Angela Ambroz

Aaaaaah.

Too fast. Over too fast!

These are much better when read in multi-issue chunks, rather than sporadic issues. And apparently they now have a mammoth issue 1-18 hardcover? Just in time for the haaaaliddaaaays.

One star for the overall plot, characters, woke-ness and writing. One additional star for the chat room scene, which was mwah VERY FUNNY AND GOOD.

Alright, so I found this boring, mediocre and totally pedestrian. But 70,000 (!!!) people on Goodreads disagree with me and found it a 4- or 5-star experience! So YMMV. But, for me, just uuughhhh. I was like, no dude.

1. The plot. OK, man stranded in multiverse as he searches for his home world/wife has been done before. Namely: several seasons of Quantum Leap, several seasons of Sliders, Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, even kinda The Time Traveller's Wife, that one episode of TNG when Riker splits himself accidentally. There's probably more. But hey! Nothing is original anymore, amirite? Right. Unless you do it worse, then it's like, WHY!? Why waste our universe with stuff that's redundant AND not very good?!
2. Which brings me to: The writing. This is reeeeal basic writing: paragraphs are, on average, 1-2 sentences long. Sentences are simple. Thoughts, feelings, actions, motives are all VERY CLEARLY EXPLAINED. This is a book where, in one scene, we see character X do X. When he's later in trouble, and evil people demand to know whether X, he says, “no no I did... Y!” - but ONLY AFTER TELLING US REPEATEDLY THAT THIS IS A LIE. It's like, yes, Jason, I know, I was with you 3 minutes ago.
3. The characters. Everyone is a paper-thin upper middle class white person. A world beyond whiteness appears once - when hero protagonist has to drive through “South Chicago” - helpfully described as “the ghetto” - and voila! That's it! The only thing I know about Jason, the protagonist, is (1) he's a “genius”, (2) he likes to drink beer and wine with his wife, and (3) he loves his wife and son. THAT'S IT, PEOPLE. Evil Jason - the multiverse parallel Jason Protagonist that devises the multiverse machine thing - is also just that: evil.
4. Which also brings me to the bad values. I found this had shitty values. Namely: (1) this fails the Bechdel Test. (2) Not only does it fail it, but the only women in the book are a damsel in distress to be saved (the wife) and a caretaker/assistant (the therapist). (3) I find stuff that perpetuates the whole “Great Man”/“genius” thing really counter-productive; it's fixed mindset. Also, (4) yoooo there's SO MUCH superficial action-movie violence in this. It's gory, and WHY?

Okay, that's the main stuff, and that makes for a pretty bad book (for me), but there was also:

5. The name-dropping of academia talk. Quantum superposition! Schroedinger's cat! Prisoner's dilemma! Okay, I suffered through a shit ton of game theory exams, papers, books, and lectures, and that was NOT a prisoner's dilemma. Also, Schroedinger meant the cat thing as a joke...
6. Coupled with... a completely unrealistic representation of academia. There's a scene in the book when Genius Physicist wins a Nobel Prize-equivalent. Immediately, he's approached by a company who wants to give him $5 billion (BILLION with a B) to build whatever he wants, so inspired are they by his insights into exotic cosmologies. Alas, we do not live in such a world, we live in a capitalist world, there ain't no market forces that have a spare $5 billion lying around to give to Kip Thorne. I mean, Kip Thorne can write some cool pop physics books about wormholes and time warps, he can advise on Interstellar, but ain't no one gonna pay him $5 billion to build a worm hole. Very sad, I know.

A clever alternative history epic that is very delightful, very dense, and VERY KSR. And I very love KSR, though to be fair YMMV. The book has two big ideas:
1. It imagines a world where ALL Europeans (not just 33%) die off from the bubonic plague.
2. It imagines a world where Tibetan Buddhism is literally true (like I did once! like George Saunders did once!).

I had heard of this book, and Idea #1, long ago, and was always intrigued about how KSR would play it out. I didn't know about Idea #2 until like three months ago, and I was less intrigued by it. My post-read thoughts are: Idea #2 is strangely delightful! Enough to overshadow Idea #1 often!

Plot summary: So this book is LONG. It's DENSE. By design, it covers multiple lifetimes of multiple characters. Or just a handful of characters, if you count the whole reincarnating-souls business. The two main characters are the क (“ka”) and ब (“ba”) characters - YES I WENT THERE, I WENT ALL DEVANAGARI UP IN THIS REVIEW. But when KSR started dropping his gigantic meta explanations of the Book You Have Just Read in the final chapters of the book, and he mentioned the “ka” and “ba”, I was like, “OMG ROBERTO CALASSO'S KA! THE MYSTICISM OF KA!” (I have not actually read Roberto Calasso's book yet.) Anyway, point is, I think KSR is a smart dude and so was very intentional in the consonants he chose for his angry/indignant firebrand “ka” and his salt-o-the-earth, easy-going “ba” protagonists. Also, fun fact: ka is the first letter you learn when learning Hindi! Or the first one I did anyway.

Okay, ANYWAY, so the book opens with a friendly Mongolian warrior, Bold ( ब/ba!), coming down the steppes to find all the Magyar kingdom (Hungarians) dead, many lying ghoulishly dead in the middle of their Budapest square. Bold is horrified and, after wandering down through the Balkans, gets captured by Arab slave traders, where he meets Kyu ( क/ka!), a young African who's been enslaved. They get carted off to China, Kyu is castrated and turned into a palace eunuch, eventually shit hits the fan (hey, this book IS Buddhist).

