Angela Ambroz

Whoa, this was a blast from the past. 3.75 stars, rounding up.

Berkeley Breathed, the cartoonist, makes a good point in his foreword: a lot of the great cartoonists of the 80s and 90s - Gary Larson, Bill Watterson, and himself - kinda disappeared in the mid-90s to vague early retirements. Bill Watterson had his hole anti-corporate, hermit thing going on; Gary Larson I have no idea where he went; and same with Berkeley Breathed. They just stopped. Meanwhile, we lost Dilbert's Scott Adams to virulent Trumpism, complete with a totally snide twitter/blog “voice”. Ugh.

Hey, what about Foxtrot guy? Bill Amend? He doesn't seem very political. Holy shit, I just googled, Foxtrot started in 1988. That man's been cartooning that for THIRTY YEARS PEOPLE.

HANNNYWAY. I used to binge this stuff back in the 90s, and I remember that Bloom County - more than any other strip, except maybe Gary Larson's - made me LOL the most. I still chuckle when I think of the strip about the resident Bloom County unreconstructed chauvinist asshole, Steve the Lawyer, getting a table at a restaurant. The maitre'd asks him a bunch of questions: “Smoking or non?” “Smoking!” he obnoxiously announces. More questions, ending with “Did your ancestors violently conquer and oppress large parts of the world?” Steve leans in, “YEEEESS!” Last panel: Steve sitting, cramped into a tiny table, asking a woman of color nearby for salt. “Apologize,” she deadpans. HAAAAA.

The 2016 presidential election lured Berkeley Breathed out of his 25-year retirement, and this book is a collection of his comic strip-sized reactions to Trump, American politics, identity politics, the new Star Wars movies, screen addiction, and did I mention Trump? He skewers right and left pretty evenly (which is probably safer for his bottom line), but doesn't seem so much angry as amused by the incoherent raging and doomsday panic and quasi-religious consumerism of this American life.

I LOLed quite hard at some of his little punchlines, which are usually delivered via Opus the Penguin, a soft and squishy idiot. I screenshotted (screenshat?) a LOT of panels, just because they either tickled or charmed me. The little girl offering free yoga classes and decorating Opus into “Zenguin” were some of my favorite moments.

(LibriVoxed.) Shit gets really real, really fast in this (anti-?)colonialist parable about the “white”, “pale” London-expelled Dr. Moreau and his “Beast People”. Did Dr. Moreau turn humans into the Beast People? Or did he turn animals into people? Who knows. Either way, he's a colonialist jerk. Our sensitive, trusty narrator, Prendick, feels godawful, all of the time. So did I. Really well-written. (The prof of the sf MOOC I'm taking noted that, in his day, everyone thought H.G. Wells was the shit, and we seem to have forgotten him a bit since. It's true - the writing is plain, absorbing and expressive! Really nice!)

Incisive, subversive, infuriating and enlightening. I had forgotten a lot of the worldbuilding from Vol. 1 but, ah yes, we're in a nightmare corporo-theocracy where American gender norms are taken just a couple inches further. And it is a frickin' NIGHTMARE.

In our (real) world where:
- the government is legislating that employers can deny to cover women's birth control
- and don't even talk about abortions
- also, btw, paid maternity leave is a mythical unicorn
- articles are written about women “having it all”, as if there's some sort of inherent tension between giving birth and working OH WAIT WE JUST LEGISLATED THAT TENSION INTO EXISTENCE
- and we have “respectability feminism” stuff like Lean In or whatever, where - as long as women negotiate more/speak up more/do XYZ more/better - then all the structural sexism will magically disappear at their feet, into puddles
- where a man with a wide reputation for, in his 30s, having sexually pursued girls in their teens, lost a Senatorial race IN A SQUEAKER and everyone was relieved and amazed!
- where a man bragged about assaulting women (“when you're a star, they let you do it”) and later won the Presidency

and so on. Yeah, so that's the sexist nightmare we're already living in, and it blows. The Bitch Planet universe takes place, say, 100 years from now, and assumes things never get any better, and only get a little bit worse. It's also kinda like Orange is the New Black, in that it's about prison sisterhood. It's great. I loved it. When's Vol 3 coming out?!

Bash agility - fluency on the Unix/Linux terminal - is a super foundational meta-programming skill that I feel like gets short shrift as we all rush towards machine learning and cryptocurrency. Yo, but the stronger your bash fu, the easier your management of remote servers and such. Like, I did this the other day and basically floated away on a rainbow chariot pulled by mighty unicorns:
pip freeze > diff - requirements.txt
YES, I AM POWERFUL.

Just like Friedl's book on regular expressions, another clarifying book on an important meta topic, this bash book was SUPER helpful and I wish I had had it in 2014. I literally remember sitting at my desk in Dar es Salaam, staring at OSX Terminal and watching some Coursera course on some tech topic, and marveling at the instructors' bash incantations. Wtf was he doing?

