The Atlantic – Human History Gets a Rewrite A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change. By William Deresiewicz. “…The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Recommended Books
Exponential, book review: Technology acceleration and its impact on society
ZDNet: “An “exponential gap” is opening up between our understanding of our world, which updates slowly, and new technologies, which change faster than we can cope with, argues Azeem Azhar… The exponential growth of computer power led the inventor Ray Kurzweil to propose the Law of Accelerating Returns and predict that by 2045 machine intelligence will pass that of… Continue Reading
125th anniversary of The New York Times Book Review
As part of marking the 125th anniversary of The New York Times Book Review (debuted as a standalone section on Oct. 10, 1896), The Times looks back at the rocky reception for some of today’s best-loved books: “Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller: “[G]asps for want of craft and sensibility.” —Reviewed by Richard G. Stern, Oct. 22,… Continue Reading
This book explains actually helpful actions you can take to fight climate change
Fast Company: “In a new book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, and a website called Regeneration, Paul Hawken lays out solutions. The book is a sequel to Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which looked at how existing technologies and approaches could be used to achieve “drawdown,”… Continue Reading
BOOK TALK: If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
Virtual Book Talk – Wednesday, October 6, 2021 – 7:00pm to 8:00pm – Registration Requested: “The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge―decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives… Continue Reading
They Knew: How the U.S. Government Helped Cause the Climate Crisis
Yale Environment 360 – “James Gustave Speth has been calling for action on climate since serving in the White House in the 1970s. In an e360 interview, he talks about his new book, which chronicles how successive U.S. administrations repeatedly failed to act in response to scientists’ increasingly dire warnings. Few people have followed the… Continue Reading
Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot
“Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER) is an impressive piece of art crystallizing the ecological and social tragedies of humanity’s ballooning numbers and consumption. Filled with powerful and evocative images, OVER addresses the many challenges caused by human population size (7.3 billion) and growth (1.5 million people every week). OVER was created as the centerpiece of the… Continue Reading
Don’t stick a fork in books yet
Teleread, Felix Pleşoianu: “I just came across an excellent write-up called How to Fork a Book: The Radical Transformation of Publishing. “Forking” is a term borrowed from open source software, whose license allows anyone to make their own modified versions that diverge from the original, taking it in another direction, like a fork in a… Continue Reading
Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America
The New York Review – “Pedestrian fatalities are rising dramatically in the US, and Angie Schmitt’s Right of Way gives a rare look at why and what might be done about it….On America’s streets, such reconsideration is sorely overdue. There is no illustration of this fact starker than our disastrous pedestrian fatality numbers. In 2010,… Continue Reading
A fascinating design history of the filing cabinet
Fast Company Adapted with permission from The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson, published by Minnesota University Press “…The filing cabinet emerged at the same time the skyscraper was becoming a cultural symbol that presented capitalism and modernity as distinctly American projects for the 20th century. As vertical structures, the skyscraper and… Continue Reading
How Does Artificial Intelligence Work?
BuiltIn.com: “Less than a decade after breaking the Nazi encryption machine Enigma and helping the Allied Forces win World War II, mathematician Alan Turing changed history a second time with a simple question: “Can machines think?” Turing’s paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), and its subsequent Turing Test, established the fundamental goal and vision of… Continue Reading
When Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death
The New Yorker: “…In A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, a psychologist and a statistician, argue that visual thinking, by revealing what would otherwise remain invisible, has had a profound effect on the way we approach problems. The book begins with what might be the first statistical… Continue Reading