Bardo intermission 1.

The rest of the book is much of the same structure, as we hop through the centuries, and as the “ka” and “ba” souls are reincarnated again and again: as pirates, as widows, as Sufi mystics, as scientists auguring an Age of Reason in Samarkand, as generals, as samurai, as a tiger (!), and so on. There are a few other reincarnating souls who always pop up too, and this group form the “jati” (caste?! I read it more as a “jodi”/जोड़ी/multi-lifetime pairing). After every lifetime, they all rendezvous in the bardo, where they usually argue and bicker, remembering every past life, lamenting the samsara (cycle of death/rebirth) and vowing to get better.

So this book is fun and imaginative and super smart. It is also marred by imperfections - in other words, it's classic KSR!! Gosh, I love KSR books. Anyway, the smart bits:
- I had a major dharma awakening moment of myself reading this when I was like, omg, reincarnation == living many lives == empathizing with many lives == compassion for all, omg.
- The inevitability of history. Much of the major notes of our history (a world war, an Age of Reason/Enlightenment, colonialism, industrialization, a Karl Marx analog, an Isaac Newton analog) are the same, and feel inevitable.
- The above made me think of how scientific breakthroughs often coincide: as two great minds from a generation, pushing against the same boundary of contemporary scientific knowledge, break through in the same way. Inevitable!
- Most interesting, and heartbreaking, of course, was the NON-destruction of the New World, and the counterfactual of Incas and Haudenosaunee societies surviving, thriving and being powerful playersin a 21st century analog. I read this book over Columbus Day/Indigenous People's Day, and thought a lot about Charles Mann's book during this, and... yeah. It was interesting, and devastating.
- Like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I consider one of the best alt histories of ALL TIME (both real and alt!!!), KSR does a fun/interesting job of weaving in the styles of each alt historical period (Victorian seances, Mughal court intrigues, dadaist post-war cafe culture) into the chapters. This is not AS meta and brilliant as Clarke, but it was there and fun.

Okay, now the dumb/not so great stuff:
- Oh man, the portrayal of Islam was... well, FRAUGHT sometimes. I mean, I just felt a bit uncomfortable when the post-war Islamic states are suffering under huge reparation payments, causing hyper-inflation, and I was like, “oh snap, KSR, do not make Islam the alt history Nazis!” And there's looots of stuff about the veil and poor oppressed Muslim ladies and stuff, and Akbar is portrayed as NOT an enlightened multi-faith tolerant ruler but kinda loose-cannon despot. I dunno. The positive/best notes of Islam are the Sufi mystics, esp. Rumi (a fave of earth mothers such as myself), and even then KSR calls Rumi “Buddhist in all but name”, which - again - fraughtness?
- KSR looooooves angry, indignant ladies. See: Maya from Red Mars, Swan from 2312, that one lady from Aurora. It's like, okay, fine. He likes ladies who are basically walking “if you're not mad, you're not paying attention” bumper stickers. I, personally, find that personality type a LITTLE TIRESOME. And so, the “ka” character - who often shows up as an angry lady - was, ooooof.
- TALKY! KSR also loves intellectual discussions, where characters talk through BIG IDEAS, about capitalism! oppression! history! Basically I imagine these to be KSR's #showerthoughts, which is fine, and mostly interesting, but also sometimes indulgent, and OKAY OKAY WE GET IT WE HAVE NOT YET BEEN SUBLIMATED INTO THE POST-CAPITALIST UTOPIA.
- Yo, I found the “War of the Asuras” chapter - about the “long war”/WW1 analog - oddly lazy!?! That was a major turning point in the book's alt history, and it felt so sloppy?!
- Also, some of the middle bits went VERY INFODUMPY, but I survived.

Overall, not perfect, but generally wonderful.

I, like many people, became aware of this book after the author's viral interview on the American Conservative website. (Too lazy to link, but you can google it up.)

Essentially, this book doesn't add much. The main points are captured in the interview - in fact, even more nuanced points are captured - and he seemed more articulate there. This book is, instead, a so-so written memoir about a dude who has just come out of one of those uplifting, glorious “rags to riches”/”get out of the ghetto” stories: he grew up in a poor and broken home, in a community of poor white Appalachian migrants to Ohio, and managed to break free, move on up through Yale Law School, and he now shops at Whole Foods. He's 31? 32? Like, he just got out.

In a way, this is a standard heart-warmer about education setting you free and the glories of upward social mobility (yay). It's especially striking, though, because it made me confront how much class pervades my life - invisibly, but powerfully. As the author's grandma notes, prejudice against poor white people is accepted in a way that no other bigotry is: it's culturally and politically acceptable to mock and deride the poor white community, and Vance argues that a lot of the marginalization and resentment felt by that community (the marginalization and resentment that feeds the Trump monster) is in turn fed by that. (e.g. Obama's unfortunate comment that these are people who cling to guns and their religion.) There's an easy condescension which, I admit, I've also - almost always, almost instinctively - held. And that bigotry (my own bigotry) manifests itself in the awkwardness I feel when, for example, my Lyft driver says he's a former truck driver, or my airplane neighbor is a hunter from Wyoming. Suddenly, I feel a chasm: oh, this person must be... a Republican. And is probably an ignorant bigot, not enlightened like meeeee. Ah, the irony.