“Is there some structured way to learn about Terminal!?” I thought. I didn't even know it was a shell language called bash! I didn't know shell != bash! Lots of stuff. I WIIISH I had had this then.

Anyway, yes, you can probably pick up these same bash skills by just osmosis over long periods of time. I did - there was a lot in here I had already learned (or had sorta half-known and used anyway), and I think experienced programmers will consider it real (bashy) basic. But if I had a young lady beginning her career transition journey into tech, I would hand her this and the regex book, and the keys to Udacity, and GODSPEED YOUNG MADAM.

And now, for much meta inspiration on people's hardware, editor, and shell choices, here's https://usesthis.com/

I'm pretty sick to death of autobiographical/memoir graphic novels, but this was beautiful and heartbreaking. The adventure and tragedy of being a refugee. Really striking.

Weird and wonderful. I put a big premium on Big Imagination stuff: hallucinogenic, acid indie comix hit me, ugh, right in the spot. Mirror is one of those.

I gueeeeess it's kinda comparable to the visionary and weird stuff of Moebius (but without the ughh tedious sexist writing), and is infused with a lot of the naturalist “aaaawwww awwwwww” (heavenly chanting) ambience of Hayao Miyazaki stuff. It veers dangerously close to furry central (there is a sexy dog lady and a buff minotaur man), but I can be tolerant of that.

The world-building is coherent and strange, the plot structure cyclical, the art gentle, atmospheric watercolors. The dialogue was meeeeehhh (and omg I hated the talk bubble fonts), but, again, I can tolerate all that - since its strengths were, yes, strong. I mean, there's a sentient asteroid, for crying out loud.

Fun, middlebrow, pretty feminist post-apocalyptic novel. I found this via a recommendation by Claude (AI), after I had asked him for “The Last Of Us minus (guns, Carhartt, machismo) and plus social science feelings”. He was bang on the money!

The plot: A plague devastates the Earth, disproportionately killing women and children. Infant and maternal mortalities are basically 100%. Men die off as well, at about 98%. We follow the titular unnamed midwife as she works hectically in San Francisco (!), catches the plague, survives the plague and - like Cillian Murphy - wakes up about 28 days later to an empty, desolate world. The rest of the book follows her on-foot odyssey across the wasteland of the American continent (in the style of The Last Of Us, indeed!), navigating the varieties of Mad Max that have sprung forth.

So there's a lot of similar books to this - the post-apocalypse is an, ahem, very PREGNANT genre, ho ho - and many of them are cleverer. Y: The Last Man came immediately to mind: how would humanity cope if our gender ratio suddenly got very lopsided? So, in a way, this felt very basic post-apocalypse. There's a lot of scavenging, breaking into McMansions looking for guns, shoes and tinned food. There are roaming bands of monstrous men. There are small pockets of communities trying to recreate the civilized life. Honestly, it felt like a video game - like The Last of Us indeed! Also, like The Handmaid's Tale, there are glimpses of a far future that are wonderfully tantalizing.

Despite being very basic in setting, there are some quirks which made me bump this from a 3-star apocalypse to a 4-star one. First of all, the book has a strong progressive sensibility that I deeply, DEEPLY appreciated in this authoritarian 2025. Elison (the author) is quick to set up a progressive perspective on the (white female) character's privileges, etc. The book also has a quirky writing style: we have a primary document (the protagonist's journal entries) interspersed with tight, third person narration of her journey, as well as occasional detours into faraway places. This is all handled well (which is hard tbh!) and it's very satisfying. It reminded me of World War Z's cosmopolitan apocalypse. If anything, I tired of the diary entries and found the Mormon interlude a little high-handed/mean-spirited, even if it was probably, well, accurate.

Another big, BIG pro was the underlying, very basic feminism: reproductive rights were, well, VERY VERY IMPORTANT and kinda the whole point of the journey. The protagonist is no-nonsense, highly practical, and understands that women's power and women's vulnerabilities will be directly tied to their reproductive capacity. Shit is crazy out there, man. And so she immediately hoards all the birth control she can find and sets out on a glorious mission to help the surviving women not become literal chattel for monstrous men. I also found the "hives" - where some of the surviving women kept harems of men - really interesting. The protagonist noted that all of these women were basically incapable of getting pregnant (due to hoarded birth control, infertility, tied tubes, etc). And they're the ones with the most power!

So the Galactic Empire is about to come down big time, as predicted by the sciencey science of master psychohistorian (empirical sociologist?), Hari Seldon. The rest of the book is about the post-Empire centuries in the periphery of the galaxy, and how Seldon's psychohistorical predictive analysis was amaaaazing (is he Nate Silver?), and a bunch of great men in future history shepherd the galactic stragglers through the usual Dark Ages pattern of Medieval religion preserving scientific insight, followed by increased trade and Renaissancey stuff, and the promise of a second Empire down the line.

Uggggghhhh.

