Non-Fiction — Book Reviews

As it builds in height, a wave crest becomes steeper and steeper, finally becoming unstable and tumbling over. This instability occurs when the wave height is greater than one-seventh of the wavelength and also when the interior angle of the peak of a wave is less than 120 degrees.

It makes logical sense that water waves would have a particular height-to-length ratio and a specific angle from which they will fall. The trick is in realizing that there is a question that can be asked in the first place, an order underlying the chaos—not just a collection of random water falling all over itself.

A feeling of wonder pervades The Lost Art of Finding Our Way: tales of “sunstones” and “celestial huts”, “portolan charts” and “ecliptics” make it hard to not get wrapped up in the obscure and the exotic. But it is the more mundane aspects of peregrination that can truly astound:

Our perceptions function in two roles: First, the sight of familiar landmarks helps us update our location in the internal map. Second, the sight of objects drawing nearer as we approach them and receding into the distance behind us gives us a sense of speed and motion. We usually take all of this for granted.

David DinaburgJanuary 31, 2025Non-Fiction, Maps, technology

The Gun

It is the impracticality of these weapons, their purposeful malignancy and impetus to cause damage, that still gives me pause. It doesn’t fit the setting. You can’t just slice and dice in a cartoon! You can’t just start shooting wildly if you’re the hero! You can, Batman-style, bludgeon and cripple a thousand villains and skate by on the illusion of non-lethality, I suppose. But a bullet? You’re limited by the threat of death, of too much violence, of overkill. Smash a man’s face and he may live. Give a G.I. Joe a laser pistol and his or her enemies fall over in flurry of sparkly lights and scorched camouflage. Actual guns firing real bullets cannot be downplayed and will never, in the zeitgeist, come across as less than lethally efficient. They cannot be used in popular culture the way something like nunchucks or a quarterstaff or a fist can be used.

David DinaburgDecember 13, 2024Non-Fiction, guns, history

Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The author speaks literally to you, the person reading the book. It is startling to have her stop her first-person account—the now standard casual-modern-non-fiction talk-text—and turn to the reader. She directly asks you a rhetorical question while calling you “you,” drawing attention to your own existence. She knows you’re there, knows she exists as a brief voice in your head, her own existence entirely out of her control. And then this sublime moment of flux is over as the tale moves on like it was nothing at all to upend the tacit conventions upon which the written word stands. She makes a salient socioeconomic point to facilitate a mental return back to nonfictionland; the reader can forget that they were a “you” that the author wrote something to and go back to being "the reader."

David DinaburgDecember 5, 2024NYC, Manhattan, Non-Fiction, first person

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

That’s the point; Star Wars is about Luke coming to grips with his (magical, destined, prophetic) heritage. Star Trek is about exploring a (fictional) universe. Picard isn’t coming to grips with anything. He’s doing his job. The audience doesn’t need to know how The Force works to be invested in Luke’s journey. The movie didn’t spend five pages of dialogue trying to pin down the BTU output of a Lightsaber. The precise energy signatures of the warp drive engineering bay is probably an integral component to whatever it is that appeals to people that like Star Trek. Probably.

Try setting Star Trek in the nineteenth century, perhaps during the U.S.’s Manifest Destiny inspired westward expansion. What, are they going to “prime directive” the native Shoshone peoples? Are we going to get fifteen minutes of discussion about what type of wood the wagon tongue is made from, and how much torque it can withstand because it is maple instead of oak? It just doesn’t work. Actually, strike that, it kind of sounds awesome. Oh wait, that happened, and it was called SeaQuest and it was terrible. Because, “They live under the sea, it’s Star Trek under the sea” was the whole premise. But it didn’t have the fictional Star Trek universe. That’s what people cared about! Tricorders and the Federation and what have you. Name a character from SeaQuest. Or an antagonist. Or some sort of characteristic of the world. Besides “the ocean.” Without Wikipedia. Maybe you know the name of the ship. I didn’t, but I just looked it up, and it’s “SeaQuest.” Seriously. That’s pretty lame. Check please.

But Star Wars? That story is about a lowly farm boy who finds out that his father is not only a high-ranking lord in the local political landscape, but that he has inherited both the legacy of magical powers and the prophetic destiny of dismantling the existing system. Also known as every fantasy story ever. It is set in space. That’s the twist! Robots and wookies instead of horses and elves. And it is glorious.

So, I’m pretty firmly entrenched in the fantasy side of things. Which is no good, at least from the perspective of trying to sell me personally on L. Ron Hubbard as an author.

David DinaburgOctober 12, 2024Non-Fiction, biography, Science Fiction

Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

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.

David DinaburgJanuary 18, 2023Non-Fiction, depressing, neoliberal, unrest

Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media

Habit 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?

David DinaburgJanuary 17, 2023Non-Fiction, Internet, media, habits

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

This 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.

Twitterbots: Making Machines that Make Meaning

Engagement 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.

David DinaburgDecember 4, 2019Non-Fiction, Tech, Twitter, Godard, Duchamp

Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality

Once 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.

David DinaburgSeptember 20, 2019Non-Fiction, Physics