Reviews and Comments

This book guides us through a a day in the life of a team of astronauts orbiting earth. But to it's a "day" is a bit misleading given how often the sun "rises" and "falls" on these characters. The book proceeds through 16 orbits, and it offers a map of those orbits at the beginning. But the book itself provides a map as well, constantly reminding the reader what part of the globe is passing underneath the international space station.

Beautifully written, and there are too many great moments to not them all here. But my favorite moment is this passage about Michael Collins famous photo of the lunar module leaving the earth's surface.

"In the photograph Collins took, there's the lunar module carrying Armstrong and Aldrin, just behind them the moon, and some 250,000 miles beyond that the Earth, a blue half sphere hanging in all blackness and bearing mankind. Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photograph, it is said, and this has always been a source of great enchantment. Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.

Anton has never really understood that claim, or at least the enchantment of it. What of all the people on the other side of the earth that the camera can't see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere, which is in night and gulped up by the darkness of space? Are they in the photograph? In truth, nobody is in the photograph, nobody can be seen. Everybody is invisible – Armstrong and Aldrin inside the lunar model, humankind, unseen, on a planet that could easily, from this view, be uninhabited. The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself – his eye at the viewfinder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the more enchanting thing about Collins's image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains." (63-64)

I was familiar with most of this argument from reading Ezra Klein's columns and listening to his podcasts (and, to a lesser extent, listening to Thompson's Plain English podcast). I am convinced by the argument: The U.S. political system has put up layers of barriers that prevent inventing, making, and building. From homes to public transportation systems, everything takes too long to build. The barriers were built with good intentions (environmental concerns, racial justice, supporting union labor), but we have reached a point where it is difficult to build what we need. And it is especially bad in cities and states run by Democrats.

I leave the book without a clear sense for how Klein and Thompson would guard against the problems of a "just build it" approach that emerged in previous years (highways built through Black neighborhoods, energy infrastructure built in those same neighborhoods because suburbs take a NIMBY approach to everything from affordable housing to power stations). They would likely say that these trade-offs have to be worked in out politically but that the tradeoff argument can't always land us in a place of not building.

I find it interesting that this book arrived at the exact same time as Jacobin's Spring 2025 issue on "Progress." All parts of the left seem to believe that the time has come for an affirmative vision of the future, given that the right's regressive vision is a hellscape.

The left has not necessarily embraced the argument fully (I think the center-left will be much more amenable). Here's a Jacobin review:

jacobin.com/2025/03/abundance-klein-thompson-book-review

Matt Bruenig lays out the counter-arguments: 1) The historical narrative the book tells is contested; 2) The book sidelines a number of agendas in the name of removing barriers to building/inventing; 3) The authors never face up to the political practicality of their argument - how do they propose to deal with the resistance to an abundance agenda? Resistance from homeowner's associations, unions, environmental activists, and more.

The close of that review seems right to me:

"Ultimately, the book seems fine to me. I’d say the policy specifics are a bit of a retread, but that’s not really a critique: the authors never claim novelty and the book itself is literally a retread of some articles they wrote for the Atlantic and the New York Times. It’s a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have. In short, I think the pique over the book is out of proportion to what the book is.

With that said, the broader Abundist world that the book is attempting to push forward — a world that appears to be teeming with libertarians, right-wing Democrats like Jared Polis and Ritchie Torres, refugees of the effective altruist implosion, and tech sector types — does seem like it could head in some pretty bad directions that Abundance would fit naturally into. But this would not be the fault of Klein and Thompson."

Fanny is hard to be friends with, and this book puts you into those difficulties. A beautiful book that isn't plot-driven but focuses much more on the dynamics of a friendship. A story told by "the Narrator," a writer who is trying to muddle through interactions with Fanny.

My favorite part is the parallel between being friends with Fanny and the act of writing:

"It was like telling a story: you had to be extremely focused in order to piece the elements together, to be in an almost trancelike state where forms arise and take shape that never appear directly to reason. You had to formulate a question as accurately as possible and, in the painstaking work of edification that ensued, produce the kind of answer that never states its name but foists itself on the reader as one of the truths of human existence. Like the profuse material of life to which a text gives form and meaning, the turmoil and mystery of Fanny's emotions demanded to be worked upon. She was the living example of what a Narrator has to confront every hour of every day. She was a book from before the book." (45)

I only recently learned of the work (writing, political leadership, organizing) of Nikil Saval. Ran into this book in a small bookshop and immediately grabbed it after having heard Saval speak at two union-related events in Philly during the last month.

