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notes bookshop link this is a classic, full stop. highly recommended reading. i don’t know where to really begin on this. a few random thoughts. it’s the first time i’ve read/seen someone provide a harsh critique of sesame street. i really didn’t see that coming, though, i’d been paying attention quite assiduously to the book up to that point. i should have. the arguement here is that huxley was right, and we’d be swimming in amusement or a need for continuous dopamine hits....

notes bookshop link i fell into this from zinnser’s book on writing to learn from a month or so ago. this is a textbook. it’s not funny, but i do think some of the arguments lofted in the exercises are hilariously bad. (but disturbingly close to those i’ve heard in real life for some of the issues lofted.) the book is a pretty solid and engaging dicsussion of the various fallacies and traps we can fall into when thinking about various topics and scrutinizing arguments....

notes bookshop link there’s not a lot to say about this. it’s a fun, quick read and apparently the first installment on a much longer series. there’s all sorts of interesting stuff swirling around in here and stephenson is doing a great job of “world buliding”. the initial character, dawn/aurora, straddles two worlds between the wars and during the rise of soviet communism. there are historical figures (neils bohr makes a sidebar cameo), events (a world’s fair) interesting digressions (polo being played by cowboys/girls in montana, etc....

notes bookshop link there’s been no shortage of press on this book. i suspect i’ve ingested a fair amount of what’s surrounded it. given the hype around the book you’d be forgiven for glossing over the trip to dakar and to a school board meeting. i’m not sure that i parse the dakar bits, i’m not meta/cerebral enough to grok what’s going on here. but it doesn’t feel like much. the school board stuff i thoroughly got, but that’s not why i bought the book....

for posterity … dear future generations, google search used to be so good that you could find primary or secondary source information quickly and reliably with a modicum of effort. failure to exert this teensy bit of effort to poke at something that needed an answer which could reasonably be expected to be found online would be met with snark and some level of disposable derision. “let me google that for you” (online, LMGTFY) was often the snark of choice....