Angela Ambroz

Wow, REALLY resonated with so much in this. Sure, it's got some padding and fluff. I didn't read every single staff eng interview in the appendix (though I may revisit - especially the Tech Leads). But I got a LOT out of this book. It kinda met me exactly where I was at.

In brief: this is one of those capitalism self-help books, but aimed at a very specific audience - folks working in (large-ish) tech companies, who are (1) engineers or eng adjacent (CRAFTSPEOPLE, I like to say), and (2) at or near a “Staff” level title. I'm a Staff Data Scientist, which was a title I yearned for for many years (!), mostly because I want to keep advancing along the “IC” (individual contributor - aka, CRAFTSPERSON) path, and tech is an industry that allows me that (as opposed to eventually switching into managing people). But now, indeed, I face the question: does Staff DS mean... my stats is more fancy? Or I tell people to do fancy stats? Or... what, exactly?

Hence this book. I especially enjoyed (1) the highlighting of many many women (yaaaa boiiii), and (2) the very practical discussions of career, life spans, and archetypes, and (3) the occasional cheek. I've now been also recommending this book to everyone who'll listen, and have also felt WAY more empowered (and inspired) at work - honestly, just removing that confusion and anxiety around “but what am I supposed to be doing?!” really helped.

SUPER up my alley. Like, if you read James Scott and if you were thrilled - THRILLED, I say! - at how last names evolved such that the state could more easily tax its citizens, well, this is a book like that. Also! If you like David Macauley and like to nerd out about infrastructure and underlying systems, yes, this is more of that. (And David Macauley gives a blurb for this book.)

I loved the internet section. I was reminded of a friend who noted that the size of the NASA space shuttle is a function of the size of horse carriages cuz of the underlying infrastructural grooves of horse butt -> width of horse carriage -> width of road -> width of truck to haul space gear. Which is amusing.

I loved the electricity section too. I am ALL about electricity markets and electrification right now. Boy. I have learned a lot about my local utility, ha.

I actually didn't care for the water section. That one left me with more questions than answers. It felt too skimmy (heh).

Still, there are not enough books like this in the world! Just like, as I shouted in 2017, wtaf is wifi!?!?!? (And I now have a decent grasp of radiowaves and such, hooray.) So too am I still like, BUT what is electricity??!?!?! And so on.

I think Charles Mann said something recently about how we need to be educating the youth about these practical systems - that, right now, in this (post-)modern life, we live so abstracted away from the actual tools for survival and modernity (light, energy, water, internet).

Four short stories by Cory Doctorow.

Unauthorized Bread (4 stars)
This one was the most fun to read, harkening back to like early/innocent/fun Cory Doctorow: namely, refugee hacker girl figures out how to un-brick her Corporate Toaster (that only allows “authorized” bread from authorized bakers to be toasted). She liberates her other appliances and those of her similarly poor neighbors.

Fun, empowering, social critiquing, progressive. This made me want to hack my own appliances.

Model Minority (1 star)
Ooh, this one felt clunky and painful. Briefly: a Superman parody where Superman decides to intervene in the attempted murder of a Black man by some American police officers. This, obviously, triggers all sorts of disasters - with the story driving home that individual action will never be sufficient to undo the structural racism built into America.

I appreciate that message - and I appreciate that Doctorow's underlying progressivism is always couched in collective action - but this felt, ooooh, so painful to read. First, I just do not connect with midcentury modern comic books. They are an immediate turn-off. Second, the portrayal of race felt so clumsy (if well-meaning). Third, the writing felt kinda lazy - at least, I've read a bunch of protests by Doctorow, and this one felt like a copy+paste?

Radicalized (555555 stars!!!)
Oh wow. The last two stories in this collection BLEW. MY. MIND. They were both incredibly unsettling, fun, clever, and provocative.

In the titular story, we follow a Basic Middle-class White Guy who becomes, ahem, radicalized in his rage against the American healthcare system. If your immediate reaction is: well, fair. INDEED?! In the story, his wife is diagnosed with late stage cancer and their insurance refuses to pay for an experimental treatment that offers a slim (but real) chance of survival.

