Little Brother: love, tragedy, and my search for the truth by Ben Westhoff
In 2005 Ben Westhoff signed up for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program in St. Louis, MO. He was paired with 8-year-old Jorell Cleveland who was living with his Dad and several other siblings. He and Ben truly bonded and Jorell came to Ben's wedding, stayed with Ben and his wife, and eventually even babysat for his kids. But, when Jorell was 19 he was murdered on the street not far from his house. Random gun violence wasn't uncommon in Ferguson, MO and surrounding areas, but this obviously hit Ben hard. As an investigative journalist, Ben decided to dig into Jorell's murder and see if he could figure out who had murdered Jorell. But, what he found was hard to swallow. Ben always tried to see the best in Jorell, but he found that Jorell was using and selling drugs and had several illegal guns. He also seemed to have a very short fuse, which Ben had never witnessed. As Ben dug into who could have murdered Jorell he struggled with what else he could have done as Jorell's "Big Brother" and also how does someone deal with the level of trauma and everyday violence that Jorell and his family and friends experienced. There are no easy answers for solving the epidemic of gun violence in poor, urban areas which this book definitely highlights.
Some reviews complained about Westhoff's "white savior complex", but I didn't see it as anything more than him processing Jorell's death and thinking about what, if anything, he could have done more or differently to help him. I think regardless of race, if you don't grow up in the kind of violent poverty that Jorell did it would be impossible to understand what that life is like. There was just SO MUCH needless violence that anyone living in that area would have some level of trauma even if somehow they didn't know anyone personally who had been shot or killed. But that mindset is extremely hard to get out of even for people who did physically leave the area. It's a very hard issue with no real solutions or answers. Jorell had people in his life who cared about him and wanted better for him - that's why his father enrolled him in the Big Brothers program. But, in the end the pull of the neighborhood was just too much. Westhoff's relationship with Jorell gave him a unique angle to look at this issue, but it's still a hard book without much in the way of solutions. Although, Westhoff did figure out who Jorell's likely murderer was by the end of the book.
Some quotes I liked:
[Ben accompanied Joe (Jorell's Dad) to a parent/teacher conference at Jorell's high school] "'He's a great student,' she said. 'He just sits quietly in class and doesn't say anything.' So that was it. Jorell was in the teacher's favor not because he was excelling, but because he wasn't disturbing anybody. He wasn't likely learning anything, but because he wasn't causing trouble she was going to pass him." (p. 81)
[An example of the ridiculously senseless violence escalating over minor arguments] "As their argument escalated, Jorell grabbed one of his guns and followed Montrel into Mike and Iesha's room. 'He pulled the fucking trigger!' Montrel said. Fortunately, the gun didn't have its [magazine] in, and no bullets were fired. 'He was trying to scare me. Jorell had reached a point in his life, he wasn't taking no bullshit from nobody.' Montrel actually respected him for this, and, as unlikely as it sounds, the pair quickly reconciled. The very next day, in fact, Montrel was once again at the Cleveland house...Jorell wore a sheepish expression and apologized for the gun incident the previous day. 'Man, we ain't even gotta talk about that,' Montrel responded. 'You don't have to apologize. We brothers.'" (p. 171-72) [This whole encounter BLEW MY MIND. Jorell would have murdered Montrel if he'd grabbed a loaded gun. Yet, they were friends before and continued to be friends afterward. If this is "normal" then what isn't normal when it comes to senseless violence?!]
Some reviews complained about Westhoff's "white savior complex", but I didn't see it as anything more than him processing Jorell's death and thinking about what, if anything, he could have done more or differently to help him. I think regardless of race, if you don't grow up in the kind of violent poverty that Jorell did it would be impossible to understand what that life is like. There was just SO MUCH needless violence that anyone living in that area would have some level of trauma even if somehow they didn't know anyone personally who had been shot or killed. But that mindset is extremely hard to get out of even for people who did physically leave the area. It's a very hard issue with no real solutions or answers. Jorell had people in his life who cared about him and wanted better for him - that's why his father enrolled him in the Big Brothers program. But, in the end the pull of the neighborhood was just too much. Westhoff's relationship with Jorell gave him a unique angle to look at this issue, but it's still a hard book without much in the way of solutions. Although, Westhoff did figure out who Jorell's likely murderer was by the end of the book.