So the entire book is literally a series of two-man conversation scenes, where Great Man X explains his position in the future history to us (since he always Gets It, and we have big time-jumps which require sooo much clunky “as you know” dialogue), while Minion Man or perhaps Enemy Man go either “oh wow jeez” or “i disagree!”. It's incredibly boring and depressing. Depressing that the first woman who shows up does so at 76% of the way through (to try on a dress, people, A DRESS), and the first woman to SPEAK is at 79%. And she's a shrewish wife of one of the Great Men's enemies. So, basically, pointless.

Yeah. It's clunky, and oh God boring, and just a bunch of exposition, and I AM NOT UNDERSTANDING ASIMOV'S POSITION IN THE SCI-FI CANON. I admit this is one book. I will read a few Asimov more, but, let's just say, this one confirmed by ~~dark thoughts~~ about some pre-1960s sci-fi: that it's chauvinistic and narrow-minded and dull as hell.

DNF @ 28%. Kind of a bummer, but KSR can be hit and miss. Actually, lemme rephrase: KSR is a master of sci-fi, I consider him in my top 2-3 sci-fi authors. But! I have indeed abandoned him before without much suffering, and while his masterpieces are very amazing and the best in the genre, his B-game is like anyone else's: a B-game.

And given the books are such TOMES... well. I got other things I gotta read!

Anyway, this had a nice premise: NYC, 100 years from now, half-drowned after two “pulses” - giant jumps in sea-level rise due to melting polar ice caps. We follow a motley crew of characters who all live in the MetLife building in drowned downtown. The usual KSR agenda - when do we get sublimated into a post-capitalist utopia? - is very much on everyone's mind, from the refreshingly vapid “geo-finance” day trader, to the Paula Mendoza-type building coop head lady, to the urchin kids who live in a boat, to the idealistic “coders” who live on the roof.

What made me lose interest fast was the writing style. KSR is a cranky dude, his goat is particularly gotten by people complaining about his infodumping (according to that interview, anyway), and I guess he considers himself a very smart dude (which he is!). That's a recipe for writing that felt arrogant and suuuuper indulgent. There's a narrator character, “the citizen”, whose chapters are solely giant future history info-dumps written in an obnoxious, combative, 60+ white dude trying to write slang voice. It's cringey. At one point, “the citizen” tells readers who hate “infodumps” to “skip ahead”. WTF!

Those were the worst, but there were numerous other moments of sorta lazy, indulgent writing: cheesy jokes and winking self-references and cringey self-enamored curlicues. They kept pulling me out of the story and ruining perfectly good scenes!

And then there was the econ and the coding. I'm an economist turned data scientist, so econ and coding are my thing. I like them! I also know something about them. So, yes, I got some solid squee when KSR name-dropped “Shiller” (BOB! I LOVE YA BOB!), and an affectionate eyeroll at the name-drop of (Thomas) “Picketty”. But his portrayal of the coders was super groan-worthy; did he just, like, browse the tech shelves at his bookstore? He name-drops the R Cookbook, of all things, and has these coders be, seemingly, all things at once: data scientists, devops, infosec. It's like, wai wai wait a minute. “Coder” is a catch-all term for “someone who programs on their day job”, but once you get into the weeds of the actual tech industry, there's specialization and shit. It just felt like KSR didn't know what he was talking about. :(

So yeah. I'm sorry to bash ya, KSR, you are still my number 1 or 2 (can't decide, main contender is Ursula Le Guin).

I was thinking to myself, “I can't rate all the Saga comix at a 5/5 - I mean, am I just carrying forward the legacy of my initial shock at how good it was? Am I/are they just coasting on the long tail of this good will?”

So I tried to Read More CRITICALLY. And I was like, “yeaahhhh, I guess I'm tired of the ponderous intoning by the future narrator” and “okaayyyy, I guess things are meandering now a bit and - waiting months or years between volumes makes it hard to keep track of the plot threads - “

But then I found myself, yet again, laughing and crying and going DAAAAMN YOU BRIAN K VAUGHAN AND FIONA STAPLES!!!! And those last few frames. Lemur boy! LEMURRRR BOYYY!!! Arghghhghghg



So yeah, we're still at a 5/5.

Not what I was expecting. I thought this would be about problem solving, aka perseverance, persistence, grit, etc, MATH. But it's not. It should really be called “What Do You Do With an ANXIETY DISORDER, MOM”. Oh, honey, boy, do I have lots to say about that. But yes, as the book says, bottom line is you do exposure therapy because otherwise that gorgeous dark watercolor cloud of worry will fuck your shit up, aka you will live in a brush-stroke hurricane of shitty thoughts, honey, so just try to face it asap, okay I love you, good night.

In other words, what a bummer. I felt sad to be teaching anxiety management now, tonight, at this age. But, sigh, fine ok.