Ayyy. I found the portrayal of parenting, of mundane suburban existence, of rage at healthcare - IT WAS ALL VERY CONVINCING. Which made it particularly unsettling when terrorism enters the chat. Holy shit.

The Masque of the Red Death (5555555 stars as well, V GOOD)
I was pretty mind-blown from the previous story, but saw that people were saying the final story was “the best”. I... kinda agree? Without going into details (since it works better if you come in fairly uninformed), this story is basically a near future take on preppers and how preppering would play out, like, in reality. Honestly, I laughed and laughed. Doctorow makes such obvious points, it's - ugh - chef's kiss. I want to post this as a reply-comment to all those mainstream (NYTimes, New Yorker) concern-troll articles about preppers. Like, it's not just that the rich are building little fortresses... it's that they think this'll give them an advantage? Really, really enjoyable. And hopeful!

SO GOOD.

This is a modern overview of modern waste: recycling, compost, e-waste, toxic waste, NUCLEAR waste, PLASTICS.

Much like tall ships, I apparently really love thinking about trash?? So this book was like semi-composted, plastic-encased catnip for me?? As I was reading, I was like, oh yeah, I wrote my master's thesis on the international dumping of hazardous waste. Oh yeah, I spent 5 years working at a circular economy software company. It's funny to be passionate about something without realizing you're actually really passionate about it. Now I am aware! I LOVE THINKING ABOUT TRASH, PEOPLE.

I highlighted maybe 50%-60% of it, and will need to go through all my highlights and dive deeper on soooo many things. The tldr is: WE SHOULD REALLY BE CONSUMING LESS. What do they say? There is no ethical consumption/labor/vibes in capitalism? Well, there is definitely no ethical waste handling solution either - they all basically suck. Compost is a bit less terrible. Recycling paper seemed sad but basically decent? Plastic recycling is a total myth. The recycling symbol and that number on the bottom are straight out lies. Americans are the worst consumers on the planet - can confirm, I saw how my own behaviors got nudged into a consumerist hamster wheel and all I ended up with is a pile of clutter. Anyway, we are 1000% hurtling towards Wall-E world. Sometimes I am just shocked at the way we live now (we would need 4-5 Earths to maintain an average American lifestyle), in passive denial about the wall of ecological reality that is bound to hit us this century. The Pacific plastic garbage patch!?!?! WAHT?!! Every time I hear about it, I want to scream.

Anyway. Great. GREAT. Do you love trash policy? Join me!

An inflamed cri de coeur about the ways the US has been fucked from the beginning. Pardon my French, ho ho.

But srs. Elie Mystal is a legal scholar and plain Englishifier of the law, akin to (wonderful) Emily Bazelon. I felt like I was attending an undergrad course on US law and history, as taught by the most charismatic prof on campus. This was a fun romp (!?) about white supremacy, as embedded in the Constitution. What I appreciated deeply is Mystal's central thesis: so-called “Originalists” - i.e. lawyers and judges like Antonin Scalia who purport to divine the Constitutional authors' “original intent” when writing the document, in order to apply that intent to our modern legal issues - ignore one central (AND OBVIOUS) problem: that the original Constitutional authors were....... uhh, 18th century slave-holding white men who didn't consider women or non-white people PEOPLE?? So maybe it doesn't matter at all what they “intended” and we should happily trash that?

That's the start and end of the book. And I am HERE. FOR. IT. The middle is a deep dive into each of the Constitutional amendments, and why they are, basically, imperfect bandaids applied to the original document in an effort to keep guiding it back to its nobler ideals. Also: in the face of changing times! E.g. maybe enslaving a big portion of the population is a bad idea? Maybe women could have the right to vote too?

I really loved and appreciated Mystal's deep dives here, because I learned a lot and feel - as he promised - way more empowered to just be like “nope, that's stupid” when a right-wing originalist argument is made. I think treating these founding documents with irreverence and a critical eye is, indeed, VERY HEALTHY, and the cultural practice of worshipping them is weird and a shield for racism. Much like how when I meet a libertarian, I'm like, “but haz you heard of externalities and market design????? Because that comes up in econ 102...”