So it's nice that Vance is “bridging that gap” and humanizing a community that has long been vilified, and making this enlightened butthead buddha confront her classism. When Vance uses the Marines as a powerful springboard into a better life, I felt inspired (me! about the military!): they give him structure, discipline, a community. They help him buy a car. A car! This touched me so. I was reminded of what was - for me - the most touching moment in Hillary Clinton's DNC acceptance speech: “More dreams die in the parking lots of banks than anywhere else.” Gah. Hits me right in my economist heart. Financial literacy is important! As are social networks: another thing Vance notes, as he navigates (awkwardly) the Yale ecosystem. It's incredible.

What's even better is that Vance is a Reasonable Republican - and so, as a conservative, he's more likely to see individuals (rather than systems/structures) as the problems and solutions to things. In a world where Trump has hijacked the Republican Party, I've been especially hungry - desperate, even! - for bipartisan debate with nice conservative people. Vance's American Conservative interview is, thus, refreshing and challenging and great: it made this lifelong liberal think, and consider more conservative ideas - and that's good!

Bottom line: So-so writing. Uplifting story. Politically super relevant.

I just heard about Moebius (that is, Jean Giraud) the other day, and have been trying (and failing, it seems!) to get a hold of his actual work since. Dude, EVERYthing on Amazon is like $200+ and out of print. Wtf?

Anyway, this is apparently only written by Moebius, not actually drawn by him. And it's just... meh. A kind of vaguely eroticized cyberpunk tale about a boy with very ripply abs and the ability to fly, some random girl he's keen on, and various evil scientists. Oh yes, and people with black eyes who can self-explode if they think really hard.

This is part 1 of a two-part series, and it's a very slow, simple beginning. Boy can fly. Stuff about exploding people. Boy escapes. Scientists mad. The end.

What in the Lord.

IDEA: Wouldn't it have been awesome if Moebius had drawn a graphic novel based on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles? Yeah.

Nope. No. Life's too short for books that piss me off - TO THE DID-NOT-FINISH DUNGEON WITH THEE.

Okay, first, I thought this book was a totally different thing: I picked this up when I was on a “the oil's gonna run out, we're all gonna die, Dark Ages are comin'!!!!!” apocalypse bender, and was looking for similarly dire Nostradamus-type end times nonfic. This book is, instead, about how we're all so blinded by our contemporary context that we can't know what will survive of our (current) civilization, and how our (current) civilization will be interpreted in ~500 years time. Consider “fine literature”, for example!!

Which is all fine and good and, sure, I agree. Crazy, right! The future, eh? Who knows! Like that hilarious and genius moment in Star Trek IV, when Kirk mentions his favorite 20th century authors (“Ah,” Spock says, “the giants.”). But I guess any future prognostication by someone inevitably reveals that person's core beliefs about society, politics, and human nature, and let's just say I found Klosterman's core beliefs to be, ahem, GROUNDS FOR THE DUNGEON.

Let me, like Abelard, list my misfortunes and why I stopped:
- Klosterman narrates the intro to the audiobook, and finishes it with, “and now - because I like the sound of British women talking - so-and-so, a woman from England, will narrate the rest of the book.” Gag.
- Let's talk about literature! Klosterman notes that the literary criticism zeitgeist these days is embodied in Junot Diaz's belief that, in the future, the Great Authors of our period will NOT be white cis hetero dudes from middle class upbringings yadda yadda. i.e. Klosterman notes that the lit zeitgeist is left-leaning and socially progressive. More news at 11. Klosterman notes that some NYT and Guardian or other “best of” book lists have a PERFECT 50/50 split between male and female authors and doesn't that just undermine the list, ya know? Like, obbbviously they were just ARTIFICIALLY trying to have a statistically representative group of male/female authors, psshhh what nonsense. He's not trying to be offensive or anything (he assures us) and surely the unfairness of affirmative action is less than the unfairness of the patriarchy, but ya know, WHO KNOWS who will be the future's considerations of the 20th century literary giants, because surely it's not 50/50 split, it might be 51/49! For example, maybe it'll be George Saunders? Maybe Jonathan Franzen or Thomas Pynchon or OH WOW I DON'T APPARENTLY KNOW OF ANY FEMALE AUTHORS.

...By this point, we were on thin ice and I was like, ya know, why do I gotta waste my time with a book that makes me feel shitty? Like, I don't always want to have to pick up sword and shield and have to defend the POSSIBILITY that a uterus does not obstruct talent or intelligence... Yes, even the bullshit “devil's advocate” “let's just hypothesize” stuff that some dudes do, where they're like, “I'm not saying I'm sexist but, gosh, political correctness really stifles debate!” The debate about my intelligence, you mean? The one where - if you “lose” - you lost a debate, but - if I “lose” - I lost my right to equality and a fair playing field? As Sandor Clegane would say.

Sigh. Anyway. So, my hackles were now at a fever pitch. And then Klosterman mentions that “Kafka-esque” is used as a synonym for “dream-like fiction” and I was like, NO NO, Kafka-esque is a synonym for modernist, anti-human bureaucracies HAVE YOU EVEN READ ANY OF HIS SHIT. And I threw my earbuds across the room and remembered my rights of a reader and that Audible gives refunds and SO LONG, SUCKERS.