Ah, Saga. I've been reading Saga since 2013. I've read it in Ghana, Tanzania, and the US. It never stops being what it is: an inventive well-written romp through an interminable space opera. The characters are excellent; the only problem now, as we're into the 30-something-th issue, is how full the ensemble cast is. We don't get enough time with everyone! I love everyone; I love - funnily - the fashion sense of the parents, Alana and Marko; and Prince Robot (now Sir Robot, knight-errant) remains the most fascinating character. Also Ghüs, the “bi-pedal seal-man” (as described by wiki). “Are you lady-folk?” HA.

Highlight of this volume were the gigantic tardigrades, because tardigrades really are something, eh. And yes! They survive in space! That's a thing! Amazing.

First, some mood music.

So this is an excellent tomey history, written in a sardonic “eff the patriarchy” lady's voice, and thus earning some low stars. (And thus also similar to Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History, which also made a bunch of conservative Hindu uncles pissed off, it seems.) But pay those low stars no mind. And pay the slow start of this book no mind: things are slow and kinda dry for the first 33% - 40%, but then there are BIG BIG PAYOFFS once Caesar gets stabbed.

Basically, this is a giant unpacking of all that we know of Rome, and it's a specific challenge to the Great Men-centric narratives we're more familiar with: the ones that divide Rome into a series of chapters starring evil brothers (Romulus and Remus), then kings, then senators, then emperors. Mary Beard tries to see beyond this narrative, into what the daily life was like, what the Roman concept of its own Romanness was, and how they were always busy revising their history (Make Rome Great Again!) as they were living it. As such, this is both history and historiography, with a special focus on Cicero. In fact, this book's subtitle should be “Cicero's Rome” since he's our guiding star for much of the book - well, until he gets murdered in the tumultuous first century BCE. (And, boy, does that feel like a tectonic shift from good ol' days to desaturated evil empire Rome. Also, he's beheaded and a mean lady (in the Emperor's palace? or the Senate? some mean powerful lady) pierces the head's tongue over and over with her hair pins I MEAN WTF LADY) But much of what we know of early, pre-imperial Rome, pre-Senate Rome even, was from the writings of Cicero and other contemporary authors - authors who may have had a stake in portraying it in this way or that.

Anyway, it's all amazing and much too big to be coherent about. So here are some random thoughts:
- Slavery in Rome? So weird. Lots of freed slaves buying houses, getting wealthy. There were enslaved doctors? Losing in a battle was a quick ticket to slavery.
- Germanic tribes kicked a lot of butt, despite what Gladiator would have you believe.
- There was a thing called the “Social War”, which was about other Italian cities hating Rome's expanding influence.
- They filled up the Trastevere neighborhood with water once to stage a giant mock naval battle. I mean, damn, right.
- The neighborhood Testaccio is an artificial mountain made of discarded olive oil pots I AM NOT EVEN JOKING.
- The whole Roman governor thing that we're so familiar with from Pontius Pilate, Ben Hur, all that stuff, was a relatively later thing.
- During the Senate + 2 Consuls years, they would name years after consuls: which would be like calling 2008-2016 “Years of Barack Obama and Joe Biden” and now, well, I dare not say it.
- Speaking of calendars, July is named after Julius Caesar and August after Augustus.
- My faaaave chapter may have been the one about how senators dealt with their diminishing power in the face of increasingly zany emperors (Nero!? Caligula?!). Like, by far fave chapter. We can learn a lot about politics from it!
- The “how the other half lives” chapter was also a heroic attempt at hearing the (silent) voices of the poor, of women, of basically everyone who WASN'T a senator/emperor/historian/philosopher.
- Right-wing “Make Rome Great Again” politicians hated the feminizing, high culture hipsterdom of Greek influence. i.e. There was a perceived cultural division between tough, hardy Romans and urban, hipster Greeks HAAA.
- There was an emperor from North Africa (Septimius Severus) and one from Spain (Russell Crowe? Maximus IS from Spain in that movie).
- And, okay, this isn't from the book, but I just want to say that I always find it funny that Commodus (who WAS as bad as Gladiator portrays - what a jerkface) is Commodo in Italian, which means “taking it easy” as in “basically lazy”.
- THE MYSTERIOUS ETRUSCANS?!

Recommended. Reconnecting with the classics == good values!

George Saunders is a style unto himself. How does he do it? I first discovered him in The New Yorker, and this is the first series of shorts by him that I read. I'm detecting the patterns now - the surrealism, anti-consumerism, satirical-yet-overly-earnest voice, the unreliable narrator/naive POV. The stories in this run a fair gamut, from the relatively relatable (a “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”-style tale of institutionalized romance; similar to the other stuff he's written), to the charmingly inventive (a scary/hilarious letter from a baby mask company's Customer Support staff), to the downright bizarre (some VERY surreal pieces towards the end).