Disappointing. Ostensibly a sf story about a 1990s kid being transported to the 2100s. Except the 2100s are... just like any progressive city in the 2020s. I read science fiction to stimulate my imagination, to imagine how things could be. I especially enjoy, indeed, utopian and progressive visions. But this was just - not imaginative at all? And kinda self-congratulatory? That said, many stars for the excellent art.

Sweet, slice of life about a big family (7 kids) in the middle of Maryland. Fictional Maryland, maybe? Told from the perspective of the oldest daughter. Mostly about how she wants her own room, and wants to make art. The mom is a coder?! The dad is a stay at home novelist. Tbh I was kinda charmed by the whole thing.

Slice of life memoir about growing up in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Really sweet. Would be great for middle schoolers, but I - a grown-ass adult - loved it too.

Terribly sad, wide-scope memoir about growing up black in America of the 80s, 90, post-9/11, Obama, Trump, etc. I want to read this guy's newspaper comics now, they looked excellent.

Made me think a LOT about science communication, and how challenging it is to convey the scientific method and scientific norms and just epistemological uncertainty, man, to the - ahem - unwashed masses.

Also, it's the same bloviating Cold War physicist assholes working for Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Pollution. It's the same like 5 guys! Over and over and over!! Just screwing things up, seeding these evil memes into the collective consciousness about “climate change debate”. Maddening!

Also also, I love history of science and have just discovered Naomi Oreskes so I am PUMPED.

Really interesting and unique novel (as is typical for Cory Doctorow, lol).

Preface/context: I've been an uber fan of Cory's for 15+ years. I feel I should mention this. I just checked and it seems I've read 7 of his books? I've seen 3 of his talks in-person, iirc. He's just great imo.

This book: So this is a novel following a young tech person, Masha, as she has, dare I say, a hacktivist's awakening. Many of Cory's books circle around hacktivism - that special, sparkly vortex of progressive activism and deep cut tech nerdery. This book is technically the third in a trilogy - after Little Brother (masterful) and Homeland (tbh I forgot most of this but prob enjoyed it decently well) - an alt present where a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge in SF leads to a huge gov crackdown and curtailing of individual liberties. In the first two books, we followed Marcus Yallow, a young hacker nerd type, as he taught us (the reader) about Tor and Linux and op sec. Wonderful. In those books, I vaguely remember, Masha was something of a femme fatale villain?

Anyway, now we hear it all from Masha's side and - honestly - it was so much more interesting? First, Cory leans into feminism and privilege HARD - he made several comments, via Masha, about the broey power structures of tech, about male/white privilege in general, and I just appreciated that so much. I have been reflecting on Cory lately (in a non-creepy way, I promise) and I've realized that he's actually quite a special unicorn/snowflake, because he's a DEEEEP cut nerd (he presents at Defcon, e.g.) but he's also extremely pro-social and actually very kind? I don't know him personally but I remember, at one talk, when a mentally ill person started to hog the microphone during the Q&A session. Cory navigated that interaction with so much compassion and grace (and respect!) that, well, I remember it many years later!

Anyway, all that to say, Cory's heart is made of gold and his books are unanimously Good Values. So what I found really interesting about THIS book, in particular, that it was kind of like the “Judas's journey”. That is, the journey from being a pragmatist, someone just trying to get by in the world, to an idealist, someone trying to change it. Masha goes through a real dark night of the soul - she's tugged relentlessly by her mental “compartments” between an idealist self and a just-wanna-pay-the-bills-and-stay-safe self. Her day job is supplying all the spy tech to all those shady gov contractors; all that awful surveillance tech, etc. She's paid handsomely and lives a weird, Green Zone-type life. This book is about that tension - between living your ideals and living for the paycheck (which, again, NO SHADE on that - as someone said, there is no ethical labor in a capitalist system). For anyone that does, indeed, have internal debates about the value of idealistic activism vs. pragmatic “be the change from the inside” - this was a great story about that. And, again, pretty compassionate from all angles! (Well, except for Masha's scary monster bosses - they were pretty bad.)

