My 10 Favorite Reads of 2024

Plus, a few coming down the pike.

Before we dive into the substance of this newsletter, I want to say: If you have not yet listened to the 10-part podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, do it now. This is a deeply moving and stunning series that takes the listener to the heart of the question about consciousness, via non-speaking autistic savants who are telepathic. I’d never heard about this phenomena and their stories are riveting and beautiful. This independent production is #1 on the Apple Podcast charts, which is wild.

Okay, here we go. A few years ago I started tracking my books on Goodreads after I picked up a book on a mad dash through an airport only to realize at wheels up that I’d read it before (The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn if you’re curious). I panic when I don’t have a book—it’s a habit from a childhood spent trailing behind a mom who didn’t want to drive back and forth from home to “town” in between activities, and a dad who was sometimes on call at the hospital (I spent a lot of time in the doctor’s lounge eating crackers and sugar cubes). There was a lot of down-time.

Now, whenever I travel anywhere—to another city, to get a coffee—I pack at least a “book-a-day” if not more, because you just never know. I mostly get books read by 10 and 15 minutes stolen here and there. (I’ve written a few posts about reading because I get a lot of Q’s about this, here’s the main one: “How to Read More Books.”)

This year, I read 85 books—mostly non-fiction. Below, the reads that really stood out to me, along with a few that I’m exciting about coming in 2025 (with podcast episodes to match). I’ve pulled a quote from each to give you a sense of the content.

Kicking it with my brother—I remember that cover, it’s Winnie the Pooh. Meanwhile, my parents put a small couch in our kitchen, near the fire, which was brilliant. Best place to be in the house!

---

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, by Barbara Ehrenreich

I ordered this on a lark—I LOVE Barbara Ehrenreich. While it was published in the ‘80s, I found it to be incredibly timely. It’s a fascinating drive into the ‘50s and ‘60s—and specifically how these decades informed the creation of a code of masculinity that lives with us today. (For more on that, I recommend Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men as well.) Ehrenreich was a great and exceptionally prolific writer who covered off on so many themes (you might know her from Nickel and Dimed). For example, I just added Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers to my cart, along with Living With a Wild God.

Anywho, here’s Ehrenreich:

“In the 1950s, where we begin, there was a firm extension (or as we would now say, ‘role’) that required men to grow up, marry and support their wives. To do anything else was less than grown-up, and the man who willfully deviated was judged to be somehow ‘less than a man.’ This expectation was supported by an enormous weight of expert opinion, moral sentiment and public bias, both within popular culture and the elite centers of academic wisdom. But by the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, adult manhood was no longer burdened with the automatic expectation of marriage and breadwinning. The man who postpones marriage even into middle age, who avoid women who are likely to become financial dependents, who is dedicated to his own pleasures, is likely to be found not suspiciously deviant, but ‘healthy.’ And this judgment, like the prior one, is supported by expert opinion and by the moral sentiments and biases of a considerable sector of the American middle class.

This drastic change in our culture expectations of men has been ignored, down-played or else buried under the weary rubric of ‘changing sex roles.’ Obviously, our expectations of adult womanhood have changed just as dramatically in the last thirty years. The old feminine ideal—the full-time housewife with a station wagon full of children—has been largely replaced by the career woman with attaché case and skirted suit. Partly because the changes in women’s role have been given conscious articulation by a feminist movement, changes in men (or in the behavior expected of men) are usually believed to be derivative of, or merely reactive to, the changes in women, begun well before the revival of feminism and stemmed from dissatisfactions every bit as deep, if not as idealistically expressed, as those that motivated our founding ‘second wave’ feminists.”

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt

I think I’m the only person in America who hasn’t read The Anxious Generation. (I have a block on it, I think because I’m sensitive to widespread cultural issues being placed on the shoulders of parents to solve.) I found The Righteous Mind to be a balm this year, particularly during the election. Haidt clarifies what determines our own moral codes and it’s not rigid, nor is it particularly logical. It’s intuitive. We feel how we feel and then we gather evidence to support that position.