Generally, I like that Saunders can strike that delicate balance between being outrageous without being alienating - I think it has to do with the earnest/dim-witted narrative voice he often uses. In a way, his stories are like more bizarre Mark Twain, or more understandable Vonnegut/Kilgore Trout. He can really drive a point home, and it's often poignant, revelatory. I didn't go for his more surreal stuff in the end, if only because my suspension of disbelief is only so flexible and - if you're going to write Fight Cluby screeds on the soul-destroying nature of American consumerism - I'd prefer a non-fic essay to a surreal fic. But that's just me.

All in all, bravo! A powerful, incredible writer.

A joyous romp through the big hits of linguistics; I loved this. I also highly recommend listening to the audiobook, since John McWhorter - who hosts the equally fun and fizzy Lexicon Valley podcast - is a natural “radio entertainer”. I found myself frequently smiling, laughing, or shaking my head in wonder and awe.

Anyway, philosophically, this book is one giant take-down of Internet pedants who despair at the ‘decline of spoken English': i.e. those people at parties who correct someone exclaiming “I was literally burning up!” with “Actually, you mean figuratively.” Ahhh, I do love taking down pedants. LANGUAGE IS A LIVING THING, YOU BETA. And that is McWhorter's central thesis: that language evolves, and that its evolution is to be celebrated, studied and even revered - rather than feared or moralized over.

I especially liked the following:
- The “euphemism treadmill”: where we use language to soften and distance ourselves from prejudice, only to find each en vogue euphemism being abused by assholes, and Concerned People having to find a new one: e.g. “crippled” –> “handicapped” –> “disabled” –> “challenged”. Each move was an attempt to distance the language from the assholey behavior of some people, but you can never escape it! IT'S INESCAPABLE.

- “Duchenne laughter” and AALLLL the amazing stuff about pragmatics vs. semantics and the grammaticalization of words: i.e. how we use laughter, or small words (“like”, “well”, “so”, and - my favorite - “ANYWAY”), not as filler/chaff, but as social lubricants conveying subtle nuances of fellow feeling. I never thought about how, when saying “Well, blah blah”, the “well” is conveying counter-expectation and softening the blow of surprise: “Well, it's actually red.” (“actually” also!) This reminded me of my Goethe Institut basic German course where - despite what you would expect - it wasn't the infamously long German compound words that were hard to understand (Lebensabschnittpartner! Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften!), it was those tiny grammaticalized words like “doch” (conveying counter-intuitive surprise?) and “mal” (a softener similar to “just”, as in “I just had a question.”? honestly, I'm still not sure).

- McWhorter's authorial voice is Full of Personality, which I sometimes dislike in authors, but I LOLed frequently at McWhorter's indulgent twirls: e.g. he calls German compound words “highway pile-ups”.

- The “back shift”: when verbs transition to nouns in everyday English, the syllabic stress shifts from the last syllables to the front syllables: e.g. “I susPECTed him.” (verb) vs. “Round up the usual SUSpects.” (noun) This reminded me of my British friends once laughing at my “charming American way” of pronouncing “goodlooking” (I say “GOODlooking”, they said “goodLOOKing”).

- INDO-EUROPEAN. My favorite proto-language. I wish we knew more about it. I could listen to a whole book about it.

Now what I need is someone to explain to me my own accent, since so many English speakers have told me I have one, and I even hear it in recordings of myself, but it makes no sense and it sounds like I'm vaguely Scandinavian. (I'm not from Scandinavia.) Maybe McWhorter should do a call-in show.

Another indulgence: OH LANGUAGE, HOW I LOVE THEE! Much like the frisson I had the other week when I attended a Clojure workshop (Clojure is a functional programming language, miles away from Python - my everyday coding language) and learned a totally new way of conceptualizing code, so too is comparative linguistics amazing and exciting! Do they have books comparing natural language to computer languages? That's another thing.

Highly recommended! I want to read all of McWhorter's stuff now, listen to all his Great Courses series. (Coincidentally, I actually listened to his intro to linguistics Great Courses series way back in the early 2000s - not knowing it was the same dude - and his explanation of how tonal languages evolve BLEW MY MIND.)

A stirring, straightforward memoir of Mike Massimino, a “regular guy” astronaut.

When starting this, I was unsure if Yet Another Astronaut Memoir was needed: I had read and enjoyed Chris Hadfield's memoir and couldn't imagine the marginal added value of another one. But Mike Massimino's felt more emotionally stirring than Chris Hadfield's; I don't remember laughing and getting choked up in the same way with Hadfield's bio. Though they do follow the same pattern: these are basically motivational speeches in book form. They're also big time NASA plugs: Massimino addresses, in particular, the way that the 1960s space craze has diminished over time (though we do have SpaceX getting people excited again, which is nice).

Anyway, Massimino is a Long Island Italian-American kid who wasn't a super-genius, but was just a real mensch. His warmth as a storyteller and people-person jumps off the page: you end up wrapped up in his excitement, his nervousness, his highs and lows. It was also, indeed, motivational and inspiring and heartening to hear him struggle with very real feelings and real failures: he bombed his qualifying exams at MIT and had to re-do them; he struggled with imposter syndrome while at NASA; he felt clumsy and was bad at things and went to sometimes hilarious heights to reach his dream of being an astronaut (the reshaping his eyeballs thing being, maybe, the coolest and most funny thing I've ever heard of). I would slot this next to Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World, as being about a real person achieving extraordinary things - while still feeling very real. (And being from New Yawk!)