Oh, and for my future reference: the Mashapedia (not by me)

Phenomenal. Brutal! A memoir of a Millennial Indian-American woman as she reflects on her upbringing in the context of the Indian immigrant community in the US.

I was honestly in awe at the author's ability to be insightful on both the microcosm of her childhood situation (which was tbh brutal - with mental illness tearing at the fabric of everything) and the macrocosm of sociological/political narratives around immigration, Indianness, and American “meritocracy”.

Very nice, feel-good memoir about a guy from southeast DC growing up through the crack epidemic and then finding his calling in a naturalist's life: conservation and falconry. I envied the serenity and connection he felt with those birds! Really, really lovely.

Great resource! This could make a good weekend project for a hacker girls club, or a good badge for a scout meetup, or whatever. Probable best ages would be ~middle schoolers?

Basically:
- 4 very brief chapters, each with an intro of an illustrious woman of technology + coupled with a small-scale hands-on application of that woman's work

Naturally Ada Lovelace shows up - she is EVERYWHERE in “women in tech” world - so I appreciated that I hadn't heard of the other 3. And I especially appreciated the DEEP CUT CRAZINESS of Hildegard von Bingen, omg THAT WAS A WACKY BIO. She was locked in a cell for 30+ years with another nun cuz... cuz it was the 11th century and that seemed like a good idea???? She had visions and sent much unsolicited advice via mail to the leaders of her time????? The project for her chapter was “make up a secret language” but HAAAAHA why not “lock yourself in your room and hallucinate”?! Or actually why not “write your political representatives”, hey that's a good one.

Maria Telkes was a fun one too - and after the Katalin Kariko bio, I am feeling very warm towards Hungarian women scientists. Her chapter's project was also EXCELLENT: a solar-powered desalination thingie. Since I was and am still on my eco-warrior, Ministry for the Future high, that felt very apropos (and also very doable).

Eek. Rarely in my life has a book fired me up so completely. I spent the last few weeks OBSESSED with this book, and have already made changes to my lifestyle. My family is pretty sick of it, HA.

I need a book club about this, but - even more desperately - I need an undergrad semester-long course with full syllabus and citations PLEASE about everything in this book. This + Charles C. Mann and I just want to shout from the rooftops. I will shout from Goodreads instead!!

The book
OK, so this is a beefy, near future sci-fi book about climate change. It basically outlines the rest of the 21st century, ultimately landing on an “optopian” (optimal realistic outcome - as distinct from “utopian”/idealized outcome) 2100. The book is a novel in the most old-man-KSR way (more on KSR below): namely, chapters vary a LOT in style. Exposition is very light. There is a LOT of talk of geological things - as well as technocratic things like economics and government and political action. Characters are fairly thinly-drawn; we spend the most time with Mary Murphy, a diplomat and head of the new UN agency nicknamed “Ministry for the Future”, and Frank May, an American aid worker who almost died in a heat wave. There is occasional eco-terrorism, lots of meetings with central bankers, and ultimately, airships and solar-sailed sailboats.

On the book's effects on me
And OH MY GOD, THOSE SOLAR-SAILED BOATS!!!!

OK, so this book got me - as I said - SUPER fired up. I was about ready to throw my plane tickets in the incinerator, and put solar panels on my entire house and family, and start composting the cat. I was (and am) OBSESSED. [My family did not appreciate.] It helps that my area is undergoing an enormous heat wave at the moment, with heat indexes at 110+ and the local government texting me every day to warn me not to die. It also helps that my gas guzzling, Earth-killing, non-EV vehicle is at the repair shop, so I have been e-biking like a utopian everywhere.

