Years ago, a cooking blog got me thinking about reverse-engineering recipes. I thought I could build an application for that. For those of us privileged enough to contribute, open source software is an endless time sync. I kept putting off the idea for some other shiny pet project–usually JSHint. With my work on JSHint finally maybe wrapping up, and with a whole lot of extra time due to coronavirus-inspired lifestyle changes, I finally set out to build the thing in March.

This book’s subtitle is, “A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb” and it really is just that. If you’re looking to learn about the ramifications of the detonation, the dispersal of the technology, or the moral struggles of the people involved, you can skip this one. Author Jonathan Fetter-Vorm focuses almost entirely on the construction of the thing, and I guess that’s a valid focus. I was expecting more, though.

Although it’s set hundreds of years in the future, Hyperion spends very little time trying to catch you up about how society has changed in the time between today and the 29th century. That’s a specific kind of challenging: as a reader, you’re forced to sit with ambiguity and slowly build context based on inference. The effect is compounded in Hyperion because it’s a frame story with a rotating cast of narrators: the perspective (along with the assumptions about what the reader knows) is constantly shifting.

The Joker is rehabilitated, but Batman’s suspicious. Sound familiar? Two-Face went through this in the 80’s, and Poison Ivy got the same treatment in the 90’s. The seemingly-tired plot made me suspicious of author/artist Sean Murphy from the get-go. The opening pages didn’t make me feel any better. Murphy sets up a world where Batman is brutal and irrational. That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s not that I can’t tolerate flaws–really, the best stories are the ones that explore the man’s shortcomings.

I’m no scholar of history. Almost all of my reading of primary sources occurred in high school. This made reading Fighting Fascism both a challenge and a pleasure. On the one hand, I was missing a lot of context. Author Clara Zetkin’s words are full of references to contemporary people and movements, and try as it might, this tiny collection doesn’t offer nearly enough background to elucidate it all. If I was more rigorous, I would have stopped and researched each person, organization, and treaty as they were mentioned.

The Life You Can Save is a book about the philosophy known as “effective altruism.” It’s tough to critique the book without also discussing the philosophy, especially for someone (like me) who was previously unfamiliar with either. That’s why this book review is also a reflection on a moral philosophy. Author Peter Singer wastes no time introducing that philosophy. Section one (“THE ARGUMENT”), chapter 1 (“Saving a Child”) opens with a hypothetical situation which demonstrates the thesis.

Dear America is listed as a “Personal Memoir,” but it’d be more than a little ironic to get caught up on this book’s formal classification. Really, Vargas suggests a much more apt description in the book’s subtitle: “Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.” The book is made up of tiny chapters whose subject matter and tone vary from page to page. Sometimes defensive, sometimes grateful, sometimes indignant, Vargas steps through a range of emotions that, while somewhat lacking in coherence, reinforce his experience growing up full of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Edward Snowden’s always been an outlaw to me. That’s true for most people who know the name since it was only through whistleblowing that he became a public figure. While I’m among those who are grateful for his actions, I knew very little about the guy before reading Permanent Record. My ignorance was probably greater than most: I hadn’t read, heard, or seen anything about Snowden himself. My understanding of the events was limited to the subject of the disclosures–the NSA, XKeyscore, PRISM, etc.

Polarization in American politics seems to be splitting the country apart. The election of Donald Trump was a wake-up call for me (and many others, I’m sure), and with the way the impeachment process has been going, it doesn’t seem to be getting better. For me, the question has been: what can we do individually and collectively to improve faith and patience in American politics? My personal (read: woefully uninformed) perspective is that this has to do with a decline in social capital maintained by most American’s.

Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang is a collection of short stories. The entries were published independently over the course of ten years, and as you might expect, there’s very little uniting them. From ancient Mesopotamia in “Tower of Babylon,” to the Victorian-era European city in “Seventy-Two Letters,” to the not-so-distant future of “Understand,” there’s no common setting or atmosphere. The narrative style varies, too: there’s traditional first-person (“Story of Your Life”) and third-person (“Division by Zero”) and also more unique non-fiction forms (like the transcript of a fictional documentary in “Liking What You See” and even an academic white paper in “The Evolution of Human Science”).