books

Finished Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie Macdonald Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante Babel, R.F. Kuang Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Started The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy 2666, Roberto Bolaño Mythos, Stephen Fry Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Sean O’hagan Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves David Copperfield, Charles Dickens Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell A Heart So White, Javier Marias The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis Ongoing / Non-narrative The Complete Poems & Plays, T....

Frank Martin uncrosses his arms and takes a puff on the cigar. He lets the smoke carry out of his mouth. Then he raises his chin toward the hills and says, “Jack London used to have a big place on the other side of this valley. Right over there, behind that green hill you’re looking at. But alchohol killed him. Let that be a lesson. He was a better man than any of us....

Why did Gaspery-Jacques get sent to Ohio where he happened to run into Mirella? It wasn’t his decision, was it? Why would the Time Institute want to do that? Was it an accident? It seems too unlikely to be an accident… I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world....

Finished Recursion, Blake Crouch ⭐⭐⭐ Story of our life, Ted Chiang ⭐⭐⭐ Five Little Indians, Michelle Good ⭐⭐ Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Exit West, Mohsin Hamid ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Anomaly, Herve Le Tellier ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ American Gods, Neil Gaiman ⭐⭐⭐ Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy The Odyssey, Homer Unfinished >50% complete The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King ⭐⭐⭐ Shutdown, Adam Tooze ⭐⭐ <50% complete Crashed, Adam Tooze Neuromancer, William Gibson Split Tooth, Tanya Tagaq Beloved, Toni Morrison Sutree, Cormac McCarthy Check out The following are from this Hacker News thread:...

The world is a musem of passion projects Music This Ted Gioia newsletter on how TikTok is changing the incentives of the record business, shifting power away from record labels and into the hands of musicians who are able to find success on the platform. I would love to see this blow up into something. Covid fallout I’ve been seeing and reading more about the social and economic effects of Covid and pandemic related actions....

This book really pits two of my beliefs against one another. On the one hand, I believe the value of specific, physical places and our relationships with them is vastly underrated. It provides meaning, connects us to the past and encourages a deep respect for people and places that is a necessary counterweight to the obvious trends of the ephemeral, impersonal nature of our modern digitized lives. It is the place from which all efforts at conservation should begin....

Podcasts On existential risk and climate change 80,000 hours: Toby Ord on existential risk Volts podcast Elizabeth Popp Berman Noah Smith Paulina Jaramillo These are all just loosely related, but I listened to them all around the same time and found it very interesting to hold the arguments and implications in my head together. Putting climate change in perspective (before the 80,000 hours podcast I had just default assumed climate change was a major existential risk) while still acknowledging the extremely destructive impacts of the warming that is likely to happen....

Articles Nadia Eghbal’s new work sounds really interesting. Hannah and I have been talking recently about a mutual desire to do more “giving”. I don’t think either of use really knows what that means to us. This is a really interesting frame for what giving is. Philanthropy, then, can be understood as a form of self-expression. It is complementary, not competitive, to government: citizens have the right to use their private assets to experiment with new ideas, and government has the size and longevity to scale and maintain them....

Articles A complaint about Google ditching Pixel 3 support. I have a Pixel 3 and sympathize. Google? More like Boo-gle. 👎 As the author says: here I am, with another piece of premature junk, made by the company that pledges to “maximize the reuse of finite resources” and “enable others to do the same". Books I’ve been listening to Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories, Story of Your Life and Others, on Audible....

Contains spoilers This was a great novella. A slow burner, it drops its core themes quickly and densely about three quarters of the way through. Language, time, free-will, purpose, parenting are all front and center in this very human human-alien encounter. I love stories that focus on that slippery line between what we have the ability to change and what we don’t and how we make sense of this partial self-determination....