Posts in: Reading

Currently reading: The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A. Farahany 📚

Her contention is that control over our own inner life will become increasingly fraught in coming years, as advances in neurotech & pharma combine to create new ways of monitoring, interpreting, & responding to our brainwaves.

I’m only a couple chapters in, but she lays out so clearly how tech is building on-ramps to this surveillance—through gamification, virtual reality, & other developments that are pitched as innocuous & “free”.

Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚

For the most part, a very good and useful book on project management—research grounded in reality, presenting some useful heuristics. Fans of Taleb & Kahneman/Tversky will like it.

Currently reading: Dubliners by James Joyce 📚

Chiefly, “The Dead.” Is there a more beautiful story?

Nicholas Dames on literary studies 🔗 📚

What happened to literary studies? If professionalization was the flaw in the construction of the bridge, making it unstable, it turns out there’s a meteor heading for the bridge anyway: the steady diminution of literature’s role in a culture where electronic, networked media is dominant. […] By lowering the barrier to entry, the Internet encouraged an early 21st-century efflorescence of occasional criticism and spontaneous theorizing that fostered vibrant subcultural readerships.

Continue reading →