing] primarily on maximizing [businesses’ financial] yield” in a linear trajectory is cast as some kind of inevitable, innocent bystander, a byproduct very nearly implied to be specific to social security. Haidt redeclares Adam Smith’s invisible hand “miraculous”. By that standard, so’s poliomyelitis, but, look, me, personally, I don’t invite any old gobsmacking function to (a share in a platform of) ideological supremacy.

And to be fair, Haidt is doggedly against fundamentalism — at least as he interprets it. Unless that fundamentalism is rooted in the ultracompetitive killing field of evolutionary psychology.

Footnote to last para: Which is what it sounds like going off Haidt’s presentation of the contemporary literature.

Whole Notes imparts the cosiness and charm of a dream first formal lesson on an orchestral instrument.

This book also represents a profound reservoir of careful contemplation, speaking, though primarily of the Western classical tradition and midlife gender transition, quite broadly to how practical musical understanding applies across peoples’ lives. The surface is tickled with cheeky humour, always friendly. In the spaces formed around the contours of his manner, one could almost hear delighted young students’ laughter bouncing along strings, grazing their instruments’ f-holes, or see the tension pouring out of the nervous adult beginner as they ready to take up their bow.

But more importantly, Ayres communicates in waves of understated sensuality, sharing a wealth of pedagogical wisdom (from a variety of teachers-and-learners), quiet courage, and at times a light, resonant awe.

To the audiobook recording, he brings every last mole of his broadcasting aplomb and finesse (if, perhaps, along with an occasional tendency to sustain a pace just slightly more at home in music-radio–length segments — or should that be shortth?). The excellent standard of spoken performance leaves me uncertain as to whether I would like the book so much if it gazed silently at me in print. Nonetheless, I very much hope to leaf through a paper edition, at very least to better absorb a few standout remarks — and loan it on.

Much of the novel assumes a tone of gossamer fantasy, still with the heft of a folktale. Think of fabric draping a central space into being, over a solid floor.

There is video gaming (along with rally and militarism) as theatre, perhaps most overtly, but the whole story is almost palpably sited within in staging containers — which mostly stretch or are transcended rather gently, in contrast to the claustrophobic violence possessing and constricting the gap in the crowd, the logged woods, the cramped room, the retina, the battered biosphere, the rigid formation, the traumatic shared memory, the laden canal, the proton.

For its themes, The Three-Body Problem is a very comfortable read. The “hard sci‐fi” elements are good fun, silly (or playful and open) without committing to ridiculous abandon. Although, on occasion, explanatory dialogue felt condescendingly conspicuous, on the whole, Liu’s devices moved smoothly enough. There are some beautiful scenes. The storytelling is both generous and measured; hospitable.

Narrative, themes, and mood flow exceedingly well across the scale of the entire novel, while very frequently individual sentences disintegrate. Some short paragraphs are riddled with ridiculous quantities of parenthetical translations that could have been skimmed out, by way of ever so slightly more evocative wording around those terms written in‐Language. Instead, the Guugu Yimidhirr boy’s chapters sputter along, tiresome despite their brevity. Comic timing, for instance, pulls through the prose more intact within the chapters from the perspective of the co‐narrating white man.

And through that boy and that man storms the worst problem: not only does talk of people always wind up actually being of men and boys, but the authors’ extensive and careful planning is built on the same mistake. Women (let alone anyone else) scarcely exist in the worlds of this book, and primarily as leverage for expressions of machismo (or in sometimes backhanded authors’ acknowledgements at the close, where worth is granted to one research contributor only as a proxy of esteemed men???). This monogender may be plausible in the case of a shipwrecked crew of the Endeavour, but reads grossly conspicuous in the lives of the local clans. Even elders always always always denotes only men — what have they been doing to all the aunties?! It would not even take a particularly close reading to see that the excuse of a boy’s‐eye view cannot account for this exclusion. In general, depictions of sexuality and gender fail to come across as convincing, considered, or — frankly — researched. Maybe they were grounded in all that historical scouring the authors’ notes speak of, but there seems to have been no thought to checking for bias.