The other primary activities – travel and eating out – took a hit in 2020, but reading prospered! Not just in terms of number of books, but the quality too. That’s why this year has a larger set, and that’s after some painful culling. And the numbers are enough to warrant a group photo, unlike last year!
Invisible Women, which I discovered thanks to D, is a book that I have been recommending to as many people as I can because of how enlightening it was. Though the extension of the book title is “exposing data bias in a world designed for men”, it actually goes well beyond that and brilliantly articulates the challenges that women face at the workplace, in public spaces, their everyday lives, and how the world works differently for them in the many, many things that men take for granted.
In another powerful book that I read recently, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff eloquently explains how the latest form of capitalism has gone rogue and is now well on its way to influencing human behaviour and actions at industrial scale. By extension, this is a systematic assault on the concept of free will, all part of a relentless bid for more money, power and control. While industrial capitalism exploited nature, surveillance capitalism is doing the same to human nature. (more…)