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?
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
My understanding from the history lessons of the book is that malls were intended to be “safe” replacement downtowns for white-flight suburban women, plunked down in empty fields in a vaguely cardinal direction from the nearby (and newly built) island of suburban homes—hence the “[direction] + [land type]” naming convention. The mall as a structure was isolated by what the book refers to as “moats” of highways and parking lots so that only those suburban car-havers could get there; protection from the dangerous elements of the city from which the suburbanites fled in the first place. Car supremacy & anti-black racism, the beating heart of mid-century America.
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Procedural Storytelling in Game Design
The other huge strength of procedural generation, to me, is that it creates too many possibility spaces for the designers to decide what is best. I do not like spending my time in a video game trying to guess what the designer wants me to do. That can sometimes be inevitable, but it still frustrates me when I start seeing the various gameplay inputs as tiny puzzles with a golden-path narrative outputs.
I am not immune to this; when my own brain starts telling me to look for the optimal route so I’m rewarded with seamless narrative breadcrumbing and cohesively designed narrative, I know I am not treating the emergent story like my story but like a book that I have to tape back together to read.
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How to Hide an Empire
So if you’re trying to decide whether to read this book, the answer is definitely yes do it. If you want a direct thesis sentence to help you, here it is:
[G]lobalization, in turn, depended on key technologies devised or perfected by the U.S. military during the Second World War. These were, like synthetics, empire-killing technologies, in that they helped render colonies unnecessary. They did so by making movement easier without direct territorial control.
That’s pretty much it. I can’t summarize how we got here, because that’s the book’s job, dude. Go read it. It's fun (and also horrifying). You'll learn things (horrifying things). What else is there?
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Factory Girls
Factory Girls twines a contemporary movement with a personal journey. It gives a reader a dozen different entryways into one esoteric aspect of modern China. Whether the literal description of life in a Chinese factory becomes ten years out of date or two hundred, the stories of people, of chuqu, of finding your way, are timeless. Factory Girls will not age, and it will not disappoint.
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Popular Music
The fucked up thing about poetry is that we imprison it in books.
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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
There is as much detail packed into every page of Because Internet as there is meaning packed into a period at the end of a short text message. Sometimes having information bursting at the seams means there is little room for authorial voice, quirky digressions, or the myriad other pleasantries that make modern non-fiction fun to read. Not so Because Internet. Maybe because I love Internet Culture Books (note the capital letters? I used to assume this was a convention of SFF [double brackets, but I won’t make you play my twitter game if you don’t know SFF is Science Fiction & Fantasy] genre when talking about Talents or Powers or Magic, but it tends to be deployed in writing across styles to convey impact!), but the author finds a way to push voice and appealing examples on every page.
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Crying in H Mart + If I Had Your Face
Your Face pushed me, page by page, to unearth its secrets. Each character was so wholly removed from anything I’ve ever lived–almost the opposite of H Mart, where any time the author extrapolated a personal point, I couldn’t help put flail my arms and point and say, “Hey, that’s me!”.
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Strange Weather in Tokyo
Right, so, cue this this book called Strange Weather in Tokyo. There’s a woman who is just sort of faffing about, working a job and existing in the normal—but not literary—sense. If she was just a person you knew, she’d be fine: a job, a home, stuff to eat, hobbies, etc etc. But if you’re reading about her, well, it seems a little flat. Something’s gotta happen, right?
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A Girl Goes into the Forest
There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.
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Fake Accounts
Imagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.
“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?
Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.
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Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip
Structurally, 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.
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Pizza Girl
If it is a story of the failures of capitalism, the collapse of the promise of an attainable American Dream for the generation reading it, then it is a clunky one. The book is called Pizza Girl, a job that delineates, without defining, the narrator. It is what pushes the plot forward, what serves as a call-and-response from the catalyst-character of Jenny Hauser, who eventually drops the, “Hey, Pizza Girl” detachment and perhaps sees her as we see her, as a someone who is both less and more than her occupation:
There was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to.
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Uncanny Valley
The underpaid office worker bildungsroman hits too close to home for me. It probably strikes the majority of my age demographic. Any book burnished by The New Yorker’s indelible house style has space in my heart. Whatever the case, I went into Uncanny Valley thinking it was a book for me, and as I read each page they proved that assumption, 200 times over:
I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skill set was neither unique nor in high demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since working in the publishing industry, and quitting without a plan was unfathomable. Every month since graduation was accounted for on my resume. Sabbaticals, for anyone other than a college professor, were a novel concept, and one I could not trust.
When it moved away from the intensely relatable and started branching wide in what felt like an attempt to carve out a cultural moment writ large, it lost the unique voice in favor of demotivational poster clichés:
Nobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious--namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.
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Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
Based 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.
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Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Much 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.
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Lord of Chaos
Beyond the expanded scope from adventuring party to nation-state wrangling, the plot has to slow for another major reason: Travelling. Rand can warp around, collapsing time and distance in such a way that “the journey” as a trope barely exists anymore. And “the journey” is the beating heart of the Fantasy genre: we all live in the travelogue that “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale” built. Now that he and a few others can move around the world near-instantly, plot-restrictions-via-distance are a thing of the past.
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The Fires of Heaven
What I wrote about Perrin in The Shadow Rising holds true for Nynaeve in this volume; she is a microcosm to understand another of Rand’s problems. This time, it isn’t about delegating responsibility and accepting your limits, but about understanding—maybe even embracing—who you are; even if you don’t want to. Rand has to come to terms with Lews Therin: his past, his present, and his refusal to put women in danger, even to the point where Moiraine has to sacrifice herself to save him.
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