Erin Kissane says the big platforms like Facebook are dead on their feet. “The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.” Agreed.
Ash Huang on tidying up her consumerism. “I can’t vote away billionaires who have no connection to common people and are obsessed with going to space instead of paying workers. But I can alter how much of my day-to-day cash goes to their war chest. I can reduce how much money I’m giving to dangerous people, and punish companies focused on algorithmic blood sucking and extractive practices. Even if they’re not billionaires yet.” Yes. I feel the need to do better at this.
David Moldawer on technique, particularly this quote from Stravinsky: “I’ve … learned to distrust the future. If I have an idea, it’s crucial to work it out now, while it still makes sense in my head, rather than jot a half-baked notion down to be resolved later. With this stuff, there is no later. Get it right, right now.” Part of my mind insists that this can’t be true, but at the same time I do find that ideas fresh at inception can and often do go stale. That might be a good thing, though? (Some ideas seem good initially, but later on, not so much.)
The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World, by Shelley Puhak, published 2022. It’s about Brunhild and Fredegund in the late 500s and all the crazy and frequently violent political machinations throughout their rise to power. Quite good. I really liked it, even if the going felt slower at times because of the less familiar names. I hadn’t realized the royal name Louis (Louis XIV etc., and that’s not one of the less familiar ones, to be clear) came from the name Clovis. Also fascinating to read about the characters (letters) Chilperic invented that ended up being adopted by the Angles and used in Old English and later Scandinavian languages, though the book didn’t say which characters (ash? eth? thorn? wynn?) and my cursory googling thus far has been less than helpful.
Fiction
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, volume 8, by Beth Brower, published 2024, historical fiction. Delightful as usual. I love the characters and enjoyed getting more backstory. The scene change for much of the book was also nice.
Veiled, by Benedict Jacka, published 2015, fantasy. Sixth in the Alex Verus series (halfway through, excluding the novellas). Liked it, especially the developments in the overarching story.
The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell, published 2016, fantasy. Second in the series, a Christmas ghost story of sorts. Quite liked it — the atmosphere, the worldbuilding, the characters. And lo, there’s a sixth one coming out in September.
Wesley Osam on worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy. In particular this bit: “Most of us live in the long tail of historical significance. The books that speak most deeply to most people deal with problems of our magnitude and help us come to terms with our mundanity. Much of SFF assumes without thinking about it—and, in assuming, inadvertently argues—that the only people of significance or interest are the ones whose lives take place on the cosmological/world-historical scale of exhaustive worldbuilding. Part of becoming an adult is accepting that you’re really Toiletry Application Guy, and that being this kind of person is okay.” I wish there were more speculative fiction in this vein.
Henry Oliver on reading great literature and his upcoming book, The Reader’s Quest. “We should read these great works because they offer us pleasures and perspectives that are unavailable anywhere else. Because they can fundamentally change how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. Because they are pinnacles of human accomplishment.” This post sparked my interest in trying classic lit again. (With some success this time!)
Steven Johnson on how to read a novel, more specifically about Patrick Collison’s book list tweet and Middlemarch and Bleak House. Neither of which I’ve read. I hope to rectify this by the end of the year.
Nathaniel Roy on how he uses notebooks. A nice nerdy deep dive. Enjoyed this. I’m using my paper notebooks more now, after a hiatus of several years, and it’s tremendously satisfying.
Julian Gough on stanets and ploons. I have no idea if he’s right about any of this, but the ideas here — that most of the life in the universe may be inside the icy moons of planets that don’t orbit stars — are riveting. (As is his idea about the evolution of universes, which I’ve linked to before.) (And…apparently I’ve linked to his newsletter not once but four times already. I did not realize this.)
Simon Willison on running a link blog, to get a little meta for a moment. Several of these accord with my own unwritten rules for these link posts, particularly the one about always including the names of the people who created whatever it is I’m linking to. That one matters a lot to me.
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Time at Lockheed, by Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos, published 1994. The morality of war and military contracting aside, I liked this a lot as a book about building things. Lots of fascinating stories about the development of stealth tech, the U-2, and the Blackbird. (And whew, that story about Carmen Vito’s cyanide pill!)
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, by Steven Johnson, published 2014. I read this for book group and enjoyed it (which I expected, given that I love books about innovations and also really liked Johnson’s The Ghost Map and Extra Life). It’s about the hummingbird effect, where a discovery or invention leads to other unexpected results — for example, the invention of glass unexpectedly led to biological discoveries because of the invention of the microscope. (Also, I didn’t know the word “lens” comes from the Latin word for lentil seed. Ha.) Particularly enjoyed the part about engineering the Chicago sewer (mindblowing, really) and the part about time being different everywhere (on the level of minutes) before the introduction of time zones.
Fiction
Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper, published 1965, fantasy. First in the series The Dark Is Rising. I last read this twenty years ago this month and wanted to see how it held up now that I’m quite a bit older. Oh, it very much does. Loved it even more this time through. The seaside Cornish village atmosphere is great, and there was more mystery and danger than I remembered. Looking forward to rereading The Dark Is Rising itself, which has long been my favorite in the series.
The Other Valley, by Scott Alexander Howard, published 2024, science fiction. I picked this up after reading tarvolon’s review. Quite liked the idea (always down for stories about time travel in any form), and other than some earthy parts I think I liked the execution, too. And the ending. And the French names.
