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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Friction’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Friction’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
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Updated 03 January 2025

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Friction’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Friction’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world.

Focusing on the social drama of the Indonesian rainforests in the 1980s and 1990s, she shows how a host of competing interests—from environmentalists and North American investors to advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, international funding agencies, and village elders—are drawn into unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Discrete Choice Models’

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Photo/Supplied
Updated 17 October 2025

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Discrete Choice Models’

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  • This book offers a foundational treatment of discrete choice models, introducing the logit model and its generalizations, logistic and Poisson regressions

Author: ALFRED GALICHON 

“Discrete choice models” are essential tools for understanding decision-making when individuals must choose among alternatives.

They have applications across the social sciences, notably in economics, marketing, and political science.

This book offers a foundational treatment of discrete choice models, introducing the logit model and its generalizations, logistic and Poisson regressions, and generalized linear models, and demonstrates their use in analyzing important econometric models.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Father Time’ by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Father Time’ by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Updated 16 October 2025

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Father Time’ by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Father Time’ by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn’t it always been so? But come the 21st century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth.

How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.”


Book Review: ‘My Musings’

Book Review: ‘My Musings’
Updated 16 October 2025

Book Review: ‘My Musings’

Book Review: ‘My Musings’
  • The book reminds us that meaning often hides in the everyday, waiting for us to notice. 

JEDDAH: “My Musings” feels less like a book and more like a long, unhurried conversation with someone who has lived, laughed, lost, and learned, and is generous enough to share the journey.

A.G. Danish has a gift for noticing the small things most of us overlook and then weaving them into reflections that suddenly feel universal.

What’s refreshing is how ordinary moments, like staring at an empty fridge, fighting with a remote control, or sipping a cup of tea, become mirrors for bigger truths about life, love, and resilience.

He doesn’t preach; he observes. And in those observations, there’s humor, honesty, and sometimes a quiet ache that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.

The beauty of “My Musings” lies in its balance: One page makes you smile, the next makes you pause, and before you know it, you’re looking at your own life a little differently.

Danish is not afraid to show his vulnerability, especially when he writes about family and loss, and that honesty is what makes the writing so relatable.

His pain of losing his wife Farida Danish can be felt in some parts of the book.

This is not a book to rush through. It’s the kind you keep on your bedside table, picking up a piece at a time, letting each thought breathe. Each chapter is a saga in itself.

If you enjoy writing that is simple, reflective, and deeply human, “My Musings” is worth your time. It reminds us that meaning often hides in the everyday, waiting for us to notice. 

A warm, thoughtful, and quietly powerful read. 
 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Earth and Life’ by Andrew H. Knoll

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Earth and Life’ by Andrew H. Knoll
Updated 15 October 2025

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Earth and Life’ by Andrew H. Knoll

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Earth and Life’ by Andrew H. Knoll

How did the world as we know it—from the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe and the life that surrounds us—come to be?

Geologists have proposed one set of answers while biologists have proposed another.

Earth and Life is the first book to reveal why we need to listen to both voices—the physical and the biological—to understand how we and our planet became possible.

In this captivating book, Andrew Knoll traces how all life is sustained by Earth’s geological and atmospheric dynamics, and how life itself shapes the physical environment.


What We Are Reading Today: Seven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor

What We Are Reading Today: Seven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor
Updated 14 October 2025

What We Are Reading Today: Seven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor

What We Are Reading Today: Seven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor

Vanessa Taylor’s “Seven Rivers” tells the story of the Nile, Danube, Niger, Mississippi, Ganges, Yangtze and the Thames.

At its heart are the empire-builders of the Chinese dynasties, Romans and Hindus and their river gods, the Habsburgs and Ottomans, Mughal emperors, the people of the Niger from Mali’s golden age to today, struggles of life and death on the Mississippi, and the dethroning of the British on the rivers of their unruly imperial subjects.