But, srsly, here is my list of behavioral changes (thanks, KSR):
- Downloaded various apps to calculate my carbon footprint (I like Earth Hero right now). Eye-popping numbers.
- Shrieked at the plastic in my home. Bought laundry powder in a cardboard box, for the love of God.
- Threw out my cursed compost bin from 2022 (plz don't ask), picked up a new one. RE-STARTED COMPOSTING.
- Signed up to my local climate action group. ✊
- Re-started my CSA.
- Went to the farmer's market.
- DID NOT buy a bunch of crap I was planning to buy. Oh my LORD, the consumption addiction!
- Made long lists of plans about divesting my personal retirement funds from fossil fuels, investing in green funds, and how to avoid online shopping ALWAYS.
- Researched and had lots of emotional drama about community solar and green bonds and buying carbon offsets. Hand-wringing here. Plz let me know your thoughts.
- Discovered some really great readings at Yale Climate Connections, Grist, and MIT Climate.

On KSR
I do so love KSR. Ever since Ursula Le Guin died (RIP, bless), he is my top living sf author. I have now read 6 of his books, and 2 as did-not-finished, and I enjoyed seeing many of his usual habits and tactics and intelligence in this one. He also has, thankfully, minimized two of his bad habits - the cranky/unlikable/”if you're not angry you're not paying attention” strong female protagonist, and his cranky infodumps. I mean, they're still THERE. Some of those short “I am an electron!” chapters were cringey (not the electron one, actually, I liked that one, but some of the others). But Mary Murphy is blessedly pleasant.

I enjoyed seeing the similarities to The Years of Rice and Salt (ugh, one of my top faves

How disappoint!!

I started this book pretty into it, but things rapidly declined and it was a SLOG for me by the end. This is a kinda magical realist, kinda very very light sci-fi, but mostly mainstream fiction novel about a gen X woman, Adina, who is:
- From Philadelphia
- Weird
- Italian-American (WAHEEYYY BADABING - I can say this because I am also italo-americanaaaa)
- probably asexual
- probably autistic

And, importantly/centrally:
- AN ALIEN, who faxes her observations of humanity's foibles to “her superiors” on some distant planet

So this sounds like it'd be up my alley, but UGH I just found it so horribly TWEE and PRECIOUS and so painfully on-the-nose allllll the time. Like, yes, we all feel alienated sometimes, especially if we were the bottom of the totem pole in middle school high society. And yes, humans are quite silly, and this can be amusing and provoke affection. But! If we're going to be faxing aliens, can we PLEASE not be so incredibly basic in our observations?!! Namely, everything in this book felt like it perpetuated just a very specific, narrow, (American) pov that was completely unsurprising and not-new! For example:
- Rich people are mean
- Blond rich girls in school are mean
- NYC is the best city in the world
- Full of bagels and personality
- Gardening is wholesome
- Dogs are wholesome
- Watching fine cinema is weird but wholesome
- Italians tan!!

Like. All of it was just like, OK, this was what teenage-me thought, but I'm now a bit over it?? Why not challenge my preconceptions a bit! Why NOT, INSTEAD:
- Rich people are nice?!
- The blond mean rich girl has a rich, interior life full of her own suffering?
- NYC is provincial and, how about, PHILLY is the best city in the world?!
- NYC has bagels AND MAYBE BIRYANI? Shall we focus on the biryani!?! What about fufu?!
- Gardening = boring and you get toxoplasmosis from it!
- Fine cinema = boring AND snobby
- Some Italians don't tan! Many Sicilians are redheads! For example!

I'm not saying I even believe in all of the above counter-points, I just WANTED SOMETHING A BIT MORE REFRESHING. A bit more contrary! A bit less on-the-nose and basic! Can we expand our horizons JUST A TINY LITTLE BIT?

Celebrated acquiring my fourth - FOURTH (!) - library card by checking this out. I'm also, like many people, still waiting for an English-language publisher to publish vols 5 and 6 of Sattouf's masterful Arab of the Future series. WHERE IS IT?!

Anyway, this book centers on a young Parisian middle schooler, Esther. We follow her when she's 10, 11 and 12 years old, from 2015-2018 (I think). These are comic strips that have appeared (weekly?) in a French newspaper, and that Sattouf creates after regularly interviewing his friend's daughter, the titular Esther.

