History — Book Reviews — Dinaburg Writes

The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts

The missing pages of my borrowed copy were not lost to the mists of time, nor were they torn out, but a simple, ghostly blank. They were near the very beginning of the book and—after my first attempt at bypassing them—crucial in establishing a base of knowledge with which to decipher the rest of the text. I decided to delay my cartographic journey until my second library hold arrived, certain that the guide-pages meant to lead me deeper into Iron Age Gaul would appear.

My second library copy contained, of course, the same jarring, eerie blankness at preface pages xi-xiv; again at one through four; yet again at nine through twelve. I decided—after consulting the parabola of a pigeon’s fearless strut down Second Avenue—that the blankness filled the role of dark space of cartographic legend, a fundamental impossibility of complete, elucidative knowledge available to, or perhaps about, Celtic society.

David DinaburgJuly 18, 2025cartography, History, bon mot, quotes, too long

A Prehistory of the Cloud

Without knowing how we got to the cloud, there is no context with which to begin parsing what tech studies in the late twenty-tens should even look like. A Prehistory of the Cloud reminds the reader that for every software-as-solution, the hardware has to be somewhere. The only reason to give away this storage—shroud it with the cloud metaphor and make it appear limitless and eternal—is to incentivize each user to upload everything without thought.

David DinaburgOctober 1, 2019Non-fiction, Tech, Computers, The Cloud, History