10 Holiday Conversation-Starters

I read too many new releases in 2024: here are the good nuggets.

All my review copies for 2024 releases

I have a problem. I still get giddy every time a review copy of a new book comes in the mail. It arrives ahead of the due date, for free, and all I have to do is write a review of it!

But this year things got out of hand. I put off more challenging, older books in favor of breezy new releases, and some of the new books were just duds. Nevertheless, I have gone back through 10 of these books to offer the good bits to you, to save you my troubles!

Holiday parties are coming up. Time to make small talk with relatives and co-workers. If you want to have something timely but fresh to offer, why not reference a book that came out this year?

I’ve linked to my reviews of the various books (if you want more detail) but offered a thumbnail to get a conversation rolling. Block quotes are my language, quotes signify a direct quote of the author.

First up…

1. Get Married by Brad Wilcox

   The strongest predictor of a high-quality marriage is “perceived partner commitment,” so religious couples who treat their bond as sacred or conservatives who believe “marriage is for life” see boosts in marital quality. Based on data from the 2018 General Social Survey, Wilcox finds that today, only 51 percent of liberals say infidelity is “always wrong” compared to 89 percent of conservatives, and perhaps unsurprisingly, liberals are about 50 percent more likely to report they have had an affair.

   How To Speak Good and Do Other Things Good Too (HTSGDOTGT): You know, all these manosphere types are always banging on about money and looks and hypergamy, but according to marriage researchers, commitment is the best predictor of a good relationship. So what dog breed would that make the perfect spouse?

   

2. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

   A young girl on TikTok, in about an hour (assuming an average of three seconds per post), could see a thousand posts that indicate what “normal” girls look like and what “popular” girls do. This amount of content, combined with the tallies of likes and comments that make status seem so objective, leads Haidt to call social media “the most powerful social conformity engine ever created.” The problem is that “normal” girls are filtered and curated and “popular” girls are often narcissistic and unwell.

   HTSGDOTGT: In his new book, Jonathan Haidt was saying that TikTok is basically “the most powerful social conformity engine ever created.” Like in one hour you take in hundreds of clips telling you how to act, what to wear, etc. I guess the question is, “What are we being conformed to?”

3. Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk

“You know, my understanding is that all blessings come from God. And the three big blessings that we talk about in Judaism are children who bring us pride and joy and follow in tradition, good health, and financial sustenance. I don’t feel like you could ever have too much of any of those things.”

HTSGDOTGT: Did you hear about this book Hannah’s Children? It’s all about the women with college degrees who’ve had 5 or more kids. The actual people who do this aren’t inspired by family policy or trad influencers. It’s a lot simpler than that. One of them just was saying, “Children are a blessing. You can never have too many blessings.”

4. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Newport coins the term “pseudo-productivity” for “using visible activity as the primary means of approximating productive effort.” Unlike other fields like manufacturing or agriculture, productivity in knowledge work is more slippery. For those who can’t point to a novel or academic paper as proof of their value (and an excuse to escape from constant interruptions), it’s easy to feel like you’re “pulling a fast one,” getting paid but not doing all that much. Appearing busy through rapid email replies and volunteering for numerous projects can ease that insecurity.

HTSGDOTGT: You know Cal Newport, the Deep Work guy? He had this book about “Slow Productivity,” which means doing higher quality work at a reasonable pace rather than rushing around sending emails all the time. He calls the rushing and emailing “pseudo-productivity.” I feel like so many jobs now are BS and just about looking busy.

5. The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway

“180,000 of the most talented creatives in the world are in SAG-AFTRA. It’s not easy to get into the union, and last year 87% of them didn’t get health insurance because they didn’t make $23,000.”

“Follow your passion” is Latin for “Prepare to be exploited.”

HTSGDOTGT: Scott Galloway—that bald NYU bro professor who swears a lot—anyway, he had this book about money that came out this year. He was laying out how hard it is to make it in romance industries—acting, music, etc. Even in the SAG union, 87% of performers didn’t even make $23,000 last year.

Sometimes, it feels like there’s an inverse relationship between how cool an industry is and how feasible it is to make a living.

