For the next while, I am not going to write and post book reviews. I have written at least a little bit about at least a subset of the books I’ve read, at some points just for my own eyes and at others for public consumption in different ways, for more than 25 years. For …
There is practically an entire industry devoted to churning out think-pieces, studies, books, and articles expressing concern about the impacts of social media and the broader spectrum of information technology of which it is a part on our lives and our world. It comes in lots of flavours, many neither convincing nor useful, some downright …
A collection of pieces by organizers and scholars who have been part of the movement in Canada in the last two years to defund the police and work towards police and prison abolition. I interviewed one of the editors and one of the contributors recently, so check that out for more details: https://mediacoop.ca/node/119048. I won’t …
YA contemporary. A young woman at the end of high school has spent every spare moment over the last few years making a podcast called *Artists in Love* with her boyfriend, with whom she is in one of those ‘perfect couple’ high school relationships. Except he breaks up with her and announces he’s leaving town …
An anti-productivity book, of sorts. In most books that are either directly or indirectly about how we individually make use of our time, the goal is to enable the reader to do more. Now, I don’t actually often read that sort of book, at least in its most blatant neoliberal-cult-of-productivity manifestation. But I have been …
Science fiction. Starts fifteen minutes into the future and extends for several decades, focusing on the climate crisis at a global scale. Begins with a powerful chapter describing in an embodied way one character’s experience of a devastating heat wave that ultimately kills 20 million people – made all the more gripping and disturbing by …
Movement history. An interview-based and archival history of the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States in the late 1960s. It particularly focuses on the ways in which women’s liberation came out of the experiences of women active in the civil rights movement and in the new left student movement earlier in …
Literary fiction. Two interspersed narratives set in London, England, one in the Victorian era and one in the present day, each following an employee of the same encyclopedic dictionary. In the older time period, it is a bustling concern, with dozens of lexicographers filling a massive building, working slowly towards the hoped-for publication. That blessed …
Scholarly. About habit – what it is, the role it plays in lives and worlds, and how it relates to struggles for social transformation. (Not, btw, the philosophy book I alluded to feeling resistant to reading in a post last week…I had already finished this by that point!) Draws on US pragmatist philosophers, more recent …
Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to politics. He has published a bunch of scholarly work along these lines too, but this …