So-so writing about a topic I'm passionate about: Star Trek, specifically The Next Generation, as a utopian model of a post-scarcity world.

The book starts strong, with some chapters on the replicator (as the source of post-scarcity-ness), absence of money (this hilarious scene!), and the Ferengi as ultra-capitalists and paragons of greed. I learned a couple new things: like how that pizza scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was when the writers went all-in with the idea that the 24th century is a post-scarcity, money-less utopia; and how TNG and Deep Space Nine were intentional explorations of that idea.

I think the most interesting chapter was about how a post-scarcity world necessarily leads to a reputation-based currency (this is also explored in my OTHER favorite post-scarcity sci-fi, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), and that a reputation economy kinda has two options: either endless popularity contests, or cold, cruel meritocracy. The latter would necessarily lead to a big lump of mediocre people (hello!) and then a striving few (Starfleet super-people). The author notes the interesting pressures this would have on people who aspire to greatness. When there's no advantages beyond your own talents and things are crystal clear meritocratic, life can be pretty brutal. The advantaged no longer have the illusion that they “made it” on their own hard work; the disadvantaged no longer have the illusion that the only thing holding back their genius is the system. The author talks about the wonderful Lt. Barclay (my favorite TNG character!) and his relatable anxieties, and about the (spoilery) background of Dr. Bashir on Deep Space Nine.

But then... beyond this stuff... there's some chapters about the origins of science fiction (huh?), there's a long digression into economics 101, and then there's a kinda incorrect-feeling description of the ways that robots are going to displace labor now. While I agree with Manu Saadia's general point that increased automation/efficiency leads us to question why we seek full employment, and how the future is here but unequally distributed and we should just have a universal basic income and be done with it. But I feel like Saadia's descriptions of robot job displacement is still only focused on manufacturing jobs. He talks about how this will suck for “random countries like Uganda and Tanzania” (! okay, his writing was kinda tactless :/) where there are huge populations of low-skill workers, but he seems to glaze over the fact that even service economies - like the US and Europe - are going to get screwed by artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars will displace all the Uber drivers; chatbots are replacing customer service representatives; there's a real threat that machine learning will be able to displace even “knowledge work”. This'll eat way up into the middle class.

Anyway, it just felt like a pretty shallow exploration of all these things: Star Trek, economics, and job displacement by robots.

You may ask yourself, Will I enjoy the #Hamiltome if I haven't seen/listened to the Hamilton musical yet? Maybe not so much. But what you should really be asking yourself is: WHY HAVEN'T YOU LISTENED TO THE HAMILTON MUSICAL YET?! That's a better question. Seriously, why?

So, like the many other people around the Internet and America, my life was recently eaten by a frenzy of Hamilmania. As Colbert relates, I went through the three stages of: (1) oh, this is pretty clever/catchy, (2) oh, this is quite profound and important, to (3) oh my God, we're covering enormous ground here, I think we just broke culture, oh the salt of my tears. I think I've listened to the soundtrack 20 times now? Who knows. My Last.fm feed is outta control. (Seriously, I am NOOOON-STOP! Hamilreffavorite Hamilsong)

I will try to stick to the tome, and not the musical (though that will be hard): This is basically a giant, craftsy coffee table book that is part verified Genius annotations (see what I did there? cuz Lin Manuel Miranda is a verified genius now? EH?), part meta-joke (it's built like a Ye Olde Booke), part documentation of this weird vortex of cultural power. Anyway. It's the full libretto, interwoven with short chapters focusing on different aspects of the show: the thinking behind the choreography, lights; how the show came into fruition; sweet spotlights on some of the actors; etc. And some pretty pictures, pretty fonts and scratchy paper.

What the #Hamiltome makes clear - which listening to the cast album and watching the actual show (those few, those happy few) only begin to do - is how incredibly rich and layered this entire thing is. Yo, this shit has depths within depths within depths. It's mind-boggling. Like, even on my fifteenth listen, I would find new clever turns of phrase, new readings of certain words (e.g. the moment I realized the show-length double entendre of “not throwing away my shot” being about both seizing opportunities, and firing in the air during duels - oooooh maaaaah gaaaad). In a way, that's just “standard” lyrical genius that you can find in good, top-quality verse of any kind: I've had similar repeat-listen mind-expanding awe when listening to Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, or Kanye. But the one thing I wouldn't have realized - and the book highlights - was the subtle thoughtfulness in the staging, blocking, choreography. Like, Aaron Burr moves in straight lines and Hamilton moves in arcs, because Burr sees limits and Hamilton doesn't! GENIUS, THEY'RE ALL GENIUSES BACK THERE. The book highlights sweet lyrical moments I (still) had been missing - the triple rhymes and references woven through every line - and it pulls together all the thinkpieces that this show provokes: about what it means to have colorblind casting, about its weird nexus point of Sondheim and Kanye and patriotism?!

Oh yeah, and I should mention, as with Act 2 of the show, I cried through several chapters in this book: the chapter on the high school kids who get to see the show and connect with history; the chapter about Anthony Ramos (who is wonderful on the cast album); the chapter, obviously, about Philip Hamilton's death and the final duel. Aaaaah. So good. So sad. So all-encompassing!

Fabulous.