Cathy O'Neil is one of my heroes; I love listening to her on Slate Money, and her less pop/more technical book, Doing Data Science, occupies a prominent place on my desk at work - and a special place in my heart. Going beyond the usual data science manuals of what a random forest is, or how to account for large, sparse data, O'Neil and her coauthor - in that book - make an almost anthropological survey of the data science “field”/profession/whatever. It's enlightening, and it's very real; less a textbook, more a professional guide.

So if Doing Data Science is the “how to do your job” manual, and Slate Money is the occasional soapbox, Weapons of Math Destruction is the manifesto. With clarity, conviction and intelligence, Cathy O'Neil scalpels away at the utopian, misty-eyed tech worship that has contributed to the data science/big data bubble. She identifies the ways in which algorithms encode and perpetuate existing prejudices, and are hidden from plain sight by the obscuring (both intentional and not) use of Fancy Math.

She notes how anti-human “market efficiency” is, and how it's often been short-hand for unjust and unequal systems, and big data is just scaling those dumb systems way, way up. For example, the use of social network data to “enrich” lending platforms; or recidivism models that ask about where a former convict grew up, whether his/her friends are in jail, how many encounters with the police he/she has had. These algorithms - because they chase correlations to make predictions (rather than identifying causal factors) - create big-data-driven poverty traps. They are also beyond the purview of the government (and, given the new administration, will probably be for quite some time): just like your FICO score is ONLY about how often you pay your credit card bills, and NOT your demographic group, so too should these algorithms be scrutinized and regulated.

Increasingly, O'Neil notes, the “human touch” comes at a price; in upper income groups, you get more real, live service - hearing about a job through connections, informational interviews with alumni, blah - while lower income groups are serviced by increasingly mechanized, machine learning code. The hiring and HR practices of CVS, McDonald's, and other low wage places were especially striking (and severe): mindless, well-meaning algorithms deployed to effectively punish workers whose BMIs (itself a stupid measure of health) are too high, or who seem “anti-social” according to a creepy questionnaire, or whatever.

I think my favorite chapter - and, of course, the most relevant one - was about the toxic brew that can be politics and data science. It was especially powerful to think through the way that, as opposed to the past, where we had “agreed upon facts” given by carpet bombing-style hegemonic culture (e.g. four news channels that everyone watched), now we have hyper-tailored DARE I SAY “alternative facts” where, by the power of marketers (who prey on confirmation bias), your neighbor's political beliefs are the result of a very specific and private relationship between them, their web browser cookies, and some political marketer. This means you may have NO IDEA why your swingy neighbor in swingy state X thinks Candidate Y is running an underground child sex ring literally under the ground of a DC pizza shop. O'Neil (and this book was written Before The Madness) notes that these sorts of micro-targeted ads that follow you around the web are very smartly tailored; the marketers know who would be repulsed by such a stupid conspiracy theory, and who would be intrigued. And that's just terrifying.

Anywayyyyy. From a data perspective, my (cold dead) economist heart reminds me that OF COURSE we're going to scale up injustice when we mindlessly maximize profit, instead of humans. We need to go back to our roots: to the philosophy and debates of Jeremy Bentham, and welfare economics, and what “utility” really means. Efficiency is not the end all, be all, despite what our current economic system seems to diktat. O'Neil also makes a good point about the repeated erroneous conflating of correlation and causation; something even the fanciest of linear algebra stochastic process meddlers fall prey to. That's something that I see a LOT in data science: the field is built on the premise of perfect prediction - and prediction doesn't need causation, it just needs correlation.

OK, I will step off my soapbox. Highly recommended.

edited to add: OMG and I just read her delightful 2017 resolutions post, and had much LOLs. Cathy O'Neil, you da best.

PLOT TWIST. Love this, as always. Ah, Saga, reliably weird, with a bit o' shock value and a ton o' fresh, realistic dialogue. Love all the strands; the characters are kinda getting apart from one another, but such is the fate of the true space opera.

Also! I started reading this series in May 2013 in Ghana, and here I am now, in October 2014 in Tanzania, on issue 20. Pretty magical.

OMG are they breaking up? OMG. Noooo.

I could do without so many heads being blown off. I'm pretty much capped out on that, really (no pun intended).

No idea where the plot is going - and that is BRILLIANT.

The arrival of King Robot is also BRILLIANT. OF COURSE HE LOOKS LIKE THAT. Of course he's Henry VIII with a widescreen TV for a head. So beautiful. This remains the best comix series of the last year or so.

Full of dad jokes and John Dickerson's wry old radio-style humor, Whistlestop is catnip to politicos, but probably too esoteric for the rest of us.

