The book is full of suggestive swerves and leaps of association, Howley’s attempts at getting us to look again at subjects and stories that might have been shocking once upon a time, but which we’ve grown used to living with ... Wide-ranging ... Human multiplicity, and irreducibility to data points, seems to be Howley’s North Star, the principle that she is invested in more than any other, and is writing to protect ... Howley doesn’t strongly demonstrate how these stories relate to one another or to her stated arguments, which roam far beyond her central point about the state’s digitally supercharged storytelling powers and into the broader culture ... Bottoms Up is peppered with...confident aphorisms, and it’s often hard to tell whether Howley is working to validate these claims or whether she assumes that readers will accept as common sense her descriptions of the world. Focussing on them in isolation, I sometimes felt skeptical ... Bottoms Up proceeds less by the sequential logic of the proof, or of typical journalism, and more by the associative logic of the mood board. And it works. Howley’s prose reminded me of Don DeLillo’s ... Bottoms Up restores the world to something akin to its original strangeness. It’s a daring approach, and an invaluable one: seeing the world anew makes it feel, in some small way, up for grabs, and this feeling is a precondition for real thought. I still haven’t decided whether I agree with at least half of Howley’s arguments, or the arguments suggested by her method.
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