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Notes -
Matthew B. Crawford's Why We Drive and The World Beyond Your Head.
Why We Drive is a vitalist paean to driving (and motorcycling), specifically the kind that involves risk and skill. It's also a rant against self-driving cars, glowing rectangles, and checking out of the real world.
I didn't hate it, but given its title, I expected "Why we road trip", "Why we go for a drive to clear our heads", "Why we explore that highway we've never been down", etc. Instead, it was more like "Why we speed", "Why we do donuts in the parking lot", "Why we tinker with gearhead shit".
Specifically with the gearhead stuff, the book did not do a good enough job of selling it to me. I fully believe it's part of why Crawford drives, but gearhead shit is not at all on the radar for me, or the vast, vast majority of people I know. The rare one or two that could MacGyver a timing belt out of pantyhose (or even know what a timing belt is) tend to be either the children of auto repair professionals, or else very deep in some automotive subculture already. That just makes the "We" in "Why We Drive" way more exclusive than it needs to be.
Partway through The World Beyond Your Head, which I'm already liking much better. It's so far a more general case of the topics surrounding attention in WWD. Probably should have read this one first.
I wonder what Crawford would make of the fact that I'm listening to it over a shitty TTS voice reader while: driving, making dinner, eating, playing video games, cleaning my apartment, swiping notifications away, only hitting pause when something else demands the vocal-processing-modeling part of my brain, such that I can no longer concentrate on the book in the background.
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