Some quotes I liked:
[Ben accompanied Joe (Jorell's Dad) to a parent/teacher conference at Jorell's high school] "'He's a great student,' she said. 'He just sits quietly in class and doesn't say anything.' So that was it. Jorell was in the teacher's favor not because he was excelling, but because he wasn't disturbing anybody. He wasn't likely learning anything, but because he wasn't causing trouble she was going to pass him." (p. 81)
[An example of the ridiculously senseless violence escalating over minor arguments] "As their argument escalated, Jorell grabbed one of his guns and followed Montrel into Mike and Iesha's room. 'He pulled the fucking trigger!' Montrel said. Fortunately, the gun didn't have its [magazine] in, and no bullets were fired. 'He was trying to scare me. Jorell had reached a point in his life, he wasn't taking no bullshit from nobody.' Montrel actually respected him for this, and, as unlikely as it sounds, the pair quickly reconciled. The very next day, in fact, Montrel was once again at the Cleveland house...Jorell wore a sheepish expression and apologized for the gun incident the previous day. 'Man, we ain't even gotta talk about that,' Montrel responded. 'You don't have to apologize. We brothers.'" (p. 171-72) [This whole encounter BLEW MY MIND. Jorell would have murdered Montrel if he'd grabbed a loaded gun. Yet, they were friends before and continued to be friends afterward. If this is "normal" then what isn't normal when it comes to senseless violence?!]
The Chaos Machine: the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world by Max Fisher
The Chaos Machine is an in-depth look at just how insidious social media can be on a society. Fisher explores the beginning of the social media entities and how from the very beginning the ethos of make the most money possible = keep people on any/all social media platforms as long as possible. But, the two most terrifying things about this in my opinion are 1) the algorithms are designed to pull the most controversial topics/pages/groups to the top of the feed and 2) AI is changing the algorithms all the time, so these companies may not even know what exactly their algorithms are doing. There is plenty of other terrifying information throughout the book including lots of real world examples of social media inspiring violence and totalitarian governments. Another aspect I found particularly scary was that some of the dark corners of the internet where neo-Nazis and extreme misogynists would hang out are now becoming more mainstream thanks to social media algorithms. And because of how social media works it makes it appear that these views are much more mainstream and held by a larger percentage of the population than they actually are - but also people's views ARE becoming more extreme, again, thanks to social media's relentless barrage of extreme content coming your way.
Honestly, when I first heard that Facebook or social media had influenced the 2016 election I was skeptical. But, after reading this book I very much understand the reality of the situation. Other than getting rid of the algorithms and just going back to the OG Facebook of a chronological feed of your friends vacation pictures, I don't think this will change until enough people get sick of it and quit social media. And yet, that's hard to do because this is now how we "connect" with people for the most part. And you have the whole other aspect of social media being designed to be addictive. There are no easy answers. But, it's infuriating to read how the leadership of these social media companies repeatedly choose money over people - and not just in a generic way, but knowing that people are being threatened, killed, etc. and still choosing to keep making money instead of looking at what their companies are doing. This is book that everyone on any social media platform should read.
