reading

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....

2034: a novel of the next world war – (ackerman, stavridis) the audible version of this got me across the better part of south dakota. i can only listen to fiction via audiobook and this did the trick. it’s a solid ride through the coarse concepts of potential american decline in military dominance. or put less jingoistically, an interesting conception of what the rise of china and india means in a multipolar world order....

writing to learn (william zinnser) this is not really what i was expecting it to be and it was surprisingly engaging. broadly, this is an argument for using writing as a mechanism for learning vs. learning to the test or via standard educational practices. he highlights institutions that have incorporated writing deeply into their programs. i have a natural bias towards organizations that have a culture of writing and this is perhaps the one thing that’s intrigued me about amazon work culture from what i’ve heard from friends....

notes bookshop link i’m glad i got this on kindle, because i slogged through this for far too long. this is an amusing sequel to the rise and fall of D.O.D.O. which was done with neal stephenson as the co-author. this builds on the whole time travel via witchcraft thing which is an amusing trope that i had fun reading. superficially, the premise is kind of neat; a rogue witch who’s engaged in the government’s time travel project decides that she’s going to make witchcraft supreme and stunt the emergence of “technology”....

links, etc Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art i read pretty much anything that ted chiang decides he wants to publish to the world at large. he’s been particularly critical of AI over the past few years and i have a difficult time arguing with the ground that he’s staked out. this article is well worth the time to read. it’s full of solid, nuanced perspective on the topic of art and human engagement with art....