Here’s Haidt:

“Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on ‘motivated reasoning,’ showing the many tricks people use to reach the conclusions they want to reach. When subjects are told that an intelligence test gave them a low score, they choose to read articles criticizing (rather than supporting) the validity of IQ tests. When people read a (fictitious) scientific study that reports a link between caffeine consumption and breast cancer, women who are heavy coffee drinkers find more flaws in the study than do men and less caffeinated women. Pete Ditto, at the University of California at Irvine, asked subjects to lick a strip of paper to determine whether they have a serious enzyme deficiency. He found that people wait longer for the paper to change color (which it never does) when a color change is desirable than when it indicates a deficiency, and those who get the undesirable prognosis find more reasons why the test might not be accurate (for example, ‘my mouth was unusually dry today’).

“If people can literally see what they want to see—given a bit of ambiguity—is it any wonder that scientific studies often fail to persuade the general public? Scientists are really good at finding flaws in studies that contradict their own views, but it sometimes happens that evidence accumulates across many studies to the point where scientists must change their minds. I’ve seen this happen in my colleagues (and myself) many times, and it’s part of the accountability system of science—you’d look foolish clinging to discredited theories. But for nonscientists, there is no such thing as a study you must believe. It’s always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or, if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers.”

Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Pulling the Thread Podcast Episode: “How We Evolved to Care”

You might know this legendary evolutionary anthropologist from Mother Time, or the fact that she coined the term “allo-mother,” or “allo-parent” way back in the day at Harvard. Hrdy is responsible for our understandings of shared care—and how our predecessors survived extinction events because they looked after each other, and each other’s children. (There’s even evidence of a “Neanderthal daycare,” i.e., many sets of children’s footprints with a lone adult.) This may seem obvious but it hasn’t been: It’s hard to over-estimate how intensely the idea of the “nuclear family” has seized peoples’ imaginations, i.e., that it’s been our enduring, natural reality. Father Time, which came out this year, furthers and deepens our understanding of the roles of men, and the revelations are stunning—namely, that we all, regardless of gender, possess the same wiring to be the primary parent. Whether it gets fully turned on or not is the question. Meanwhile, Hrdy sifts through the evidence that suggests that cultures where men and boys are kept apart from women and children are exceptionally more violent and dangerous for women and children, suggesting that caring for babies is one of the factor’s that has kept us alive and collected.

Here’s Hrdy:

“There are sound reasons to think that on average women tend to be more empathetic and other-regarding than men. After all, mammalian mothers evolved to tend and keep safe, and nourish with life-sustaining milk, little creatures they gave birth to. Theirs is an age-old legacy prompting mothers to proceed more cautiously than males. If they are less foolhardy and prioritize safer environments, it's because they need to stay alive in order to care for helpless and highly dependent young. This helps explain why women today are more likely than men to vote for social programs targeting child well-being, and to take the lead in environmental protection. No wonder political commentators are convinced that nations are better off with women leaders when caution, tact, or a conciliatory mindset is called for. It helps explain why, once women get the vote in a democratic country, that country is less likely to initiate war.

“Meanwhile, assumptions about males having evolved to compete with other males for status and mates help explain why men are more likely to take risks, often egged on by a testosterone-fueled overconfidence. Such hubristic inclinations to "deceive up" all too often lure male stockbrokers to trade impulsively, or team captains and military leaders to imagine that they can win a contest or war whose outcome they can't actually foresee. All this is consistent with Darwin's original assessment of male competitiveness paired with women's gentler, more prosocial, other-regarding proclivities.

“But if men caring for babies undergo the same neurological transformations, the same increases in prolactin levels and oxytocin-infused sensual pleasure as mothers do; if their testosterone drops and men become as fixated on infant well-being as mothers; if their brains undergo shape-shifting similar to that in mothers, wouldn't men's psychological preferences change as well? Might men's priorities come to more nearly resemble the more prosocial ones mothers are assumed to have?

“Might such men also be more likely to opt for safer and more sustainable courses of action?

“Anthropologists have long been aware that societies where men spend more time in contact with mothers and children are less bellicose and exhibit lower rates of violence. Social psychologists tell us that men exposed to cues from babies tend to be more other-regarding and generous. Might baby-exposed men also come to prioritize the well-being of children— and the planet — above their own social status or, in the case of politicians, their electability?”

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein

At first glance, the premise might be odd: Klein explores the way she’s often confused with Naomi Wolf, a writer of a similar age who used to explore similar themes who has since gone into the Steve Bannon mirrorworld, after being canceled and cast out by the literary elite. But it’s a brilliant conceit for exploring doubles and polarity and the way we come to act out what we profess to hate…it’s really a book about the Jungian concept of shadow. She also offers an excellent critique of the left (of which she is a part) and how we got to this political moment.