6. On the Edge by

   Nate Silver

Silver is a knowledgeable fan and builds prediction models for a living, yet here’s his summary of the 2022-23 NBA season: “I bet a total of $1,809,006. And I finished the year ahead by a whopping $5,242—for a paltry ROI of 0.3 percent.” Despite this modest return, he was good enough for many of the major books like BetMGM and DraftKings to limit how much he could bet on any given game.

There’s a famous line in “Rounders,” “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” This certainly applies to sports betting. If they’re letting you put money down, you’re probably the sucker.

HTSGDOTGT: Nate Silver, you know the pollster guy? Yeah, he wrote this book about gambling and risk-taking, and he bet $1.8 million on NBA games and only made $5,000 from all of that. These gambling sites are rigged, and they’re getting increasingly predatory.

7. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

“Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt,’ which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail—or worse, don’t even try—it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet. If this describes you, there’s a good chance that like me you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers,’ which is a diplomatic way of saying that our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy.”

HTSGDOTGT: Oliver Burkeman, he wrote 4000 Weeks? He’s like an anti-productivity productivity guy. It’s confusing. In his new book, he wrote about “productivity debt,” the idea that you wake up and feel like you’re already behind, and if you work really, really hard, maybe you can make it back to zero by day’s end. I so feel that. It’s like, “How are you?” “Busy!”

8. Cue the Sun by Emily Nussbaum

Insiders call manipulative [reality TV] producers posing as confidantes “preditors,” a mash-up of predator and editor. [The Bachelor producer Sarah] Shapiro was one of the best.

One season, Shapiro knew her contestant wasn’t getting the final rose, but sensing an opportunity, she began pumping the bachelorette up: “Oh my God, I’m going to get fired for telling you this. Like: Oh my God, oh my God. It’s you.” She got the bachelorette into her dress, excited and liquored up. When she was rejected, Shapiro earned hours of meltdown footage and high praise from her bosses.

HTSGDOTGT: Sometimes, when I watch reality TV, I can’t tell if I should laugh or cry. And then I turn on the news, and it’s kind of the same, you know?

9. You Are Mine by

   Sister Anastasia

“Through the gradual process of cutting off from life online, I began to notice that the virtual reality I had entered (and become addicted to) in social media mimicked what was taking place in the unseen, with the deception of the spirits. The structure of social media in my life was like a carbon copy of the ego bolstering, sensory stimulation of the spirit world.”

HTSGDOTGT: There’s this wild book that came out this year that’s basically a memoir of a witch who became an Orthodox nun. But she was describing the ways that her spiritual experiences were mimicked by life online: the stimulation, the sense of power and control that the internet gave was almost like how it felt to channel spirits, apparently. Kinda crazy, I know, but kinda not? We sort of are magicians now, in our own little ways.

10. Living in Wonder by

    Rod Dreher

“Some of the world’s top scientists and tech pioneers believe that extraterrestrial intelligences are passing technological information to us telepathically. Simone [a pseudonym for a tech venture capitalist] is one of these believers, and she teaches classes on how to open up oneself to receiving such messages. Though she believes that she has been channeling information from these entities all her life, Simone believes that AI allows everyone to access the wisdom of these intelligences. It’s a kind of high-tech Ouija board.”

HTSGDOTGT: You hear about Rod Dreher’s new book on enchantment? [Insert audience-dependent disclaimer about Rod Dreher]. Anyway, he seems to think aliens and UFOs are actually demons and AI is like a high-tech Ouija board. Not just him but a lot of the people who work on this stuff think so too.

I feel like all of a sudden, it’s become totally normal to talk about AI or algorithms driving crazy behavior and calling it demonic. At least metaphorically, if not literally, that’s becoming mainstream.

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Hopefully, I can be a little more disciplined in 2025. Right now, I have review copies for

Nicholas Carr

and

Ross Douthat

’s new books on my shelf. Those should be great, but then I’m hoping to read some meatier works. I feel like Kristin Lavransdatter is following me, getting recommended at every turn, so that’s on deck!

God Bless you this Advent/Christmas season.

Now, Go Forth And Make Small Talk Good!

Ben