book review – literature

SELF-REALIZATION: Survival of the fittest – it's about staying in shape and taking care of your own productivity. You also have an app that measures heart rate, steps and sleep quality.

CARE: The UK is increasingly dependent on the efforts of volunteers to provide citizens with a minimum of care while public services are suffering from budget cuts and crises.

ARTIST: Guttorm Nordø talks about the immediate as the only guideline for his art. One of the finest, most risk-taking and wittiest art books of 2021?

CLIMATE: Are vegans' attempts to lift the meat comb or drop flying the solution to the climate problem? Over the past year, our changing travel and behavior patterns have had only a small effect on global greenhouse gas emissions.

When Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, introduces the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution), and when Elon Musk, the founder of the successful Tesla, plus Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents the visions for the 21st century , you should pay close attention to what is the specific content of what they present of technology, researched in the laboratories of Silicon Valley.

MODERNISM: Can the current anti-social urban and housing situation need more modernism? Two books actualize a belief in progress that society can change for the better.

ENVIRONMENT: We are on a collision course with both natural and social capital, globally, what former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a global suicide pact. Well, we have to build a new future stone by stone – knowing that we will not see the result ourselves.

CLIMATE: Heikki Holmås describes zero emission targets in a new book, where the climate crisis is solved with taxes and emission requirements, plenty of green power and technology. But at what price?

MORAL PHILOSOPHY: It has proved extremely difficult to get philosophy to conform to what society at all times considers sensible, reasonable and appropriate.

EAST ASIA: North Korea has been subjected to persistent blackening to the extent that the slightest attempt to nuance the image is immediately shot down. Is this a book that will provoke the press, political influencers and researchers?

GREEN CHANGE: Norway has an inability to get out of oil dependence.

CULTURAL CRITICISM: Yoko Tawada moves between German and Japanese words – in line with Paul Celan or Roland Barthes. But did you know that tears contain the stress hormone cortisol?

ECONOMY: Dragsted has a number of suggestions for how employees can get a larger share of the «community cake» – e.g. by shutting them into the corporate executive rooms.

3 BOOKS ON ECOLOGY: From the Yellow Vests came new forms of organization within production, housing and consumption functions. And with "Degrowth", starting with very simple actions such as protection of water, air and soil. And what about the local?

SOCIETY: There are many indications that a definitive collapse is approaching. For many people, the collapse is already a fact.

RADICAL CHIC: If the left is ever to become dominant again, it must, according to Mark Fisher, embrace the desires that have emerged under capitalism, not just reject them. The left should cultivate technology, automation, reduced working day and popular aesthetic expressions such as fashion.