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Notes -
Yesterday I finished The New Science of Narcissism. I was disappointed to find it no better than any other pop science book I've read in the last few years, and quite a bit worse in a couple of specific ways (the author rings the "DAE orang man bad???" bell a lot despite himself including a bar chart showing that Trump is no more narcissistic than many prior Presidents; and he completely lost me when he argued that the Goldwater rule ought to be abolished). I was expecting something a lot more useful and/or a lot more discomforting, but for the most part it told me a lot of things I already knew (everyone has narcissistic traits to some degree, narcissism can be an asset in certain contexts, you can be narcissistic without full-blown narcissistic personality disorder etc.). The book also includes an entire chapter about how geeks are narcissistic, which seemed a bit tangential. Probably the only thing I really got from it was a better understanding of "vulnerable narcissism" as distinct from the grandiose narcissism with which we're all familiar.
Yesterday evening I started Ted Chiang's short story "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", and finished it at lunchtime today. Readable and entertaining, but a fairly conventional time-travel story for the most part - it didn't get me thinking the way "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" did. Planning to read Bones and All next, having enjoyed Luca Guadagnino's film adaptation far more than I expected to, to the point that it's my favourite film released in 2022 aside from Tár. (The film of Bones and All incidentally represents a massive step-up in quality from Guadagnino's previous collaboration with Timothée Chalamet Call Me by Your Name, about which I still cannot understand the hype.)
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