Reading for fun, threads over the years of scifi, history, social movements and justice, farming, philosophy. I actively work to balance out the white male default in what I read, but have a long way to go.
He/they for the praxis.
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The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. …
Classification schemes, as Bowker and Star note, "have the central task of providing access to the past" [and] classification practices also organize selective forgetting.
Here talking about ACT UP but on a strong tack from the prior section's focus on colonial dispossession and indigenous memory.
When, in 1922, thirty-year-old Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, he is sentenced to …
A fast-paced, mind-expanding literary work about scientific discovery, ethics and the unsettled distinction between genius and madness.
Albert Einstein opens …
The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. …
Referenced by both Ada Palmer and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein so here we go.
Honestly, these just roll in unpursued. This from a chapter intro to The Disordered Cosmos.
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir is a 2021 memoir by Michelle Zauner, singer and guitarist of the musical project …
A quirky alien / manhattan mystery, all of the sets and dimly futuristic premises sat well with an amiable lead, but my mystery satisfaction bar wasn't met by the ratcheting plot.
The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so …
A wild collection of short stories rubbing shoulders with each other and The Goon Squad (which I barely remember, but enjoyed) in a near sci-fi future. Tightrope between failing to cohere, falling from believability or originality, and engrossing oddities of character after character, I liked too many of these to complain.
Great whale facts, wild how little we know about most whales. What we do know about the social behavior of humpbacks, bowheads, sperm whales, killer whales, and coastal dolphins (the authors study sperm whales, apropos, but build their argument across all these evenly) makes it clear to likely that social learning that is not environmentally or genetically determined is widespread in many aspects of their lives, and which make the case for preservation of broad populations of whales to maintain cultural diversity.
In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian …
Impressive set of lectures on the societal implications of technology - broadly, from ancient metalworking to sewing machines to electrification to military industrial arms - from a feminist pacifist horizontalist perspective. Franklin highlights ways in which technical choices obscure moving from holistically artisan to hierarchical control, from biological growth and uncertainty to manufacturing's obliviousness to context, and the false claims of liberation or ease from the introduction of new tech which turns to exploitation and makes us dependent on industrial supply and control.
There are no tides more treacherous than those of the heart. —Teek saying
The great …
moving and growing and flinging us back out from the first's tensions.
Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follows Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very …
"Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well …
Wonderfully sharp and lucid climate critique of fiction and global capitalism. Through modern literature's failure to face or grapple with climate change, he weaves the blindspots of the western novel's individual moral narrative, the role of empire in partitioning the world's industrialization growth and infeasibility of replicating western economic exploitation for the colonized masses, and the compartmentalizing of politics to no longer allow any sense of collective or commonweal.
loppear
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I very much enjoyed reading this word, which is part memoir, part a report on a career (so far) of scientific findings related to how trees (and other plants) communicate through fungal networks underground. It was an engaging and enjoyable read.
The only thing is that I wish there was more acknowledgement of the generations of Indigenous knowledges that pointed to the same ideas. Simard notes that in her 20s a friend pointed out to her that "The Coast Salish say .... that under the forest floor, there are fungi that keep the trees connected and strong" (p. 66). And yet most of the book doesn't really connect to this existing knowledge even though she notes that it was there even while she was starting out. The focus is on a Western scientific approach, which is also important. But further recognition, acknowledgement, and talking about the Indigenous knowledge of the …
I very much enjoyed reading this word, which is part memoir, part a report on a career (so far) of scientific findings related to how trees (and other plants) communicate through fungal networks underground. It was an engaging and enjoyable read.
The only thing is that I wish there was more acknowledgement of the generations of Indigenous knowledges that pointed to the same ideas. Simard notes that in her 20s a friend pointed out to her that "The Coast Salish say .... that under the forest floor, there are fungi that keep the trees connected and strong" (p. 66). And yet most of the book doesn't really connect to this existing knowledge even though she notes that it was there even while she was starting out. The focus is on a Western scientific approach, which is also important. But further recognition, acknowledgement, and talking about the Indigenous knowledge of the same phenomena would have been helpful.
The subtitle of the book (which I think may not always be up to the author alone) even says that this is about a "Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," as if this is the first time such a thing has been "discovered."
Other than this significant gap, I do think the book is interesting, well-written, and informative.