Here’s Klein:

“It’s satisfying and feels a little like self-determination on platforms where everything else is determined by others. But I am also unsettled by the ease with which we can turn off other humans. I fear that there is something habit-forming about making other people disappear with a keystroke. (Just as there is surely something habit-forming in the sadistic pleasure that comes from being part of a pack that drives someone off a platform for good.)

“When someone is pushed out of progressive conversations or communities because they said or did something hurtful or ignorant, or questioned an identity orthodoxy, or got too successful too fast and was deemed due for a takedown, their absence is frequently met with celebration, as Wolf’s exile from Twitter was. But these people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them. They go somewhere else. And many of them go to the Mirror World: a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped.”

The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, by Iain McGilchrist

This was the first—and longest—book I read in 2024. It reads a bit like a bit of a filing cabinet of everything McGilchrist finds interesting, but there are a lot of incredible insights and gems, namely about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. McGilchrist also wrote The Master and the Emmissary, which I haven’t read yet (fortunately, it’s a mere 600 pages and not 1,500), which postulates that the left hemisphere sees the world in parts, while the right hemisphere is responsible for keeping its “wholeness” intact. As such, the right hemisphere should be the master, and the left the emmissary. McGilchrist argues that in today’s culture, the left brain has run away with the show. He cites some fascinating studies where they shut down a hemisphere—without the right hemisphere to keep it in check, the left hemisphere actually lies. It’s so committed to what it perceives, it can’t open up to a larger reality absent the right hemisphere being online: “As far as the left hemisphere is concerned, truth is fidelity to a closed system which defines its own reality. Internal, theoretical, consistency is more important than truth to experience. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, thinks that it might be worth checking by looking out of the window, where, whatever it may say on the piece of paper, a porcupine is not, actually, a monkey, nor are tropical winters cold.”

I have 43 pages of notes, so hard to find a good summation, but here’s one:

“In humans the left hemisphere is designed for grasping, controls the right hand with which we grasp (as well as those aspects of language which enable us to say we have ‘grasped’ something—pinned it down) and helps us manipulate, rather than understand, the world. It sees little, but what it does see seems clear. It is confident, tends to be black and white in its judgments, and jumps to conclusions. Since it is serving the predator in us, it has to if it is to succeed. It sees a linear relationship between the doer and the ‘done to,’ between arrow and target.

“By contrast, the wide-open, vigilant, sustained attention of the right hemisphere, without preconception as to what it may find, is designed to look out for all the rest—whatever else might be going on in the world while we are busy grasping. Its purpose is to help us understand, rather than manipulate the world: to see the whole and how we relate to it. It is more exploratory, less certain: it is more interested in making discriminations, in shades of meaning.”

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, by M. Scott Peck

I am somewhat consumed with the polarity of good and evil—and specifically whether true evil exists, or is simply deep shadow. (I have a podcast episode with Thomas Hübl coming up where we get into this—and I have written about it… a lot. Too many times to list here!). I loved this classics from the ‘90s just as much as I loved The Road Less Traveled. This book is fascinating, particularly the sections near the end when he writes about…exorcisms. I mean, why not?

Here’s Peck:

“It is a strange thing. Dozens of times I have been asked by patients or acquaintances: ‘Dr. Peck, why is there evil in the world?’ Yet n one has ever asked me in all these years: ‘Why is there good in the world?’ It is as if we automatically assume this is a naturally good world that has somehow been contaminated by evil. In terms of what we know of science, however, it is actually easier to explain evil. That things decay is quite explainable in accord with the natural law of physics. That life should evolve into more and more complex forms is not so easily understandable. That children generally lie and steal and cheat is routinely observable. The fact that sometimes they grow up to become truly honest adults is what seems the more remarkable. Laziness is more the rule than diligence. If we seriously think about it, it probably makes more sense to assume this is a naturally evil world that has somehow been mysteriously ‘contaminated’ by goodness, rather than the other way around. The mystery of goodness is even greater than the mystery of evil.

…

“Evil is in opposition to life. It is that which opposes the life force. It has, in short, to do with killing. Specifically, it has to do with murder—namely, unnecessary killing, killing that is not required for biological survival.

