Chapter One: Love and evolution. The way is the goal

Chapter Two: Your siblings shape your genes. For life

Chapter Three: Mind, Madness and Modernity 

Chapter Four: 21st c apocalypse: What would Marx do?

I love Naomi Klein. Strong, courageous, principled. In her latest, Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world (2023), willing to open her life for us to see for ourselves what makes her tick. A world of doppelgangers, shadow selves of many varieties from our repressed inner Other, to an AI construct of who you are in public.

Cosmopolitan -- 'world politics', 'world citizen' -- people of many races under a world empire. The word became a meme in the 1890s as British empire blossomed, supposedly the world now united around principles of the free market. Sounds cool. The market is the proven way to run economies. It is neutral, no favorites, harsh but just, making us work hard, the state ensuring people don't cheat and undermine the sacred system. For if belief in all this wavers, the loss of faith in the market would spell doom for all, equally. We are equal before the law, and we can vote. That's what democracy and freedom are all about, right?

But is the apparent real?

In 2018, a majority of millennials said boomers had ‘made things worse’ for their generation. They tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos.

In all fields touched by the six boomers profiled here---technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, law---what they passed on to their children was worse than what they inherited.

Andrews is senior editor at The American Conservative, and her book is a jeremiad, with the flavour of Old Testament divine justice, a call for owning up to one’s sins. The sins are many and the style is refreshingly unapologetically angry. The boomers should not be allowed to shuffle off the world stage until they have been made to regret their actions… In a just world there would be cosmic retribution for taking Jobs’s life’s work and turning it to the most boomerish purposes imaginable.

Writing this memoir has been as much about discovering my story, that is, myself as it is about telling it. That's Falk's version of Socrates' 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' Or should I say, Forrest Gump's? Falk's life reads like a storybook, starting with meeting Supreme Court judges with his father at age 9 in 1939, making friends with Claudette Colbere, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liz Taylor (long story) at age 15, befriending and befoeing many of the dramatis personae of the Cold War throughout his long and productive life, finally landing on the shores of democratic socialism as the US charges towards the (literal) finish line.