Okay, things are a little going off the rails in this one; I admit that. It's a little bit all over the place, and the pacing stutters and stumbles. They break the fourth wall repeatedly, and it starts to feel indulgent, rather than clever.

But - overall! - this still remains such a smart, fun, and funny exploration of human sexuality and relationships, and one of the best comix out there right now; just like volume 2 featured the denuding of poor Jon's libido due to mental health issues, volume 3 features compassionate, authentic portrayals of a woman realizing she's asexual and a man's self-consciously “vanilla” preferences. It's not all kink! Yo, and if there's one thing we all learned from Alfred Kinsey (or, the movie anyway...) was how much much more diverse and heterogenous sexuality is than we all realize; which makes sense, given sexuality is an internal biological something-or-other that is often “performed” (e.g. “oh isn't he hot”, Cosmo magazine sex tips, sex ed classes, movie scenes) and often moralized over. In fact, there's a wonderful lecture scene in this volume that talks a lot about sexual morality as a direct tool of the patriarchy (e.g. “hysteria” was removed from the DSM in the 1990s, stuff like that); this reminded me of that great documentary, Orgasm Inc., highly recommend!

Oh shit. Placing this review here, even though I haven't read the book, to remind myself that Andrew Gelman thinks it's baloney and has blogged about it. Eeeeeek

A wordless, tactile picture book about Flora, a human girl, and two male peacocks who get real jealous of her attentions. It has flaps, but it's intended for older (3+ year old, I'd guess?) readers. You be the judge of your kid's fine motor skills. My kid asks me to “read” it to them at bedtime, which is just us silently turning the pages. Sometimes discussing the inner turmoil of those insecure peacocks. Peacocks: relax, my man.

Honestly, I enjoyed this at a 5-star level, but I'm trying to avoid hyperbole here.

A scathing memoir by an old school journalist trying to make it in the brave new world of young tech startups, this book was a hoot. The book is divided into three sections: first, after Lyons is laid off from his old boys Newsweek job, he joins a broey Boston tech startup, HubSpot, and is variously amused and horrified by the Millennial antics there. Second, Lyons explores the economics of what he believes is the second tech bubble (this was my favorite section by far). Third, Lyons describes the Kafkaesque corporate bullying that can happen when one is, ahem, “managed out”.

I picked this up after hearing a talk by Lyons which variously impressed and amused me - even if we could argue about whether tech is in a speculatory bubble right now, I think we can all agree that the CULTURE of the tech industry deserves to be popped. I would shelve this book right next to Brotopia, in that both offer painfully astute insights into how tech - dominated, for the last ~15 years, by 20something white dudes and fashioning itself a “brave new world” that “disrupts the future” - is actually just replicating a lot of old social hierarchies, coupled with fierce agism. Lyons is scorching in this regard: he calls HubSpot's “kooky office culture” an “adult kindergarten”, and ceaselessly (and hilariously) mocks the coddling perks for 20somethings. He also notes, horrifyingly, how alienated he is made to feel because he, for example, would rather go home to the wife and kids than do beer bongs with the bros on Friday night. He constantly notes how “lily white”, “pure as driven snow” white the whole company is, and the incredible chasms between the values it preaches (radical transparency, e.g.) and what it actually practices (dystopian “disappearing” of people - e.g. employees who are suddenly fired are rebranded as having “graduated for their next awesome adventure”).

That the tech industry has - on average - huge problems with age, sex/gender, and race is well-known. That many companies's cultures are frozen-in-time replications of an extended adolescence - frat houses with a paycheck - is also well-known. For the most part, I enjoyed Lyons's seemingly accurate take-down of what seems to be an extreme case of a general trend. I've worked at tech startups that had some of these Millennial-minded perks (free beer on tap, e.g.) but also were a little more enlightened (our meeting rooms were all named after prominent women in computer science, aww). I do think this book is worthwhile reading for people that work in these industries, if only to show what NOT to do. Indeed - in a way - the speculation and money washing around the tech industry means that a big spotlight is on their culture; I would LOVE to see similarly scathing satires written about, e.g., academia and the development industry (The Idealist is the only one I can think of). No industry is immune from madness of one type or another; we are all in our little cultural tribes in that regard, and Lyons - coming from (what I imagine and what he sorta describes) as the cigar-chomping, dick-measuring, self-congratulatory bombastic cynicism of old school journalism - is a big fish out of water in the “omg that's awesome!!!” culture of Millennial corporatism.

The second section of the book - when Lyons jokes about trying to awaken some of these young people, via a Norma Rae-style inspiring pro-labor speech, to the way many of these “perks” are just repackaged ways for the company to skimp on its workers (e.g. unlimited PTO being one) - is, in my mind, the best. I LOOOVE labor economics, and I think the tech industry is particularly fascinating in this regard. As I said in my Brotopia review, and as Harvard economist Claudia Goldin says in that one paper, tech has the potential to dismantle a lot of artificial, arbitrarily-imposed constraints to work - it could be really liberating, from a labor perspective. This opportunity and potential is coupled with huge market forces (which Lyons argues are largely speculative and based on hot air) that, instead, perpetuate old power dynamics and exacerbate inequality. Lyons notes that the second tech bubble's motto is all about “exit strategies” - grow a company very fast, never turn a profit, do an IPO and cash out. This only benefits founders and VC funders. Young workers are cheaper and easier to exploit: free beer takes the place of pensions; “tours of duty” take the place of mutual loyalty. “Passion” and “hackathons” gain prestige; meaning people see glory in working, essentially, unpaid overtime.

