Category: Books

  • My 2025 in Books

    My annual journey across the books I read over the year. If you’re looking for a good read (or books to avoid) then you’ve come to the right place! Happy New Year! Note: Since this week’s issue is longer than most, your email might truncate it, particularly if you use gmail. At the truncation, just click…

  • Retro Futures and Who Counts as Human

    What lessons does a 1985 Isaac Asimov novel have to teach us about AI and algorithmic bias today?  After months of failed attempts and carting the book around the planet, I finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s magnificent and challenging Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. (Don’t take the word…

  • Experience Stacks, Romantasy, and Harry Potter Fanfic

    A terrific NYT article explored a new genre of big books emerging from online fan fiction and missed a few things along the way. On Wednesday, August 20, The New York Times ($) ran a fascinating article: “Why Magic, Dragons and Explicit Sex Are in Bookstores Everywhere: Romantasy is propping up the fiction market. Thanks to a…

  • My 2024 in Books

    My annual journey across the books I read over the year. If you’re looking for a good read (or books to avoid) then you’ve come to the right place! Happy New Year! This is the first Dispatch of 2025, and I’m pleased to share that next issue will be the 150th. Thank you for the gift of your…

  • Emotional Truths that Aren’t True

    Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation” is a terrible book on which nobody should waste their money or attention. Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of joining Joey Dumont on an episode of his True Thirty podcast in which we debated the merits of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling nonfiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring…

  • Serendipity Engines

    In commerce, there’s an incalculable difference between search and discovery. Discovery requires serendipity, and there’s no better source of serendipity than independent bookstores. Wednesday, I was in Eugene, a small Oregon city a couple hours south of Portland. I dropped into the legendary Smith Family Bookstore, where I found a $4.00 copy of Violent Spring by Gary Phillips,…

  • My 2023 in Books

    My annual journey across the dozens of books I read this year. If you’re looking for a good read (or things to avoid) then dive in! Good morning! This is the final Dispatch of the year, and I’m happy to share that next issue will be the 100th. Thank you for the gift of your attention over…

  • Retro Futures: “Redcrosse” and the view from 1997 and 2011 – Bonus

    Yesterday, April 27, 2023 was when the plot of my 2011 near future dystopian novel began… what a weird feeling. I’ve written before about Retro Futures, by which I mean looking at how the future looked to science fiction writers in previous eras, measuring what they got right and what they got wrong, and then thinking…

  • Why You Should Read “Chokepoint Capitalism”

    A new book explains how we got to our age of giant culture companies shaking down artists, why it matters to the rest of us, and what we can do about it. It baffles me that Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s book Chokepoint Capitalism isn’t on top of The New York Times bestseller list. It’s an important book…

  • The Start of the English Major

    In the A.I. revolution, figuring out the contours of our human intelligence has never been more important. Who is best equipped to do this work? I give keynote addresses all over the planet about digital transformation and sharpest-edged technology trends. One of my themes is that anything that can be digital will be digital. The counterintuitive corollary to this is that…