Brown Motion

After the Israeli historian Harari educated us about our species and its origins in easy to read manner earlier this decade, a Brit followed up with a hilarious portrait of our uncanny ability to cock things up. Humans - brief history of how we fucked it all up -  is a 2019 attempt by British journalist and storyteller Tom Phillips to lay bare the truth that we are not all that smart as cracked up to be. Starting with a condensed table of contents that describes an ape falling off a tree 3.2 M years ago after probably jerking off and dying, the species went on to get to present state aka Wise Man (leaving that moniker in doubt) or Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Contrast Yuval Harari's detailed investigations of historic records and some eye opening data points to Phillips' easy going hilarity, the latter was quite an entertaining read. Indeed we as a species still deal with the consequences of what we now see in the rearview mirror of history.  Discovering agriculture, gasolin...

I read the third international bestseller from an Israeli historian called Yuval Harari. A modern day thinker, this man has unpacked a lot in his writings over the past few years.  All his writings revolve around trying to answer some of history's most complex puzzles.  Who are we?  What is our purpose?  What comes next? In this latest installment he takes us on a journey way into the past to the point of creation and brings us crashing into the modern day earth and then paints a scary picture of what is to come.  Or at least a possible future. While it is hard to completely digest the entirety of this man's writings here are a few takeaways I can enumerate - 1.  Humans are really bad with large numbers.  Each of us to varying degrees has a switch that fails at computing 'scale'.  We can think of ourselves and our surroundings over a period of time but it is far too limited when appreciating our role as a species over extended periods....

A street in Las Vegas or Amsterdam or Mumbai.  A lonely soul looking for some action.  The sexual kind.  The purveyors of said service are many.  To the highest bidder go the spoils.   While the world's oldest profession has benefited humankind as being a pleasure or a vice (viewed differently) it is fundamentally about a transaction.  A transaction where just like buying eggs at a supermarket the buyer and seller exchange value. The value is determined in Euros or Dollars or Rupees and is considered legal or illegal depending on the lat and longitude of the location where said transaction takes place.  But in the end the parties to this transaction are left feeling adequately compensated.  This transaction also adds to the economic value of the society in its own way, again whether legal or otherwise. This is the ideal and easy to follow scenario. While human flesh and fluids are an integral part of the above described experience the...