Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and […]
Category: reviews
Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour
Amazon link I started this book more than a month ago, as I mentioned at the end of this post. It’s incredibly dense. I don’t think I could have even started on it without having been trapped on that crowded bus with no other options for a few hours. Even once I got started, it […]
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When I first heard that they were making a movie out of the HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I was horrified. I loved those books. It would not be an exaggeration to say I worshipped them. I had most of the books memorized almost close to verbatim in high school, and could quote chapter and […]
Comedy and drama
While driving into work yesterday, I started thinking about humor for some reason. I guess I was thinking of practical jokes, of the variety that Ashton Kutcher purveys on Punk’d, and why I find such jokes shallow and cruel and not very funny. It seems to me that such jokes are funny because the audience […]
Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg
Amazon link Most of my readers will have heard of Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor who’s a regular contributor to Fresh Air and the New York Times Week in Review. This book is a collection of pieces from those venues, where he muses amusingly about quirks in our language for a few minutes at a […]
Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, by William J. Mitchell
Amazon link I mentioned in this post how I picked up Me++ at the Whitney Museum, and started reading it. Some interesting ideas here. I found out later from Jofish that Mitchell is the current head of the Media Lab at MIT, which explains a lot about the book. There’s nothing particularly innovative about his […]
Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith
Amazon link While we were driving up to Cornell, Jofish recommended this book. I’d read another of Smith’s books, Spares, borrowed from the library, but it made absolutely no impact on me, and I didn’t remember a single detail. But, in the mornings, while waiting for others to wake up, I picked up Only Forward […]
Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse
Amazon link After seeing James Carse speak, I was eager to read his book, which I finally got around to doing on this vacation. It’s a deceptively simple book, with lots of short, simple sentences. But there’s a lot of thought packed into those sentences. I covered his overall gist in that previous post, where […]
Emotional Design, by Donald Norman
Amazon link I go back and forth on my feelings about Donald Norman. I think that his observation of The Design of Everyday Things was a really important insight in understanding how omnipresent the role of design is. I liked his idea of information appliances in The Invisible Computer. But I’ve always been left a […]
Wonderfalls
As I mentioned in my post on Firefly, I also got the DVD set of Wonderfalls in the same Amazon order. And I’ve watched that whole series now as well. My original review actually stands up pretty well even after watching the rest of the unaired episodes, in terms of describing the overall feel of […]