Disclaimer: I am a huge John Dickerson fan; he's been my favorite host on my favorite podcast, Slate's Political Gabfest, since I became a regular weekly listener in 2011. When I started watching his ‘day job', i.e. Face the Nation, I was really impressed as well: it was true! There truly is a special, incisive magic to the “Dickersonian” question! He's a damn good journalist. Maybe... DA BEST of this generation!?! He certainly does have a way of unpacking politicians with his rapier-like questions that come wrapped in inoffensive “aw shucks, who? me?” old time dapper-ness. He's also quite mysterious: keeping his personal politics inscrutable, letting his personal spirituality (I think he's a devout Catholic?) peep through by, say, quoting St. Augustine on his Instagram or something. And his moments of waxing poetic about the Fourth Estate, and freedom of the press?! Oh, man. The gospel according to St. John (D.). I tell ya, when aliens come or zombies happen, I will only trust John Dickerson to report it.

So anyway. In addition to being a much-loved, much-trusted newsman, JDicks is also a GIANT NERD about old campaign history. On the Political Gabfest, they have a segment called “Cocktail Chatter”, where each host shares an interesting book or movie they just read/watched. John will almost always have some historical tidbit from 1848. (This chatter still makes me laugh out loud.) Those chatters became so legendary, they formed a spinoff podcast, Whistlestop, which then formed this book.

Essentially, it's a highlights and lowlights from presidential campaign history. From 19th century scandals to 20th century... well, scandals, it is an aficionado's book for the aficionado. I found it alternatingly vaguely interesting, or kinda boring (sorry, John!). The overall theme of the book is one of reassurance: we spent much of the awful 2016 election discussing what an aberration all of it was. Lest I be accused of the Sin of Normalization, Whistlestop does provide a useful perspective: we see the echoes of Trump in Andrew Jackson's upset in 1828, we see the rise of self-defined, proud/angry ‘Deplorables' and the tapping of racist fringes in George Wallace's surprise almost-win in 1968.

Of course, things seem scarier now because the world seems to have raised the stakes: we have industrialized genocides now, after all; we have the power of the bomb; we live in a Panopticon of near-total surveillance.

If you're more of a presidential campaign noob, or you're just generally interested in the Presidency, the Washington Post's Presidential podcast is an excellent ‘introduction'. Whistlestop can sometimes get lost in the weeds which - again, if you're into this stuff already, it's glorious. But if, like me, one Republican National Convention from the 1960s is much like the other, then you will have your eyes get a bit glazey.

A spare, sad, and sweet dystopian-comedy about a lonely, bored police officer on a quickly depopulating moon colony. Like Tom Gauld's other stuff: his style is just charming.

Life is too short to force-finish books! And thus did I abandoneth this. Sorry. On paper, it is NOT up my alley: a nonfic book about a dude digging through old 19th century Transcendentalist parchments and realizing he needs to divorce his wife. Divorce? DIVORCE?! Plz universe, you are harshing my mellow. Also, Thoreaux... fist shake!!! Don't get me started on that guy.

I grudgingly acknowledge, however, that DESPITE THESE PREJUDICES of mine, it actually WAS very well-written and sort of charming. Charming! Charming?! So I've put this in my mental catalog of things to return to, when my mood is more aligned.

Argh. Right up my alley, but frustratingly shallow.

This is a non-fiction overview of the current state of Fake Food. In the early pandemic, I - like many other privileged, low-risk liberals - went deep into glamour homesteading mode. I made my own yogurt. Things like that. Anyway, as I went deep into gourmet food-land, I began to realize that more and more of the food items I had taken for granted as being Real were, in fact, Fake - that is, heavily processed and often containing very little of the things that they said they were. Some examples include maple syrup, vanilla, chocolate, olive oil, most fish, yogurt (!). In addition to that, by random chance that I'm Italian and had spent some years living in Italy and had a transformative moment when I moved from Italy to the US and tried to buy canned beans (BOY WAS THAT DIFFICULT), I also have spicy thoughts and built-in anger about the fakeness of “Parmesan”, “prosciutto”, and basically every other “Italian food” that is sold in the US.

So I was like the #1 super ideal market for this book. And, in many ways, it satisfied me by reassuring me that, yes, there is a Fake Food epidemic and yes, it's mostly in the US and the US's fault. And capitalism's fault. For the moneyed gourmand, the author, Olmsted, includes a “where to buy the real thing” guide at the end of each chapter. That's how I learned about e.g. Zingerman's, which supplies pricey olive oil that they say is real and - after I did a blind taste test - certainly tasted better/realer (?).