The third section is Lyons recounting, well, adult bullying - as HubSpot decides it needs to get rid of him, and engages in the frankly cowardly act of “managing him out”; making his life so miserable that he quits, or hunting for small errors and blowing them out of proportion. This is the least interesting part of the book. I mean, it sucks for Lyons - and toxic workplaces definitely suck - but I don't believe they're special to the tech industry. And so this section just feels like a long personal beef, a rant by Lyons. I felt sorry for him, but was also less interested. There IS, however, an unexpected “payoff” to this since - once Lyons quits and announces he's planning to write a book about his experiences - HubSpot apparently went from being “bozos” to being “monsters” by attempting to hack, extort, and break into (!) Lyon's house (!!). I found this INSANE. It seemed like an insanely disproportionate response to what is essentially just a catty, snarky book painting them as annoying at best, incompetent at worst. But not EEEEVIL. So that was a surprising turnaround. But maybe, in the age where fake news isn't just Facebook's problem - it's its solution, this shouldn't be so surprising.

Anyway, a lot of fun, some horror, many amaze. Recommended.

Oh, glorious! Read this on the recommendation of a wonderful PBS Idea Channel episode about it. And what?! Mainstream comics corporations like Marvel and DC have actually, finally updated their superheroes?! To people that aren't ponderous caricatures of hyper-Aryan masculinity!?

Honestly, I never felt like the superhero comic genre would ever be for me: it seems so incredibly remote from anything I cared about, it still carried so many ridiculous vestiges of its 1940s origins. It was boring, and took itself incredibly seriously, and, yes, was mostly aimed at young white dudes.

But when - in the first few pages of this comic - our protagonist, the Pakistani-American Kamala, rejoices in her Avengers fanfic getting 100+ upvotes on the fanfic site, I was hooked. What?! A comic that's aware of actual geek culture (not the Comic Book Guy stereotype, which is a bit outdated and also a specific subset of geek culture anyway). A comic that was humorous and layered and featured a brown girl superhero? That featured a realistic, bumbling, complex family? That ends with her shaking a giant, enlarged fist at the villainy of the world?! CAN I LOVE THIS MORE? No, I cannot.

And I can't recommend this highly enough. Very much looking forward to the next issues.

Maaamma mia. MAAAAMMA MIA. I've got chills! OOOH. OH MAN, I GOT CHILLS. OHHH MANNNN.

So I had super low expectations for this book - I assumed it was going to be another disappointing mainstream sf book like American War or Underground Airlines or Dark Matter. BUT NO. About 25% of the way in, I was like, “huh. this this pretty good, these characters are really well drawn, and that's so funny and true about OKCupid”. At 40%, I was like, “hm, maybe this is pretty good, but is there any sf in this?” At 50%, I was SUDDENLY IN TEARS and getting chills from one of the most horrifying, chilling descriptions of a tragedy I've ever read. The second half of the book, when I realized the Science Fiction had occurred and WAS OCCURRING, I was riveted. And the ending! THE ENDING! MAMMA MIA. MAAAAMMA MIA.

Basically Dexter Palmer has done something that is soooooo difficult, and he did it - MWAH - with pizzazz! I doff my hat to him. I bow down. WOW. He's (1) world-built an amazingly precise, biting near future America akin to a good Black Mirror episode, (2) peopled it with tangibly real people, who frustrate you and amuse you and feel like the 3D people from your daily life, and (3) structured his plot like one of those Japanese secret puzzle boxes that shimmy and wiggle to reveal hidden chambers, for a story that (4) makes smart (even new!) philosophical points about that most tired of sf topics: time travel! I was ENTHRALLED. I was AMAZED. I was like, DAMN.

Okay. So I don't want to spoil anything, because I SO admired the deftness with which Palmer told his story: it was elliptical, it was smart, and he would deliver certain scenes (that 50% tragedy, ho shittt) with such great force just by virtue of how he hints and elides them earlier. But the main story is about a couple - Rebecca and Phillip - who met on an online dating site (basically OKCupid) and got married. Rebecca is a bit shipwrecked by the Great Recession, while Phillip is a passionate, remote physicist with lots of potential. In fact, he works on a TIME TRAVEL BOX. When we meet them, they've been married for a few years, it's not a great marriage, and there was some tragedy in their past - they had a son, Shaun, and it's apparent that he died.

AND THAT IS ALL I WILL SAY ABOUT THAT.

Guh. So time travel stories always have the usual concerns about paradoxes and regret and fate. And this book certainly has that in spades. There are fun, well-cited discussions between Rebecca's Unitarian minister dad and Philip regarding this. (And omg I just realized now it's a LITERAL Schrödinger's box!! Also I am amazed at Palmer as the superset of all these characters' knowledge - yoooo SO VAST!) But, in addition to that, this book ALSO makes keen, precise observations of social media and an Internet society - he writes about the performative aspect of social media, the pervasiveness of surveillance (and the accompanying security nihilism), the churning of human beings and human relations into Big Data-fueled machine learning algorithms. Everything he says is ON POINT and very true. Again, it's akin to the best of Black Mirror. There's the President, for example, who can appear - at any moment - on all screens, where he individually greets us and delivers a tailored bit of news or propaganda or pep. (This only works, of course, if everyone is always facing a screen, which... well, we are.)