Get ready, there are LOTS of quotes I liked:
[Successful Silicon Valley start-up creators] "'They all seem to be white male nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life,' John Doerr, a legendary tech investor, once said of successful founders, calling this the 'pattern' he used to select investees...Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, had urged elevating antisocial contrarians. 'Individuals with an Asperger's-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today,' he wrote in an influential book on startups. 'If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.'...In reality, those results, Doerr's 'pattern' bearing out, simply reflected a tech culture that was hostile to anyone outside of a long-held male geek misanthrope ideal." (p. 49)
"'Gamergate seems to have alerted racist, misogynist, homophobic internet trolls to the level of power they actually possess. Which is definitely a good thing,' Andrew Anglin, a longtime 4chan poster, wrote on The Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi forum he'd founded in 2013. He urged his followers to coopt Gamergate and the broader social web, launching 'the rise of the Nazi troll army.'...The internet's foundational ideals, while noble, had led tech companies to embrace a narrow and extreme interpretation of free speech that was proving dangerous..." (p. 74)
"Like most, I had not initially considered Gamergate a harbinger of the world to come, having missed its implications at the time, I told [Brianna] Wu. 'I will tell you straight up,' she said, 'I also underestimated it. I could not have foreseen that all of our politics were going to become Gamergate. And of course they were.' She wished she'd anticipated, she said, 'the number of people that are taking up Gamergate tactics. I want to be clear, it's mostly the right doing this. But there are plenty of people on the left that I've been horrified to see have taken up the same kind of tactics of outrage and mob culture and shame.'" (p. 80)
"Public life itself was becoming more fiercely tribal, more extreme, more centered on hating nad punishing the slightest transgression. 'I'm telling you, these platforms are not designed for thoughtful conversation,' [Brianna] Wu said. 'Twitter, and Facebook, and social media platforms are designed for: 'We're right. They're wrong. Let's put this person down really fast and really hard.' And it just amplifies the division we have.'" (p. 93)
"As psychologists have known since Pavlov, when you are repeatedly rewarded for a behavior, you learn a compulsion to repeat it. As you are trained to turn all discussions into matter of high outrage, to express disgust with out-groups, to assert the superiority of your in-group, you will eventually shift from doing it for external rewards to doing it simply because you want to do it. The drive comes from within. Your nature has been changed...All it takes is regular scrolls through your anger-filled feed not only to make you feel angrier while you're online, but also to make you an angrier person." (p. 156)
"Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK, had gathered data on every anti-refugee attack in Germany over a two-year span, 3,335 in all. It had been a volatile period, as Europe's refugee crisis had been followed by a rise in far-right politics...In each incident in the study, the researchers analyzed the respective local community, using a handful of key variables. Wealth. Demographics. Political allegiance. Number of refugees. History of hate crimes. One thing stuck out. Towns with higher-than-average Facebook use reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. This held true in virtually any sort of community: big or small, affluent or struggling, liberal or conservative. The uptick did not correlate with general web usage; it was particular to Facebook. Their data boiled down to a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose by one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 35 percent. Nationwide, they estimated, this effect drove as much as 10 percent of all anti-refugee violence." (p. 184)
"In an unintended 2015 test of this, Ellen Pao, still Reddit's chief, tried something unprecedented: rather than promote superusers, Reddit would ban the most toxic of them. Out of tens of millions of users, her team concluded, only about 15,000, all hyperactive, drove much of the hateful content. Expelling them, Pao reasoned, might change Reddit as a whole. She was right, an outside analysis found. With the elimination of this miniscule percentage of users, hate speech overall dropped an astounding 80 percent among those who remained. Millions of people's behavior had shifted overnight. It was a rare success in combating a problem that would only deepen on other, larger platforms, which did not follow Reddit's lead." (p. 189)
[Joel] "...Kaplan [a former Bush administration official and lobbyist] successfully pushed to shelve one of the company's internal reports finding that the platform's algorithms promoted divisive, polarizing content. He and others objected that addressing the problem would disproportionately affect conservative pages, which drove an outsize share of misinformation. Better to let users be misinformed...Facebook's courtship of Republicans, who retained control of the levers of federal oversight throughout 2018 and 2019, was exhaustive. It hired Jon Kyl, a former Republican senator, to produce a report on any anti-conservative bias in the platform...Zuckerberg hosted off-the-record dinners with influential conservatives, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who had accused Facebook of seeking 'the death of free speech in America.'...Facebook announced it would allow politicians to lie on the platform and grant them special latitude on hate speech, rules that seemed written for Trump and his allies." (p. 258-59)