BUT. Here's how the book left me unsatisfied. A couple things:

- First, I didn't care for the tone, which was good ol' boy dad jokes. He was trying to connect with the reader and, just for me at least, it fell flat and left me more alienated than connected. Oh well. Tomayto tomahto.
- Second, the vast majority of his examples of “faked” food are European - and the narrative is very much about the EU laws protecting “terroire” products like Champagne or parmigiano vs. US industrial food production wanting to sell you yellow fizz and Kraft saw dust, riding the coattails of well-known high-quality foods. That's all fine and well and I am, in some part, quite curious about how exactly the EU went all-in on protecting its food. (Eating real food in the EU - especially Italy - is much, MUCH MUCH easier and taken for granted and boy do I miss it.) His one non-EU example is Kobe beef from Japan (we have a chapter on this), and some mentions of stuff like Colombian coffee. But that's it. And I was like, well, that's very interesting. Where's the rest of the world? If I may flex my worldliness for a moment: there are some glorious food products from non-EU places that are, I guess, not exported to the US market in the same volumes, and not for the same per-unit price, so they don't get copied? I'm thinking things like South Indian idli, Keralan appam, Ghanaian fufu (or jollof rice, or red-red!). I guess all of these are RECIPES, not terroire products - Olmsted makes an important differentiation there, arguing that that's what should be protected: the land + process of making something like parmigiano. I dunno. Can you find good appam in the US? (If so, plz tell me.)

Oh yes, and this was another book where I recommitted to really, for real not eating fish anymore. That market is just a nightmare.

Fun! Inspiring! I'm pumped! Or maybe my biceps are.

In 2013, while living in Tanzania, I decided to lose some weight. I don't know how I ended up doing it this way, but I made a Google spreadsheet, inputting how much a pound was in calories (3,500), calculated my likely daily caloric needs using some online calculator, tried to eat under that, and tracked the cumulative calorie deficit. I kept the spreadsheet to remind myself that losing weight is slow. Like, VERY slow. Anyway, in doing this, I (a) lost weight (more than intended), but, more importantly, I (b) discovered macros. OH, MACROS! Let me sing thy praises! PROTEIN, CARB AND FAT, HOW I LOVE THEEEEE.

I also discovered, from experience, that protein + caffeine can really help with keeping you full, but that your brain can die if you under-carb it (there was one day when I had to rush out to find a pastry - ANY PASTRY - before I brain-deathed all over my laptop at work). I also discovered protein gets you shredded (who knew). I also discovered r/fitness, the bro lifting community, deadlifts (my love!!!), and, actually, Reddit overall? Wow, what a time to be alive that was.

So this book included a lot of THAT stuff (minus Reddit). One thing from r/fitness/the lifting world is that you must “bulk” (eat above maintenance calories) to gain muscle and then you must “cut” (eat below) to remove fat and, voila, reveal your 6 pack. As a woman who grew up in the late 20th century, where a very thin, androgynous, under-fed body type was lauded as super model-worthy, I have never (!) had the courage to bulk. Eat MORE than I need, are you mad?! That said, I think I'm approaching the time to do that. I have had some refreshing brainwaves where I started to value a different body type (in myself and others), and also I had a REAL big nirvana last year about “health at every size” - like, my post-pregnancy body was just a blob of aches and pains. I started running. I didn't lose any weight (indeed, gained some!), but I felt MUCH MUCH BETTER. Health at every size, bitches!!! I also discovered some body-diverse athletes like the Slow AF run club guy, who's just great. This has really dislodged a lot of my adolescent body image BS programming.

OK. All that to say! The big takeaways from this book, some of which were new to me:
- Bulking and cutting are the yin and yang of your fitness journey
- CICO is the main way
- Macros are the second most important thing (PROTEINNNNN)
- Caffeine helps you feel sated. Cocaine or amphetamines would probably help even more KIDDING KIDDING
- You can't endlessly cut (or bulk, for that matter), you need “maintenance periods” to reset your body and mind. Namely: Cut for 3 months, maintenance for 1-3 months, etc. This was a real nirvana moment for me.
- You probably need to bulk. JUST BULK. Put on that muscle! As lovely Casey Johnston/Swole Woman says, you must eat like a big beautiful horse. Do you want a horse butt? What is more beautiful than a juicy zebra butt? Nothing, people! Anyway, given how the Exercised guy scared me about muscle wasting during our advancing years, I'm now like, oh shit, I gotta bulk up like Arnold. It is time!
- You cannot, alas, do everything at the same time (you cannot bulk + cut, obviously, but you also, sigh, cannot excel athletically in ALL your fields (endurance, strength, etc)... I am running up against this now and it is saddening me OH SO MUCH, maybe a lament for another review. Are there any good “hybrid athletics” books out there?!)

There was also some discussion of, like, being a woman in this culture and eating disorders and so on. Tbh I found that stuff kinda ham-fisted? It was well-meaning. I don't know if people who suffer from EDs would find it helpful? I also found the motivating pep talk “you can do it” stuff like meh, whatever. Much more motivating/inspiring were the many many pics of various women of various ages and body sizes doing various athletic things (wow that deadlift, lady! ooh, you ski?!).

LOLed a lot. A LOT.