But in addition to these “big topics” of the multiverse and big data eroding our lives and the replacement of eye contact and in-person chat with text mediated by screens - ON TOP OF ALL THAT - Palmer ALSO makes precise points about the sociology of academia and the scientific community (YO THIS FELT SO REAL), and the subtle pervasiveness of racism and sexism, and alcoholism! He does this all effortlessly, it feels like, and it feels natural and human and vulnerable. This is a long-ish book (~500 pages), and I alternatingly felt annoyed by or protective of each of these characters - I'd feel frustrated with Rebecca's alcoholism, only to then feel incredible heart-crushing sympathy a few scenes later, only to then feel annoyed again, and then suddenly awed by her. And the same with the other characters: Philip, Alicia and Carson, Kate, everyone. You're charmed by their vulnerability, you're annoyed by their (very believable) foibles. They felt like PEOPLE. Also, this was one of those books that had me both laugh out loud AND cry, which is like bing bing bing we have a winner.

Oh yes, and one more aspect of delight: I don't think Dexter Palmer codes, but he clearly knows all about the basic ideas, even if the jargon is a bit “off”. In particular, the titular “version control” (which prior to reading, I was like, oh haha does he mean git) - well, YES, he DID MEAN GIT. And when the physicists talked about commenting their code and writing “spaghetti” code, I was like, haha is it python, and YES IT IS PYTHON. This delighted me to no end. ESPECIALLY SINCE THE FATE OF THE MULTIVERSE HANGS ON A SPAGHETTI OF GIT COMMIT HISTORY. HAHAHAHAH That was so wonderful. So gratifying. Here is my favorite tweet about such spaghettis. I already feel panic when my CODE looks like that, if my WORLDLINES looked like that, well.

OH YES, this book is also a bit like Primer (one of the best time travel movies evaaaa) and a bit like The Lathe of Heaven. SO GOOD. MUCH RECOMMEND>>>>

Hmm. I liked the world-buildery of this, and - okay - I am (still) a filthy Orientalist who innately values non-American space-future portrayals, so something about a Himba woman going to some far future space academy - wherein much math is worshipped - WELL, HOW COULD I RESIST? I could not, I did not. And it was glorious; we need more expansive, open, culturally rich portrayals of our human future, not just goddamn Pittsburgh in space for the thousandth time. (I say this as someone who loves Pittsburgh, plz don't yell at me, Mayor Peduto.)

But! The plot was kinda crazy. I agree w/ my pal Jess's review (too lazy to link): the narrative arc is a little crazily shaped. Like, hello, the space jellyfish totally just murdered your crush and - a few days later - we're all chummy friends?! WHAT. Earth jellyfish, by the way, are a huge marine problem, a sign of our Eco End Times. It was hard for me to feel any sympathy towards them. Google it, etc.

Excited to read more by Okorafor!

Poop, or pulp? Feces, or gore? WHICH, dear reader, is the most abundant material in this book?! I think I vote poop. Rotting flesh is a close third.

So this is a madcap (!) romp (!!) through a doomed whaling expedition to the north-ish pole. Aboard our steam/sail/whatever-ship are various disgusting, fecal-smelling, blood-covered ogres and gargoyles - just imagine the very worst of humanity, and then dial it like way down? Up? Anyway, everyone is quite terrible. The novel KIND OF has a hero - Patrick Sumner, a traumatized, opium-addicted veteran of the Siege of Delhi, and (my favorite trope) a frontier doctor. The novel DEFINITELY has a villain, or, like, 3? 4? But the most eye-wateringly evil is Henry Drax, an absolute sociopath and moral vacuum.

Is it weird to say this novel is charming? Because it is?! There's a kind of black (frostbitten...) comedy to it all. They are really awful people. And terrible things happen to them. Even the good things that happen to them are... well, terrible. Like when they find that floating corpse of a half-eaten, rotting whale. Yay, more blubber??!! Ooh, it's all gooey and smells bad. (This author LOVES describing the awful smells and textures of putrefying tissue.)

Economics - and money-making - are important motivators in this. From Sumner's (brief) Delhi flashbacks, to Drax's machinations. Insurance fraud makes a cameo. It's like... a whole thing. Nasty, brutish, and short - and capitalist!

Also also: GREAT book for beefing up your SAT word count. Thank God I read this on my Kobo and thus could long press on words like “gallimaufry”. Also, clearly the author has a mixtape of 19th century sea shanties in mind, because the characters - when they're not shitting themselves, impaling each other, vomiting, drinking, or swearing - are often charmingly whistling some obscure 19th century pop tune.

Laughed, cried. Maybe perfection. Always stuns me with how fun and clever and human it is.

The plot is getting crazy brilliant, with the introduction of some ancient Greek mythology. Jokes are still rad, as is the art. Punk/riot grrrl fashion still strong.

And I love their “women's history” exclamations - “Holy Sister Rosetta Tharpe!”, or, “In the name of Agnodice!” It's like the most awesome women's studies course ever. And it leaves me with such good feelings after every issue, like I need to finally read this.