In 1964, in response to police violence in Harlem, June Jordan wrote to Buckminster Fuller to propose a speculative redesign of Harlem. Saval tells that story in a book that is a recreation of a lecture he gave on zoom during Covid restrictions and during his campaign for Pennsylvania Senate (an election he won). It's an interesting story and worth the read.

It's striking to read Jordan's account of what it's like to move through the grid of a city when you feel like you're constantly in the crosshairs:

"Given our goal of a pacific, life-expanding design for human community, we might revise street patterning so that the present patterns of confrontation by parallel lines would never be repeated. The existing monotony limits pleasures of perspectives. rigidly flat land is ruled by rectilinear for. The crisscrosing pattern too often becomes a psychological crucifixion; an emergence from an alleyway into a danger zone vlunerable to enemies approaching in at least two directions that converge at the target who is the pedestrian poised on a corner." (67)

Jordan and Fuller propose large towers (that resemble nuclear cooling towers) that reorient life away from "the street" and is various dangers and toward something more collective and something that would prioritize public safety (safety from, among other things, the police).

15 years ago, I likely would have read this book and rolled my eyes a bit. Now? I'm kinda with Mander:

"Computers, like television, are far more valuable and helpful to the military, to multinational corporations, to international banking, to governments, and institutions of surveillance and control – all of whom use this technology on a scale and with a speed that are beyond our imagining – then they ever will be to you and me." (3)

But beyond this discussion of the damage computers and telecommunications network had done and would do to everyone, Mander is focused on the impact it was having on Indigenous peoples. The effects on Indigenous languages, on traditional storytelling practices, and on communal gathering.

He doesn't get everything right, but This book is worth a read both as a historical document and, honestly, as a way to think about legitimate modes of resistance and refusal when it comes to tech.

I was intrigued to hear an argument that American democracy needs Christianity, and I was especially intrigued to hear it from an openly gay atheist. In all, the book is interesting. The argument basically goes like this: There are things that the U.S. constitution does not deal with (morality, ethics), and there need to be other institutions that step in to handle those things. The bargain between Christianity and the U.S. form of government has been that each will handle what it does best. Of course, that bargain has broken down. The church has become a political entity, and American politics has taken on the look of religious institutions (people worshiping at the alter of red and blue).

Two things Rauch assumes in this book (unsurprisingly, given that he works at a Washington thinktank): that liberalism is a desirable political system/ideology; that capitalism is a desirable economic arrangement. I think if he were to question those two terms, the argument might have to be rethought.

But also: I am not convinced that Christianity is the only way to fill the gap here. There are other ways that people can choose to organize themselves and address questions of morals and ethics. He might agree with this argument, but I think he's taking a pragmatic approach: Christianity is so big and powerful that we should look for ways to persuade Christians to change the church.

I picked this book up on a whim - I didn't really know anything about it. And now I am excited for Volume 2 and interested in what the translation schedule is for the remaining volumes (8 in total).

Yes, this is a Groundhog Day-like story, but it is much more than that. My favorite parts are when the character works through what it's like to attend to the same day over and over and also when she is trying to understand her relationship to her spouse as she remains stuck in this loop.

"Suddenly I remember the sounds of summer. I remember the creaking of the stairs. You don't hear it when there is moisture in the air, it is never there in winter, but there comes a point in the course of the summer when the stairs start to creak. It has to do with the wood drying out and you have to tread carefully, especially if you're going up or down the stairs when someone is sleeping. If it is the middle of the night or early in the morning when all else is still and when the dry creak fills the room if you don't set your feet very carefully and silently on step after step after step. It is a sound that speaks of summer and the many years those stairs have been there, of the generations of feet they have carried up and down. But when summer is over, in the middle of September or some time in October, the sound disappears from the stairs, the moisture seeps back into the wood and autumn sets in with its breezes and silent stairs." (95)

"Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it's a chemical reaction, I don't know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other's company. Maybe we are a weather system - condensation and evaporation." (46)