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott, published 1998. A bit slow and mildly repetitive in places, but overall a fascinating anthropological look at the resilience of social and natural diversity in the face of homogenizing nation states. Emerson’s saying about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds kept coming into my head throughout the book. “My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.” Much of what Scott documents felt like a failure of UX, where planners didn’t pay attention to the people who’d be using/living the system. The urban planning parts reminded me that I need to try Jane Jacobs again. (I bounced off The Death and Life of Great American Cities last time I tried.) “A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order.” I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but that’s true, and a good reminder that sight is not the only sense and that accessibility concerns often end up affecting us all. The part where Scott talked about “the absence of a dense street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of the spatial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling” also resonated with me. The grid-system suburbia I live in is nice, but I often find myself yearning for those spatial irregularities and higher density and informal gathering places. (That said, my church ward does meet the need for neighborhood feeling.) I also liked the parts about variolation leading to vaccination and about check dams. All in all, glad I read it, lots of food for thought.
Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, by Ross King, published 2000. This is Florence a hundred years earlier than Benvenuto Cellini and I’m here for it. A fascinating read. I loved the detail throughout the book on how they built the dome — the machine Brunelleschi designed to hoist heavy stones up hundreds of feet, for example. (Speaking of which, this book unexpectedly triggered my fear of heights over and over again.) Crazy how in Florentine law, people were considered adolescents until they turned twenty-four. And that prank Brunelleschi played on the carpenter! Great book, highly recommended.
Fiction
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, published 2003, science fiction (barely; it’s more historical fiction). Other than some fairly bawdy parts I didn’t care for, I generally liked it — readable throughout (if very long), and the scientific research aspect was fun, as was the variety in form (play fragments, epistolary, etc.). It’s completely bonkers in places. Lots of 1600s politics. Lots of Newton and Hooke and Leibniz and Pepys, too. (I have no idea how historically accurate it is, but that didn’t matter, I loved it anyway. The 1600s are my jam.) The Royal Society minutes were a hoot. And that ending! Whew.
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2022, fantasy. First in the Tyrant Philosophers series. I loved it — great worldbuilding and interesting characters (particularly Yasnic and his god, and also Ruslan’s fate). Enjoyed the Les Mis vibes when they showed up, and I felt it gave a compelling overall picture of life under an oppressive empire. The large number of points of view also worked well for me. Very much looking forward to the rest of the series.
Lincoln Michel on TV prose, his name for writing overly affected by visual media. Yes, 100%. This is something I’ve thought about frequently in recent years, and I’m slowly trying (with varying levels of success) to get into older novels to offset this.
Alan Jacobs on breaking bread with the dead (reading old books, etc.). “A vast cultural inheritance is ours for the taking, and to access it almost all we need is a computer with a web browser.”
Jonathan Edward Durham. “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” Ha. I like that.
James Goldberg’s essay on Latter-day Saint holidays from the Holiday Lit Blitz. “I will admit that, living less than two centuries into Latter-day Saint history, our holidays can feel a little underwhelming to me. But I suspect they’re still in their early stages, waiting to see what we might make of them.” I really liked this and agree.
Samuel Arbesman on creating a humanist monospace font for his terminal. “I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.”
Quick minor note: I’ve redesigned the art page, grouping the pieces into collections. I’ve also added RSS feeds for all collections and tags (linked from the top of each collection or tag page), so if you’re just interested in the religious art and don’t want to subscribe to the full blog, there’s now an RSS feed for that. There’s also a feed for all the art.
The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement, by Sharon McMahon, published 2024. Quite good. Lots of inspiring, hopeful stories from history, which was just what I needed when I read this. Speaking of the challenges these people overcame, by the way, it’s awful how America has been (and clearly often still is) so sexist and racist. Human tribalism is a hard thing to overcome. I feel like the gospel of Jesus Christ is an effective countermeasure, though.
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, published 2023. I heard about this from the newsletters of Austin Kleon and Ryan Holiday. Really liked it. For the past few years (I’ve mentioned this before), I’ve been using pretty much exclusively digital notes, but reading this got me itching to return to paper at least some of the time. The little that I’ve done so far has been satisfying. I didn’t know it took five hundred years for Florence to return to pre-plague population levels. I also hadn’t really thought about paper being so critical in the development of art, but it makes a lot of sense (having an affordable way to do lots of sketches and studies). In the part about the Dutch album amicorum, I suddenly remembered that when I was on my mission, the younger Thais (and missionaries, including me) had friendship books, which I had totally forgotten about. Two other parts that stood out to me and that I’m still thinking about: the idea of notebooks containing rough notes that later get transcribed into journals and then get refined and processed until they’re ready for publication, and the idea of notebooks as an actual extension of one’s mind — an SD card for the brain, basically. Oh, I also enjoyed the history of double-entry accounting.
Fiction
Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, published 2007, fiction. I read this for book group. It’s from the perspective of a woman who gets early-onset Alzheimer’s and shows what that’s like. Whew, it’s tragic. Fiction is a great vehicle for this type of thing, though — letting you experience something you probably haven’t (similar to Kindred). Looking forward to reading Genova’s ALS book at some point down the road.
The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, published 2020, mystery. Quite liked it. Fun, delightful characters (Joyce especially), and twisty, too. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and then Osman’s newer series after that.
The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, published 2024, fantasy. A twisty Holmes/Watson-style murder mystery, with big monsters in the background for flavor. Other than a few small parts I didn’t care for, I liked it. Especially the interesting worldbuilding. I still need to finish Bennett’s Founders trilogy, which also had interesting worldbuilding (magic ala programming).
