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More of these to come when I find the time to write up my notes.
Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman: ( artist as hustler )
Rory Cormac, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons From the World of Secret Statecraft: ( everyone does it )
Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: ( ethical capitalism? )
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution:( history from another time )
Adrienne Mayor, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: ( cryptozoology )
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain: ( tolerance = not all the pogroms were religious )
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: ( in country )
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: ( historical rhymes )
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:( read the essay )
Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Who Makes and Who Takes from the Real Economy: ( economics is a rhetoric )
David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order: ( really? )
Nancy L. Mace & Peter V. Rabins, The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementias, and Memory Loss: Useful for walking through the realities of caring for someone with dementia. Hard to read.
Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It: As with any fan, Tiffany maybe overattributes causation to her own fandom (One Direction) and I know I’m prone to it too so I can’t say too much. But she sets out how everything is fannish and fandom now, in ways both good and bad, commercialized (often exploitatively so) and not (a lot of online vitriol, from Qanon to fans of specific singers).
Marc McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: Essays centering around the idea of Amazon and its effects on our consciousness, specifically literary consciousness and readerly consciousness (the reader as consumer). I found it too dense for my taste/interested in things I’m not interested in (e.g. the modern realist novel), but interesting to see someone unite a kind of survey of ordinary works in general fiction with reflections on the economic conditions producing them.
"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, ed. Torie Bosch: Short essays on code, good and bad, buggy and intentional, from the origins of code in weaving and music to the Volkswagen defeat device to the “like” button to the first police profiling algorithm (in 1968!) and more. Ethan Zuckerman, who coded the first pop-up ad, writes: “Sometime around 1997, I wrote a line of JavaScript code that made the world a measurably worse place.” “Brand safety” was the motivation: “The pop-up specifically came about after an auto company complained about their ad appearing on a personal homepage about anal sex. My boss asked me to find a way to sell ads while ensuring brand managers wouldn’t send us screen shots of their precious brands juxtaposed with offensive content. My slapdash solution? Put the ad in a different window than the content. Presto! Plausible deniability!”
Joi Lisi Rankin is one author exploring the ways race and gender affected code: “Among the high schools connected to the Dartmouth network as part of the [1960s] NSF Secondary Schools Project, the coed public schools—all predominantly White—had only 40 hours of network time each week. By contrast, the private schools—which were all male, wealthy, and almost exclusively White—had 72 hours of network time each week.” And access was only for students in math/science classes, from which girls were often excluded. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth to be taught in a standard math class, was therefore a way of transitioning computing from women’s work to work from which women were excluded. From Meredith Broussard: “When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, … [t]he database redesign process was informally called Y2gay.”
Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman: ( artist as hustler )
Rory Cormac, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons From the World of Secret Statecraft: ( everyone does it )
Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: ( ethical capitalism? )
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution:( history from another time )
Adrienne Mayor, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: ( cryptozoology )
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain: ( tolerance = not all the pogroms were religious )
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: ( in country )
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: ( historical rhymes )
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:( read the essay )
Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Who Makes and Who Takes from the Real Economy: ( economics is a rhetoric )
David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order: ( really? )
Nancy L. Mace & Peter V. Rabins, The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementias, and Memory Loss: Useful for walking through the realities of caring for someone with dementia. Hard to read.
Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It: As with any fan, Tiffany maybe overattributes causation to her own fandom (One Direction) and I know I’m prone to it too so I can’t say too much. But she sets out how everything is fannish and fandom now, in ways both good and bad, commercialized (often exploitatively so) and not (a lot of online vitriol, from Qanon to fans of specific singers).
Marc McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: Essays centering around the idea of Amazon and its effects on our consciousness, specifically literary consciousness and readerly consciousness (the reader as consumer). I found it too dense for my taste/interested in things I’m not interested in (e.g. the modern realist novel), but interesting to see someone unite a kind of survey of ordinary works in general fiction with reflections on the economic conditions producing them.
"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, ed. Torie Bosch: Short essays on code, good and bad, buggy and intentional, from the origins of code in weaving and music to the Volkswagen defeat device to the “like” button to the first police profiling algorithm (in 1968!) and more. Ethan Zuckerman, who coded the first pop-up ad, writes: “Sometime around 1997, I wrote a line of JavaScript code that made the world a measurably worse place.” “Brand safety” was the motivation: “The pop-up specifically came about after an auto company complained about their ad appearing on a personal homepage about anal sex. My boss asked me to find a way to sell ads while ensuring brand managers wouldn’t send us screen shots of their precious brands juxtaposed with offensive content. My slapdash solution? Put the ad in a different window than the content. Presto! Plausible deniability!”
Joi Lisi Rankin is one author exploring the ways race and gender affected code: “Among the high schools connected to the Dartmouth network as part of the [1960s] NSF Secondary Schools Project, the coed public schools—all predominantly White—had only 40 hours of network time each week. By contrast, the private schools—which were all male, wealthy, and almost exclusively White—had 72 hours of network time each week.” And access was only for students in math/science classes, from which girls were often excluded. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth to be taught in a standard math class, was therefore a way of transitioning computing from women’s work to work from which women were excluded. From Meredith Broussard: “When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, … [t]he database redesign process was informally called Y2gay.”
