Category: Books

  • My 2017 in Books

    This is the fourth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2016 list here,…

  • Brief review of “Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz

    Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a just-released and consistently interesting near-future dystopian science fiction novel set about 120 years in the future at the intersection of robotics, AI and biotech. Newitz, the author (with whom I went to grad school many years ago), has created an intriguing world that combines golden age science fiction tropes about…

  • From the archives: the Amazon Tip Jar

    My Amazon obsession is longstanding, as evidenced by this piece from way back that I stumbled across today. The date was October 6, 2009, and the original title was “Open Letter to Jeff Bezos: Please Create an Amazon.com Tip Jar.” If you want to see the original context and comments you can find it here…

  • Delight and paradox in Jeff Rosenblum’s book ‘Friction’

    I’m delighted to share my first byline with The Drum, which is a review of “Friction” by my friends Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg. Here are the first few paragraphs: Reading most business books is like watching the movie Groundhog Day, just without the funny bits. Such books bludgeon their readers with a single idea…

  • My 2016 in Books

    This is the third year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I write on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2015 list here…

  • David Brooks Calls for a Third Party

    I thought I was as done with the election as a boy can be, but despite a Coyote-plummeting-off-the-cliff decline of interest in the news I noticed David Brooks remarkable column from election day, “Let’s Not Do This Again” in which he resignedly calls for a third party to break the D.C. deadlock. Here’s a relevant excerpt:…

  • My 2015 in Books

    This is the second year that I’ve kept a list of all the books I’ve finished, sharing that list on New Year’s Eve once I’ve realized that I won’t finish anything else before midnight.  I’ve read plus-or-minus 56 books this year (the +/- will make sense if you read on), not counting re-reads or partial…

  • The Girl in the Spider’s Web isn’t terrible, isn’t great

    Over the weekend I zoomed through the new David Lagercrantz novel, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which is the not-written-by-Stieg-Larsson sequel to the Millenium Trilogy that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’ll start with some thoughts about the book itself — so you have your spoiler alert — but I’ll wind…

  • Daniel Kahneman kicks my ass, or Reading Fast and Slow

    Like Moe, the schoolyard bully in Calvin & Hobbes, Daniel Kahneman has taken away my cognitive lunch money for the last four years.  To be clear, it isn’t the 81-year-old Nobel laureate himself: it’s his best-selling 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow. Let me back up. I read fiction quickly, sometimes gobbling up a novel…

  • Against Disruption: Louis Menand, Douglas Adams, Books and Technology

    Have you ever smacked into a glass door when you didn’t realize it was closed?  I have.  It hurts.  The intersection of my face and a glass door happened at my great aunt’s tiny desert house in the 80s, where the mix of a trick of the sunlight and my distracted boyhood mind made the…