Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale by Adam Minter is a fascinating look at what happens to people’s stuff when they no longer want or need it.

The first couple of chapters discuss people decluttering on their own or disposing of a deceased family member’s belongings, often by bringing in a service to go through the stuff and determine what can be sold or donated and what should simply be thrown away.

The second part of the book goes into the global economy of second-hand stuff. For example, all the Goodwill stores in one county take unsold clothing to a Goodwill “warehouse” where clothing is sold for a dollar or two per bag; people purchase truckloads of clothing, drive over the border, and resell it at enough of a profit to make a living.

Highlights

Between 1967 and 2017, the money that Americans spent annually on stuff—from sofas to cell phones—increased almost twentyfold.

Location 51

Garage sales aren’t where it’s at anymore. Half the stuff doesn’t sell because the prices are too high. Everyone thinks they’re on Antiques Roadshow.

Location 836

In the United States (and in Europe), most secondhand goods are donated rather than sold. As a result, most people lack a financial incentive to take care of their things. So instead of seeing the end of an object’s life as an opportunity to extract some last value from it (as people do with their cars), Americans view that object in philanthropic terms. It’ll help the poor; it’ll benefit the environment. For better or worse, both those reasons have proved to be little incentive to take care of stuff.

Location 1076

None of the cut-up fragments of sweatshirt through which Wilson is rummaging were used in India. Rather, they were likely made in South Asia, exported to the United States, and worn until they were donated to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or some other thrift-based exporter. When they didn’t sell there, they were exported again, to Kandla most likely (or perhaps Mississauga, en route to Kandla), cut up, and exported again—this time to Star Wipers in Newark, Ohio. Each step of that journey makes perfect economic sense, even if the totality of it sounds ridiculous.

Location 2755

Buy the book

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road is an account of how Ross Ulbricht built the Silk Road, a marketplace for illegal drugs (the book several times compares it to “Amazon for drugs”).

It traces the history of how he built the site, and how individuals from several branches of law enforcement collaborated (or competed…) to stop him.

I thought the technical explanations were very good: accurate so a geek like me didn’t get annoyed or frustrated about incorrect descriptions, and short enough to be relevant and informative to others.

Overall I highly recommend it.

Buy it here

Description

We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, we’ve zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.

In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints. 

Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader’s use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You’ll learn why it’s bad when politicians use “we” instead of “I,” what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge’s syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.

My Thoughts

I thought this was a mildly interesting book explaining how people’s use of language reveals a lot about their personality and mental condition.

For instance, when speaking to a superior, people tend to use more personal pronouns, but when speaking to a person under their authority, they tend to use far fewer pronouns. This is an unconscious behavior that happens even within minutes of meeting a stranger.

However, the book didn’t seem especially practical. Many times the author reiterated that we don’t pick up on differences in pronoun usage and must rely on word-counting software to analyze text and find patterns. Because word usage is a symptom, not the cause of our behavior, changing our speech patterns won’t have much effect. Rather, it opens a window into what’s going on internally in a person’s thoughts and emotions.