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The Subject Breaks the Mold
Physician/anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer was remarkably committed to the idea of a preferential option for the poor. While his rock-solid conviction may be easy to summarize, its application is anything but. The context–the culture of those impacted–is historically obscure. The work is logistically ominous and tragically political. And the personal ramifications are a strange mix of awkward, disappointing, and inspiring. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, author Tracy Kidder adapts some conventions of the biography in an attempt to fit it all in.
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Review: The Premonition
There’s been a lots of finger-pointing about the US’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be tough for a layperson to sift through all the different takes on which experts let us down and how they failed. Everything I’ve read from Michael Lewis (one book on early Internet adoption, another about professional sports team management, and the third on Wall Street tomfoolery) is mostly lower-stakes than that. While their subjects aren’t matters of life-and-death, the books all demonstrate a clean style and an aptitude for critical thinking.
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Review: The Will to Battle
The Will to Battle is the third installment of author Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota tetralogy. After reading Too Like the Lightening and Seven Surrenders, I opened it expecting some answers and a bunch of new questions. I got both along with a few surprises.
The narrator is maybe the most compelling challenge. Mycroft Canner’s writing style is by now familiar, which is not to say that it’s easy. It’s formal, emotionally unstable, laden with rich metaphor, and intentionally abstruse when it comes to gender.
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Review: Truman
History is not my strong-suit. Like the stereotypical “STEM” student, I opted out of the humanities whenever possible and doubled down on math. I’ve been trying to balance that out in recent years, though. Thanks to works like All the Sha’s Men and Stamped from the Beginning, I’ve come to recognize Harry S. Truman as a real class act. I’ve wanted to understand him on his own terms, though, especially when it comes to the use of the atomic bomb–a decision which I considered to be the most difficult ever made by a US President 1.
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It's not you. It's the docs.
“It says speechSynthesis.speak returns ‘void.’ What’s ‘void?’”
“It says that? Well…” I tried to think of an answer that was both honest and helpful. I settled on, “some people use the word ‘void’ to mean the absence of a value. For JavaScript code, they really mean undefined.”
Cat, ever focused on the task at hand, took my hand-waving for what it was and continued working on her web application.
But that interaction stuck with me.
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Article Highlights for 2021
Collecting the articles (and videos) that stuck with me this year. It’s disappointingly incoherent, reflecting a somewhat unscrupulous news diet on my part. “American democracy” is not a heading I expected to require at this time last year.
Here’s hoping for a more equitable year in 2022.
American democracy
Denial Is the Heartbeat of America - Kendi challenged my early attempt to internalize the riots The American Abyss - my introduction to Timothy Snyder–a historian whose words I found myself reading all year long.
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Rational Climate Action
Climate change is notoriously difficult to reason about. There’s this enormous threat, and even though we routinely see evidence of its existence, we still struggle to quantify it. Some people say we’re doomed. Others might disagree, but even the most optimistic can’t muster more than “it’s maybe not that bad.”
I got to feeling like the only sure thing is that we need to be scared. That position probably won’t motivate action, it very likely doesn’t inspire logical thought, and it certainly isn’t going to help you appreciate your good fortune in the present.
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Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things
I’m Thinking of Ending Things injects menace where you’d least expect to find it: a road trip to visit your partner’s parents. The aura isn’t so much threatening as it is unsettling, so it’s more likely to intimidate rather than frighten.
When it comes to horror, whatever the medium, I prefer more psychological stuff. From Jacab’s Ladder, to House of Leaves and Silent Hill, I’m consistently drawn toward the threat that refuses to show itself.
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Review: Asterios Polyp
In 1986, David Mazzucchelli drew my favorite superhero story, “Daredevil: Born Again”. He followed that by drawing the “Year One” arc on Batman–another deservedly-famous superhero story. His subsequent projects received less attention (both from the industry and from me), and his pace dwindled as he pursued other interests. He hardly published anything at all throughout the 2000’s.
Then, in 2009, he completed Asterios Polyp, a 300-page graphic novel that he wrote and drew.
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Review: Seven Surrenders
As the second book in the Terra Ignota series, Seven Surrenders picks up right where Too Like the Lightning left off. That’s hardly surprising, as Lightning doesn’t conclude so much as it… halts. This made it really easy to pick up, with the major aspects of the world mostly fleshed out. There’s still plenty of complexity that needs clarification–it’s just easier than starting from square one.
Author Ada Palmer nails down a bunch of details, once again smartly mixing subtle clues with direct explanations from Mycroft Canner to their reader.