How shosta personally ruined an entire American city. Book was actually a little better than I expected after having read some of his articles before. He's now running for Governor of California too. The book is mostly good at identifying the problems, but like most books the solutions don't really make much sense. He's more on the Himu side of things than the shosta side but I still thought the critiques of certain things were solid. Probably the oddest thing, especially with the subtitle, is less that it's aimed at convincing progressives that they're fucking up than it seems to be like he figured it out and really wants to tell conservatives something they probably already assume. I thought it was most effective in the places where he talked to more progressive advocates who helped make the case that whatever policy was failing on their own terms. In other words, he should have written his entire book solely for me.
Oral history of The Office, with many of the actors and so on, written by the actor who played Kevin based on stuff he compiled for his podcast. Pretty good, the background stuff about how it came to be is better than the rest of the book where they sort of rush through the actual series. And not just because Greg Daniels also talks some about King of the Hill and how it informed his vision for The Office. Worst of all is the constant injection of Vox writer Emily VanDerWerff, an awful person who was not involved in The Office and literally has nothing to say about it. I'm not joking, there was lots of words but basically no content. The one attempt at trying to construct a thought was just gibberish about how the true meaning and value of the show was somehow revealed by Trump-era capitalism. Heartwarming part in the book is people reveal that during the writers strike Greg Daniels gave all the crew $1000 personally to help them through it.
Superior book about the superior NBC show. The same kind of thing but leans a bit more into covering every single episode even if barely. I think the best part of it was also the early development and early years of the show. Funniest part was the writer talking about people confusing Tina Fey and Sarah Palin and then himself writing that something Fey did was something Palin did. Book spends a lot of time complaining about how problematic 30 Rock was and invites in only white people like the author to say that pulling episodes from streaming was the right thing after the world discovered black people existed in 2020, with the one black person asked saying that nothing should have been pulled, while lamenting that other episodes weren't pulled due to transphobia and fatphobia. As if this wasn't bad enough it then brings in fucking VanDerWerff to say literally nothing informative about the show but spend tons of time complaining solely about how problematic the humor was and how "we" just didn't know better back then along with how sad it is that Tina Fey hasn't learned to do better. How does someone this awful with nothing useful to say keep winding up in books? If the next book I read about PayPal has them in it I'm quitting reading forever.
