Thinking Fast and Slow review

Reading Thinking, Fast and Slow is a humbling experience, as Daniel Kahneman shows we’re not the pinnacles of reasons who we think we are. Kahneman describes how our intuition is prone to many cognitive errors and thus often wrong. He does so through talking about the two systems of our brain; one being fast, intuitive, emotional, energy efficient, the other being slow, more deliberate, logical, algorithmic, energy consuming. It is a simple concept, yet Kahneman describes it in fine detail, including the far reaching consequences. The vocabulary is crisp, pinpointing the difference between seemingly similar terms such as probability and possibility, and rationality and reason. Yet be warned; despite its clear language; don’t pick this book if you’re looking for a light read. It’s thick and each page jam-packed — and bar some repetition, it’ll require your full attention. Yet thanks to all its brilliance, that’s exactly what this book deserves.

Latest

Searching for meadows

Searching for meadows

Our new home in the Netherlands sits in a mundane residential area full of young families like ours. The street name comes from made (‘meadow’), still referring to a field that once lay here and now survives only in the name. And cycling through the villages around Hattem, I keep meeting names like it. Nearby […]
August 5, 2026
Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
July 11, 2026
Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
June 30, 2026
Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026