…

“Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, rising either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”

Rebels with a Cause: Reimaging Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, by Niobe Way

Pulling the Thread Podcast Episode: “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

I’ve written a fair amount about this book: “What’s Happening to Our Boys?,” for one. I had the opportunity to interview Niobe and California’s First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom about the enduring crisis with boys earlier this month as well. Rebels with a Cause is not a parenting book and you don’t need to have boys in your life to find Niobe’s research relevant and essential: She diagnoses our culture-at-large as “boy culture,” in which girls and women participate as well, and points to all the reasons why boys, in particular, are committing acts of violence against themselves and others.

Here’s Niobe:

“Thin stories, or the first type, are not inert. Rather they work as culturally dominant forces determining how we live, think, feel, and behave. They provide the model by which we raise and educate our children; treat one another; and act at home, in school, and in the workplace. They determine what our goals and aspirations are, and how we interact with technology and the natural world around us.

“They form our ideas about what it means to be a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, an adult, and a human and what it means to develop over time. Those of us living in Western society have been telling thin stories for centuries, guided by the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. These stories split reason from emotion, give a gender identity to human capacities and desires, make culture into nature, and have no heart. In these distinctly European stories told by white and economically privileged men, the men are separated from the women and children, thinking from feeling, the self from the other, the mind from the body, and nature from culture. They are more than just separated, however; they are also placed on a hierarchy. Men (especially those who are white, rich, and straight) and their so-called masculine qualities are placed on the top, while women and children (especially those of color and those who are from poor and working-class communities) and their so-called feminine qualities are put on the bottom. Evidence of the hierarchy of human qualities is in our definitions of manhood, maturity, success, modernity, and even science, with its privileging) of our ‘hard’ qualities and capacities such as stoicism, independence, assertiveness, thinking, and crunching numbers over the ‘soft’ ones such as vulnerability, dependency, sensitivity, feeling, and the analyses of words and language. The mainstream definitions of maturity, manhood, and success are premised on the capacity for self-sufficiency and independence and don't include the ability to be interdependent or to sustain mutually supportive relationships in which no one gets sacrificed over another person. The open expression of vulnerability and sensitivity, especially by boys and men, is considered not only lame but also immature, girlie, and gay, which is an insult in a culture that places girls, women, and gay people on the bottom of the hierarchy. Similarly, modernity and science emphasize money over people, numbers over words, respectively, with the soft qualities on the bottom being considered ‘traditional’ and thus inconsistent with advancement or not based on a ‘rigorous’ scientific method and thus not science. g

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, by Francis Weller

I first heard about this book—and Francis Weller—on Anderson Cooper’s wonderful podcast, “All There Is.” Weller, a psychotherapist, proposes five gates of grief, which form the structure of this small but mighty book: 1. Everything we love we will lose. 2. The places that have not known love (including all those parts of ourselves we’ve placed outside of the boundary of worthiness). 3. The sorrows of the world. 4. What we expected and did not receive. 5. Ancestral grief.

Here’s Weller from the introduction:

“We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves or to others, hoping to disown them. Doing this, we feel we may be spared the discomfort of having to face what has been declared unwelcome. Cultures also send aspects of psychic life into the shadow. Our refusal to acknowledge grief and death has twisted us into a culture riddled with death. One of Jung’s more chilling observations was that whatever we put into the shadow doesn’t sit there passively waiting to be reclaimed and redeemed; it regresses and becomes more primitive. Consequently, death rattles through our streets daily, in school shootings, suicides, murders, overdoses, gang violence, or through the sanctioned sacrifice of war dead.”

Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth, and Delight, by Ken Wilber

Pulling the Thread Podcast Episode: “To Transcend and Include”

I’m deeply indebted to Ken Wilber for helping me process and make sense of this moment of time—it keeps me calm. Through Ken, I learned about Spiral Dynamics, a system that I’ve come to rely on, and I refer to his models for Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, etc. all the time. More reading: “Transcend and Include,” “Ascending and Descending,” “Embracing Nondual Thinking,” “Growing up vs. Waking Up”

Wilber takes all the systems and theories and then condenses them into a meta-theory—it’s a huge service and incredibly clarifying, even though it’s a bit heady a times. (Finding Radical Wholeness is a big bite—for this current political moment, I recommend A Post-Truth World. It’s only 184 pages.)

