Critiques et Commentaires

Choppy writing veering from personal history to technical, the argument for evolutionary genesis by "living together" symbiosis at the cell level is convincing more because it's already largely accepted at the time of this popular account?

Humble academic conversant philosophy, interrogating why we can't settle on a ethics based in removing contamination or suffering or bad things or stripping down to some innocence, especially in realms of consumption or oppression. Points in a collective interconnected liberatory direction, from topics including colonial settling, AIDS and disability and transgender activism, climate and interspecies justice, and that to be human (without overly centering humanity) is to be impure, contingent, and political.

In the face of non-deterministic societal evil and the limits of an individual life or grasp or genius... "When We Cease To Understand The World" encapsulates it well. The format of documentary slipping into fantastical nightmare is fitting and yet weird to assess.

Great memoir of losing a parent as a young adult, and of Korean cuisine's staples and nooks, like a nostalgic meal this is heavy but a rich balance of time spent caring and fearing and collecting and tying back to well before and gathering the family into what comes after.

Searing essays on the problems of physics at the edges of our understanding of the universe, and the problems of physicists and academia struggling to understand its bizarre-from-fresh-perspective and harmful white colonial subjectivity. Some of these essays have stronger bonds between these elements, while others feel importantly wedged in here with necessary perspective but less thematically linked, like a good blog.

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.

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.

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.

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.

moving and growing and flinging us back out from the first's tensions.

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.

Multiply recommended and interested, most recently from my partner. Maybe you'll get to it before me too?

Beautiful poetic interpretation, just enough word choice footnotes to remind you of the underlying ambiguity throughout.