Reads of the week - March 1, 2024
books, articles, podcasts, and videos I'm recommending
I love receiving Friday reading/listening roundups (Austin Kleon and JT Ellison’s are my favorites these days) and I’ve already been reading a TON in 2024. I’ve also been writing my tail off. I have a co-authored book on the ways demographic data get distorted in the public sphere due for peer review mid-March so I’m head down and fingers flying. The crick in my neck is clear evidence of the hours I’m spending at my desk. This book project started about four years ago so I think my co-authors and I are actually glad to have the deadline finally here. It will be amazing to have it off my plate for the next few months.
1. Read: I’ll be talking more about Leta Hong Fincher’s 10th anniversary edition of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. We hear all the time that birth rates are low in China because of gender inequality, but what does that actually look like? The CCP’s use of the pejorative term “leftover women” to describe single, urban professional women in their late twenties or older is part of their campaign to encourage marriage and childbearing—clearly, it has the opposite effect. I plowed through this book in a day and found Fincher’s connection between property rights and low marriage rates especially useful. Side note: I also enjoyed her 2018 book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.
2. Listen: Huge fan of Cal Newport’s books yet somehow had no idea he had a podcast (probably because there are just so many books and podcasts out there, right?). Loved this episode on “The Email Catastrophe,” in which he reminds us that there were “before times” when we’d do work and communicate without email. Blows my mind to think that there are other ways we could have employed that tool rather than the way we chose. Can we please go back in time and start over? (3/1/24 inbox unread messages: 546. Send help.)
3. Read: Go ahead and preorder Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, which releases March 19th. Low birth rates are caused by economic reasons, sure, and gender inequality (see number one on this list), but there’s something else our research often doesn’t capture. That’s what Tim focuses on. While I don’t approach the issue from a religious perspective, like Tim does, and am well-aware of the how this issue gets hijacked in the political arena (hence, the book I’m co-authoring), I still found great value in the way he described the breakdown of community and valuing children. I’ve found the same to be true in my own experience.
4. Read: This story from ProPublica made me cry and feel pretty darn hopeless.
5. Read, or don’t: I’ve read a bunch of novels this year already but they were mostly not great. If you have a really great page-turner let me know in the comments. I did love First Lie Wins and so did my husband—the rare read we both enjoyed. And I think I’m finally on the Sarah J. Maas train. “Romantasy” is a great palate cleanser for all the non-fiction I read on a daily basis! Skip Argylle. Seriously.
6. Watch: I consulted on and was interviewed for this 6-minute PBS video on global demographic change. It was great to have an easy-to-grasp synopsis of the kind of work I do to share with the 99% of people in my life who aren’t studying demography from dawn to dusk.
Okay, hit me up with your recommendations. My TBR for the weekend includes Babel, by RF Kuang, Bride, by Ali Hazelwood, and Every Summer After, by Carley Fortune. Ready to hunker down.
Cuteness overload:
We’ve been fostering these puppies over the last two weeks while their permanent foster was out of town. Let me highly recommend being a “vacation foster.” We signed up for 5 days but kept them a bit longer just for snuggles.
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