Here’s Wilber talking about our collective evolution, particularly when more of us shift from the ethnocentric stage (me and mine) to the integral stage (everyone):

“When religion is interpreted from an ethnocentric stage, it is indeed the largest source of hatred, torture, and warfare in humankind’s history; while when it is interpreted from the higher stages (worldcentric or integral), it is one of the greatest sources of love, charity, and compassion. That is how this brutal ‘paradox of religion’ came into existence (the paradox is that religion has been the source of both the greatest amount of hatred, torture, and warfare, and also the greatest amount of love, compassion, and care).

“Finally, if individuals move on from the third stage to a genuinely integrated or Integral structure of Growing Up, their interpretive capacity for all experiences—including Waking Up experiences— will likewise move to that larger, more expansive, Integral stage. This means, among other things, that they will ‘transcend and include’ the perspectives of all their previous stages. Hence at this stage, they are dramatically more inclusive, synthesizing, and integrating. Reaching this Integral stage also means a person will begin to dramatically expand the areas, ideas, fields, and disciplines that they consider true, real, or important. If they are diehard scientific materialists, they might start considering the utter contradictions in such views and be more open to transcendent realities; if they are religious fundamentalists, they will start to find invaluable truths in other spiritual systems; if they are hardheaded nationalists, they’ll be more open to globalist views and see their understandable patriotism in the larger context of a community of other welcomed nations and an integrated humanity.”

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, by Jamil Zaki

Pulling the Thread Podcast Episode: “Why Cynicism is Not Smart”

I wrote a lot about Zaki’s latest book (he also wrote The War for Kindness) in the lead-up to the election, as research would indicate that we have so much more in common than not. (See: “Cynicism vs. Skepticism,” “Time Traveling with Oprah.”) He also suggests that we are wrong to venerate cynicism, or to assume it denotes more intelligence—it’s actually the opposite. We would all benefit by being open-minded, demonstrating the flexibility of our minds, and being willing to be wrong or have our minds change.

Here’s Zaki:

“Most people also think cynics are socially smart, able to slice through insincerity and dig out the truth.

“If cynicism a sign of intelligence, then someone who wants to appear smart might put it on, like wearing a suit to a job interview. And indeed, when researchers ask people to appear as competent as possible, they respond by picking fights, criticizing people, and removing friendly language from emails—performing the gloomiest version of themselves to impress others.

“Most of us valorize people who don’t like people. But it turns out cynicism is not a sign of wisdom, and more often it’s the opposite. In studies of over two hundred thousand individuals across thirty nations, cynics scored less well on tasks that measure cognitive ability, problem-solving, and mathematical skill. Cynics aren’t socially sharp, either, performing worse than non-cynics at identifying liars. This means 85 percent of us are also terrible at picking lie detectors.”

Coming up in 2025…

I’m having Sunita Sah on the podcast in January to discuss, Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes—there are some fascinating insights from this Cornell professor about the pressure we feel to “go-along,” our fear of hurting peoples’ feelings or wounding their reputations, and the way in which we express our anxiety.

Father Richard Rohr has a new book coming on March 4 called The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage that I just cracked open. Gorgeous. It’s about the Jewish prophets and it feels perfect for this moment, as he always is. (I’m planning on going to see him early this year, so fingers crossed I can bring you a podcast episode.)

Those of you who suffer from chronic pain won’t want to miss Nicole Sachs new book, Mind Your Body, coming in February. She’ll be on the podcast to discuss. Sachs is a psychotherapist and protégé of the late Dr. John Sarno (author of Healing Back Pain), and she’s an excellent translator of his theories, offering simple frameworks for emotional work you can do, by yourself, at home, with a piece of paper. No spinal fusion surgery required. As she says, “The pain is not in your head, but the solution is not in your body.”

This email is awfully long, but in case you missed it, I’ve been published podcasts through the holiday season. Here are the last three:

The Astrological Shifts to Know for 2025 (Heidi Rose Robbins)

The Real Meaning of Resolutions (Solo Episode)

Finding Mercy in Impossible Times (Father Gregory Boyle)

And if you want to join my workshop on Sunday with Satya Doyle Byock, there’s still time. You can find all the info at the bottom of this email.