Book reviews old and new mingle here.
The green-leaf iconography and pleasing homeliness of “natural gas”—signifiers of ecological foresight or pluralistic promise—are still based on money; a wealthy man with connections happens to own a lot of natural gas. Now that resource will be sold as environmental to a society hungry for a veneer of change that doesn’t require any sort of sacrifice—pretty pictures, pretty thoughts, dirty world.
Read MoreHabit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:
Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.
After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver: always be riffing; I’m just kidding. Unless…; say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?
Read MoreStructurally, it swings between light personal anecdote and researched didacticism. Tonally, it is like talking to my dad. The author is a total square, and speaks with the casual paternalism born of white, Midwestern, upper middle-class comfort. Take, for example, the position of language regarding airline deregulation:
With some basic parameters and policies for the aviation industry set, the job seemed done.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. In fact, the government was just getting started. As bureaucracies tend to view such matters, if a few good rules are sufficient, then many more are even better. The aviation industry also became swept up in a wave of sentiment opposing free market competition in the 1930s.
I’m not sure whether the anecdotes or the history lessons taught me more, but Pull Over! was at its best when it blended the two.
Read MoreBased on past years of detective work, CrowdStrike tied Fancy Bear to the Russian military intelligence agency known as th GRU. Cozy Bear, it would later be revealed, worked within Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency.(The two “bear” names derived from CrowdStrike’s system of labeling hacker teams with different animals based on their country of origin--bears for Russia, pandas for China, tigers for India, and so on.)
These are cool little facts that add depth to general interest readers. Cybersecurity people would know this naming convention, but I definitely didn’t. It’s a nice peek behind the curtain, and something I appreciate being explained; a lot of books that focus only on their core demographic might elide this part to make sure they don’t bore or insult their intended audience.
Read MoreMuch like you need to be “above 5’9” and under 6 feet” to be considered a model, you need to know what words will be used and how in each specific frame of reference. But VIP never moves too fast, or assumes you come into the pages knowing exactly what a high-end club looks, sounds, or feels like. The book never punishes you for being outside, looking in: in fact, it is presented from the liminal space between inside and outside the scene. As both erstwhile model and active sociologist, the author is in the field, participating without disrupting; an important facet of why the book works as well as it does. As reader, you never feel left outside the velvet ropes so the author can flex their intellectual fortitude.
Read MoreThis paragraph took about...six hours of tinkering to create. I will say that, at the point this was being spit out, I did not think my grand experiment was worth it. I mean, I was thrilled i got anything to work (see above, wherein I produced nothing but sequential numbers), but this sample of my trained model was pretty raw. Perhaps you could separate out some of the parts about “pizza,” “burgers,” and “my tights” to tell a story. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. I want you to see, warts and all, the nonsense I had to pick through to dredge up a few good lines. Context, thy name is not Machine Learning.
Read MoreCatch & Kill is too Eustace Tilley to be a trash spectacle, too sombre because it respects and internalizes serious subject matter, too close, too soon, too decent. It’s the opera Pagliacci when you’re searching for the “But, doctor, I am Pagliacci” joke format.
Read MoreThis is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.
Read MoreEngagement with and understanding of more than just technical breakdowns makes for text that is often engaging regardless of your proximity to bots, AI, or ML writing. It is interesting to see how tech-minded people with a firm grasp of the humanities—rather than the near-exhausted trope of the literary stodge trying to make sense of technology—engage with cultural source. The written word isn’t treated as mere grist for the GPT-2 mill.
Read MoreI am not exaggerating when I say I would consider myself successful as a writer if I turn a garbage-nothing clichéd phrase like “due diligence” into idiosyncratic flow with half the zest as a cool quarter of the sentences in this book.
Read MoreOnce you know the rules, nothing but the rules seem to make sense and all the tentative, speculative nonsense gets brushed away. But when you’re still trying to figure them out? Anything that holds together for more than a moment feels etched in granite.
Read MoreWhat Three Women does is write about women like they are people, complex people, rather than someone whose most important adjective is “female.” It centers them without aligning them against a masculine center. And it is jarring, because it is so uncommon.
Read More“The problem with foreign oligarchs isn’t that they’re foreign, but that they’re oligarchs”
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