"I came to think of Facebook's policy team as akin to Philip Morris scientists tasked with developing a safer, better filter. In one sense, cutting down the carcinogens ingested by billions of smokers worldwide saved or prolonged lives on a scale few of us could ever match. In another sense, those scientists were working for the cigarette company, advancing the cause of selling cigarettes that harmed people at an enormous scale. I was not surprised, then, that everyone I spoke to at Facebook, no matter how intelligent or introspective, expressed total certainty that the produce was not innately harmful. That there was no evidence that algorithms or other features pulled users toward extremism or hate." (p. 262)
Honestly, when I first heard that Facebook or social media had influenced the 2016 election I was skeptical. But, after reading this book I very much understand the reality of the situation. Other than getting rid of the algorithms and just going back to the OG Facebook of a chronological feed of your friends vacation pictures, I don't think this will change until enough people get sick of it and quit social media. And yet, that's hard to do because this is now how we "connect" with people for the most part. And you have the whole other aspect of social media being designed to be addictive. There are no easy answers. But, it's infuriating to read how the leadership of these social media companies repeatedly choose money over people - and not just in a generic way, but knowing that people are being threatened, killed, etc. and still choosing to keep making money instead of looking at what their companies are doing. This is book that everyone on any social media platform should read.
Get ready, there are LOTS of quotes I liked:
[Successful Silicon Valley start-up creators] "'They all seem to be white male nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life,' John Doerr, a legendary tech investor, once said of successful founders, calling this the 'pattern' he used to select investees...Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, had urged elevating antisocial contrarians. 'Individuals with an Asperger's-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today,' he wrote in an influential book on startups. 'If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.'...In reality, those results, Doerr's 'pattern' bearing out, simply reflected a tech culture that was hostile to anyone outside of a long-held male geek misanthrope ideal." (p. 49)
"'Gamergate seems to have alerted racist, misogynist, homophobic internet trolls to the level of power they actually possess. Which is definitely a good thing,' Andrew Anglin, a longtime 4chan poster, wrote on The Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi forum he'd founded in 2013. He urged his followers to coopt Gamergate and the broader social web, launching 'the rise of the Nazi troll army.'...The internet's foundational ideals, while noble, had led tech companies to embrace a narrow and extreme interpretation of free speech that was proving dangerous..." (p. 74)
"Like most, I had not initially considered Gamergate a harbinger of the world to come, having missed its implications at the time, I told [Brianna] Wu. 'I will tell you straight up,' she said, 'I also underestimated it. I could not have foreseen that all of our politics were going to become Gamergate. And of course they were.' She wished she'd anticipated, she said, 'the number of people that are taking up Gamergate tactics. I want to be clear, it's mostly the right doing this. But there are plenty of people on the left that I've been horrified to see have taken up the same kind of tactics of outrage and mob culture and shame.'" (p. 80)
"Public life itself was becoming more fiercely tribal, more extreme, more centered on hating nad punishing the slightest transgression. 'I'm telling you, these platforms are not designed for thoughtful conversation,' [Brianna] Wu said. 'Twitter, and Facebook, and social media platforms are designed for: 'We're right. They're wrong. Let's put this person down really fast and really hard.' And it just amplifies the division we have.'" (p. 93)
"As psychologists have known since Pavlov, when you are repeatedly rewarded for a behavior, you learn a compulsion to repeat it. As you are trained to turn all discussions into matter of high outrage, to express disgust with out-groups, to assert the superiority of your in-group, you will eventually shift from doing it for external rewards to doing it simply because you want to do it. The drive comes from within. Your nature has been changed...All it takes is regular scrolls through your anger-filled feed not only to make you feel angrier while you're online, but also to make you an angrier person." (p. 156)
"Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK, had gathered data on every anti-refugee attack in Germany over a two-year span, 3,335 in all. It had been a volatile period, as Europe's refugee crisis had been followed by a rise in far-right politics...In each incident in the study, the researchers analyzed the respective local community, using a handful of key variables. Wealth. Demographics. Political allegiance. Number of refugees. History of hate crimes. One thing stuck out. Towns with higher-than-average Facebook use reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. This held true in virtually any sort of community: big or small, affluent or struggling, liberal or conservative. The uptick did not correlate with general web usage; it was particular to Facebook. Their data boiled down to a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose by one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 35 percent. Nationwide, they estimated, this effect drove as much as 10 percent of all anti-refugee violence." (p. 184)
"In an unintended 2015 test of this, Ellen Pao, still Reddit's chief, tried something unprecedented: rather than promote superusers, Reddit would ban the most toxic of them. Out of tens of millions of users, her team concluded, only about 15,000, all hyperactive, drove much of the hateful content. Expelling them, Pao reasoned, might change Reddit as a whole. She was right, an outside analysis found. With the elimination of this miniscule percentage of users, hate speech overall dropped an astounding 80 percent among those who remained. Millions of people's behavior had shifted overnight. It was a rare success in combating a problem that would only deepen on other, larger platforms, which did not follow Reddit's lead." (p. 189)
[Joel] "...Kaplan [a former Bush administration official and lobbyist] successfully pushed to shelve one of the company's internal reports finding that the platform's algorithms promoted divisive, polarizing content. He and others objected that addressing the problem would disproportionately affect conservative pages, which drove an outsize share of misinformation. Better to let users be misinformed...Facebook's courtship of Republicans, who retained control of the levers of federal oversight throughout 2018 and 2019, was exhaustive. It hired Jon Kyl, a former Republican senator, to produce a report on any anti-conservative bias in the platform...Zuckerberg hosted off-the-record dinners with influential conservatives, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who had accused Facebook of seeking 'the death of free speech in America.'...Facebook announced it would allow politicians to lie on the platform and grant them special latitude on hate speech, rules that seemed written for Trump and his allies." (p. 258-59)
"I came to think of Facebook's policy team as akin to Philip Morris scientists tasked with developing a safer, better filter. In one sense, cutting down the carcinogens ingested by billions of smokers worldwide saved or prolonged lives on a scale few of us could ever match. In another sense, those scientists were working for the cigarette company, advancing the cause of selling cigarettes that harmed people at an enormous scale. I was not surprised, then, that everyone I spoke to at Facebook, no matter how intelligent or introspective, expressed total certainty that the produce was not innately harmful. That there was no evidence that algorithms or other features pulled users toward extremism or hate." (p. 262)
What My Bones Know: a memoir of healing from complex trauma by Stephanie Foo
Stephanie Foo grew up in an extremely abusive household and both of her parents had abandoned her by her junior year of high school. But, while she remembered the abuse and knew it was wrong and bad she felt like it wasn't continuously affecting her. Then once she had her dream job in New York City and was dating an amazing man she started having severe panic attacks. Her therapist told her that she had complex PTSD. And even though she'd been seeing this therapist for 10 years this was news to Foo. Instead of feeling relieved, she felt worse - broken and unfixable. So, she found a new therapist (several actually, it took awhile to find the right one) and started studying up on complex PTSD - how it happens, how it affects people, and how to start healing. This book is that journey and if there is ever someone who embodies resilience more I don't know who it could be besides Foo. She shares details of her childhood for background and then digs into the two years after her c-PTSD diagnosis. While this is not a light, fun read - there is a LOT of hard stuff - it is hopeful and Foo shows how this diagnosis is nothing shameful or unhealable.
Some quotes I liked:
"It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being." (p. 186)
"Trauma isn't just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That's just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had." (p. 231)
"Being healed isn't about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That's just life...As Lori Gottlieb says in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, 'Many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can't mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You'll also mute the joy.'" (p. 296-97)
Some quotes I liked:
"It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being." (p. 186)
"Trauma isn't just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That's just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had." (p. 231)
"Being healed isn't about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That's just life...As Lori Gottlieb says in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, 'Many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can't mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You'll also mute the joy.'" (p. 296-97)
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