Well, that was adorable. Found this via the excellently humorous and inventive Nimona webcomic, by the same artist (Noelle Stevenson). Love this stuff. For the first 12-13 years of my life, I wanted to be a cartoonist/animator. Now I can live vicariously through these great artists like Stevenson, Kate Beaton and Fiona Staples, and dreeeam of the funky, sci-fi, fempower graphic novels I'd also write, if I had the time and talent.

LOVE all the scrappy, punk, creative lady characters. LOVE the positive vibes of nature and can-do/DIY spirit. And LOVE the eccentric fantasy stuff (three-eyed wolves, etc). Highly recommended.

Aahahaha. Like Margaret Atwood meets Orange Is the New Black. In your face femrage, clear sardonic wit (those fake ads!), gets you pumped. I didn't know anything about this before reading, so I guess I wasn't over-hyped - I was perfectly neutral. Puts the F-U back into fun.

There's an adorable, “comfort food” quality to this story - much like English pub food (bangers and mash!!!). It's set in (1) near future Oxford, where the university's History Department occasionally uses the Physics Department's (or someone's) time travel machine to go do some front-line research, AND (2) 13th century “height o' the Plague” Oxford countryside as one History student finds herself inadvertently trapped in the past. Adventure!

One nice bonus of awesome time travel books is the amount of research the author puts into them; it's like having historical fiction embedded into a sci-fi tale. Two in one! I'm not a Black Plague historian, but it sounded real/legitimate enough to me. Plus, I wasn't on a fact-finding mission with this (unlike the protagonist). I was just happy to see the poignant psychological realism Willis invested into both sides of the temporal divide. She also punctuated her near future setting with some fun grace notes of spec weirdness: New Hinduism, for example; new slang (“necrotic!”) and so on.

The juxtaposition of a modern plague-like illness felling near future Oxford, right while our heroine watches ye olde Oxfordians drop like flies, was a nice touch too. And it seemed to support Willis' overall meta-thesis: people are people, at any time and place. And we're all scared of getting sick, and time travel machines don't guarantee any invincibility.

Overall, a real page-turner that leaves you feeling satisfying, warm and fuzzy.

Really adorable, as Dr. Sacks is. A totally elliptical book, with many digressions and parenthetical paragraphs, about his totally interesting, totally unexpected (in many ways! for me!) life. For those who don't know, Dr. Sacks writes awesome, sensitive, heartfelt pop neuroscience books about weird brain stuff: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is one classic. Musicophilia. Awakenings (which became a wonderful movie). I saw Dr. Sacks give a talk in 2010, and he confirmed many of my assumptions about him: a natty, fusty, adorable Oxford don-type old British man. I remember he spoke of loving salmon sandwiches and having a morning swim and I was like, OF COURSE YOU DO, you wonderful teddy bear British person.

But if old/current Dr. Sacks conforms to my preconceptions about him now, young Oliver Sacks is - like - what!!! He was a really big, beefy beefcake!? Who was hugely into weightlifting (setting squat and deadlift records on Muscle Beach?!) and motorcycles?! He got addicted to amphetamines?! He's gay!? I had no idea! And then he had a whole slobbish, giant Allen Ginsberg beard period in the 1980s that I also had no idea about and discombobulates my expectations!

I actually found it sort of wonderful and inspiring how disconcertingly varied he is, how he's super-shy and completely socially awkward, loves salmon sandwiches, and SQUATS 600 POUNDS. This book made him seem so completely unique, so adorable. So full of life! And empathy! I can't believe he did so many drugs!? (Well, I guess it was The Sixties.) And his first Amsterdam trip, what!?

OK, I'm not articulating this clearly. He seems like such a wonderful person. This book is wonderful, if not completely straightforward. I guess it's mostly for people who already admire him. But if you don't admire him - then get thee to Awakenings and marvel at your brain, his brain, everybody's brain! And come back and read this.

A comforting novella about comfort food, and immigration. If you're like me, you think the history of 19th Chinese-US immigration is fascinating and full of amazing stories. If you're still like me, you've unfortunately never found the time to investigate this more than superficially. What history books to read? What novels? The big questions.

If you're still being like me, you also ADORE ALL THE CHINATOWNS OF ALL THE CITIES. Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, the mighty San Francisco. These are marvelous neighborhoods to get lost in and, yes, food is a major, MAJOR factor here. I can remember every meal I've had in these places, how fundamentally happy they made me: finding the hole in the wall, ordering something I did't know much about, enjoying it. What a great culinary adventure! Big shout out to Gourmet Dumpling House of Boston, where my heart (and stomach) still remain, waiting for the rest of me to return.

Anyway. Ken Liu's novella (or is it a novelette?) features many of these familiar, comforting feelings: the discovery of amazing (real?) Chinese cooking, the excitement at the new tastes, the stories and the everything. This is all told with post-Civil War Idaho City as a backdrop, mostly through the eyes of a little (white) girl, Lily, befriending one of the local Chinese miners, Logan/Lao Guan, who introduces her to glorious stories (namely about Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war) and glorious food.

The story is fairy tale-esque, in the sense that characters are pretty black-and-white, with the Evil Bigots versus the Noble/Kind Immigrants. Lily is likewise your Standard Little Girl, who mostly goes through the story wide-eyed, in a constant state of WOW.

Which is fine. The context, the textures (THE FOOD), and the threading together of ancient China with pioneer ‘murca is charming and very readable. It was published in GigaNotoSaurus, a sci-fi/fantasy mag, but the speculative elements are very, very light touch.