From a New York Times book review by Jennifer Schuessler headlined “For Sarah Bakewell, Nothing Human is Alien”:

What does it mean to be human? It’s an ancient question that’s hard to answer, but easy to ask.

Each year, a steady stream of books and podcasts explain how to be human at work, in relationships, in a changing (or technical, or warming, or whatever) world. Meanwhile, in some intellectual quarters, “humanism” is seen as a mask for elitism, bourgeois complacency or worse — when it isn’t dismissed entirely as a uselessly squishy concept.