Critiques et Commentaires

Subtle - a history of early computer use in politics, following a mostly uninteresting and overconfident marketing company - Simulmatics - from '50s campaign analytics and simulation to Vietnam War psychological surveys and counterinsurgency to domestic riot prediction. Wherever she can, LePore tells this history from the perspective of the wives and secretaries of these blustering ad-and-war men, and with an eye to the parallel shadows and overpromises of current technology companies.

A little murder mystery on a space station, always nice (with plenty of sarcasm).

Sharp rant on rejecting conformity and consistency with society or your past self, the wisdom of humanity we too easily revere in ancient and rare men is accessible to each of us by introspection and independent lived experience. Even with the theme's obvious early-US-individualism shortcomings in considering collective or interdependent life, this is a quality call for reset.

Deeply researched biography, following this influential European naturalist doing mostly things you'd expect: heroically adventuring through the Americas, taking the rest of his life to write and influence other scientists and artists and politicians (Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, and John Muir all get space here), and mostly not worrying about money or relationships. And yet this is well told, and the central thesis rings through that Humboldt's realizations and advocacy about the interconnected global phenomenon of life and distribution of species and ecosystems and colonial practices impact on diversity have all dispersed so thoroughly into our world by those who were his fans that we've nearly forgotten Humboldt. A fine hope for us all.

These are reflections at the end of a week, looking towards the end of a life and what we owe to the land and life around us. Fewer of these were excellent, but quiet and deep still.

Enjoyed this summer job coming of age storytelling, my first King in a long time. There's much intentional cliche, with smart perspective, but I felt the constraints of turning this towards mystery and murder dragged at the more central story around how we grow our sense of relationship and friendship after those first crushed crushes.

A moving poem about the summer of 2020 and all the pain and loss and breathing that raises up, with iterative raw illustrations, some of which evoke so much in a ragged shadow or stroke when paired with a phrase or lone word. Would have made a stunning museum installation, I'm not entirely sure how well it works as a 15-minute 300 page hardback.

One of those old-enough books systematically looking at information, technology, and society's structures and making predictions that ring somewhat true and prescient - challenges for intellectual property rights, commodification of knowledge, factory automation and its eventual application to white-collar labor too - and perhaps for being right, it seems like it's not saying much new to us today.

Excellent dialog reflecting on lifetimes pursuing radical education, seeking non-authoritarian ways of developing freedom for students to participate in knowledge production, to be respected as capable humans who bring knowledge and common sense to the classroom. To not be neutral as a teacher, teaching with an objective of structural change through education for all.

Bio of Carver emphasizing his connection to modernizing agricultural practices in the context of deep southern black poverty, and the historical context of land grant colleges, chemical fertilizers and state depts of agriculture, cash crop pressures, and the destructive to soil and humanity farming practices he finds in moving to an academic post at the fall line of Alabama, advocating for manure, compost, and soil improvement with a diversity of crops. A short chapter at the end covers the mythology of Peanuts and Devout Black Scientist that arises as his apparent legacy after his death.

A brief and resounding argument that the male-dominated medical profession is an recent aberration created by violence in consolidating and support of class power. Emphasis on how expert/evidence/professionalization comes at the end of the process - to start, elite doctors were dangerously uninformed in comparison to folk healers. But the latter's propensity to undermine power and support agitation for class and gender equality movements led to systematic persecution.

Still great nostalgic nonsense and sharp satire about this absurd world.

Random slice of 1998 guerilla urban gardening, essays calling for a Lower East Side Autonomous Zone, reporting on specific garden sites histories and fight back against Giuliani's redevelopment auctions, and broader takes on biotech, horticulture vs agriculture, and more from NYC and Madison WI. Eerily relevant in strange and mixed ways, the editor is concretely-and-earthly dismissive of a friend who "recently told me he was devoting himself to fighting fascism on the internet".

Two bizarre alien-stories-who-are-people meet in a challenge of caring over identity and belonging, with mostly-comic reminders of Leckie's prior exploration of this space as mediators and judges at the sidelines of a serious gulf.

A non-revolutionary non-authoritarian non-technocratic vision for computer-facilitated democratic socialist economic feedback and simulation in Allende's Chile. Follows threads (through archived correspondence and interviews with many key people) of Chilean officials enthusiasm for non-Soviet non-capitalist forms of state control, making do with limited computing and communication capacity, and the socialist shift in UK consultant Stafford Beer's flavor of Cybernetics - organisms adapting to changing environment, structural relational change not internal behavioral change, revolution though devolution of power. Within the narrow and dry subject, the author does an excellent job connecting and contextualizing relations to global power dynamics, gender dynamics, and the waxing and waning of technological solutions in political turmoil.