nonfiction

notes bookshop link this was a dense and often redundant read with a lot of the classic, academic need to spend a lot of time on (re)naming things. to summarize … tunnels are the new internet. you might not necessarily realize/recognize what’s going on, but the focus of today’s internet is no longer end-to-end connectivity and addressing, etc. it’s what you can accomplish with tunnels. this is true, pretty much everything that you’re going to do in internet and enterprise engineering for the remainders of our life time is going to be in the service of some form of tunneling....

notes bookshop link this was a disturbingly current read. it’s reasonably fresh off the press and i wrapped it up a couple of days before the election. it’s an exhaustively researched and referenced work that digs into the politically charged battles over education and the desire to create a glossy, positive history from those on the right. there’s a lot to unpack in this book despite it’s pretty short length. it ranges from discussing the german repackaging of history pre-WW2 to florida’s book bans and dismantling of their instutuions of higher education....

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 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....