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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the

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[This is the seventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It\\u2019s not by me - it\\u2019s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I\\u2019ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you\\u2019ve read all of them, I\\u2019ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out\\xa0point 3 here\\xa0for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]

Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I\\u2019m one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from\\xa0The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre\\u2019s\\xa0misquoting\\xa0of Dostoevsky\\u2019s take on atheism from\\xa0The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn\\u2019t kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos \\u2013 mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I\\u2019m thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann\\u2019s\\xa0The Wizard and the Prophet.

According to the instructions on the tin,\\xa0The Wizard and the Prophet\\xa0is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the\\xa0Green Revolution. Roughly speaking, Wizards want continual growth in human numbers and quality of life, and to use