nonfiction

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....

numbers don’t lie (vaclav smil) there’s a lot of “elite” love for vaclav smil. bill gates and steven pinker wax poetic about smil. i guess i get it. he provides a dispassionate comparison of various things and stands back all neutral-ish like. this was a quick read and the follow-up elements are well laid out if you’re keen to dig into something further. the whole book is laid out as a series of brief essays on whatever the topic du jour was a weriting....