I love Sattouf's work. It's brutal but also... humane? Esther is kind of awful and wonderful. She's imaginative, materialistic, already pre-addicted to an iPhone (she LONGS for one in almost every page), feminist, chauvinist, a bully, homophobic, caring, conscientious, and everything. I definitely saw myself in her. She's innocent, trying to fit into a world - including all its broken parts (the homophobia, eeesh, can these kids chill out about gay people) - and trying to figure out herself in it. As she grows, we see her confidence grow. I LOVED her moments of courage and imagination, when she's like “sorry but fuck that” lol. Sattouf sometimes centralizes the casual cruelty of children (Arab of the Future had a LOT of that), and tbh middle school cruelty is the last thing I want to revisit, but I also appreciated how steady-eyed and non-judgmental and... resilient? He also portrays things? Like, life is definitely suffering - but it's also very funny and there are moments of sweetness.

I always enjoy these essay collections. I was flustered that the editions cover the preceding year, so this one was actually 2019 articles. Aaarghhh. I wanted an overview of Covid science!! Oh well - onto the next one!

This one had lots of gems. Stuff that really struck me:
- The horrors of California wildfires, as experienced on the ground.
- Two excellent paleontology articles (who knew I loved paleontology so much).
- An adorable buddy movie about astrophysicists trying to find Planet Nine.
- A heartbreaking one about a young girl's mental health.
- A great one about immunotherapy.

Less exciting was the stodgy New Yorker article about natural language processing, large language models (aka, LLMs, aka ChatGPT and “AI”). There wasn't anything explicitly factually incorrect about it - it does a decent job of describing what LLMs are, etc - and I even agreed with some of the opinionated Luddite hand-wringing. But something altogether about it felt cringe.

A long-ish, engaging intellectual screed against the marriage of conspiracy theorizing and New Age woo. This was written with a lot of color and brio, so it's a lot of fun and quite podcasty.

This is a history of 20th and 21st century wellness movements - yoga, Reiki, all that New Agey stuff - and their underlying politics, as well as their often close relationship with conspiracy theories and cults. The first two parts are a lively sociological and historical study of this stuff, and I learned a lot and filled in lots of gaps that I had had. This was basically what I wanted to learn from American Veda, a book I am too lazy to actually buy. So, it was a lot of fun! And cut very close to home, especially the Theosophists and Buddhism in the West stuff. [I look down at my Buddhist tattoo in some chagrin.]

I didn't care for Part 3, where the authors present a Wall of Shame of the worst “conspiritualists” in recent years. Oh yes - “conspirituality” is basically the tight coupling of alt-right Qanon craziness with New Age business, and how the Covid pandemic was like gas on that flame. The Part 3 Wall of Shame chapters profiled the most egregiously awful of these yoga-practicing, coffee-enema-ing, Covid/election denialist influencers. And honestly, I just don't have the patience to listen to complete and utter garbage for chapter upon chapter.

The final part zoomed in on more quotidian conspiritualists - the conspiritualist next door, if you will. This was, of course, much less outrage-inducing and much sadder. e.g. The breast cancer patient who refuses mainstream medicine and dies amidst her magical thinking and potions. Ugh. It's just awful. So the book, ultimately, preaches compassion for these benighted and confused people.

The book also discussed the tropes of conspiritual thinking: namely, I replace your reality with my own. A lot of this has to do with people's ignorance re: the scientific method - and their disappointments in it (i.e. they expect science to be infallible and - once a scientific question is “answered”, the answer never changes). This is a real problem, indeed, and is the problem of MY CAREER, I would say: how do you get people comfortable with uncertainty? How do you convey the epistemology of the scientific methods(and statistics, do not even get me started)? Without them just completely jumping ship and swimming to crazy island?

Very very fun. I never really read mystery/thriller fiction, but maybe I should. This was fun.

Briefly: modern UK setting. The cast: An OFF. THE. RAILS. 39yo first-time mom and her shrieking newborn. A little old lady who is super crotchety and has blood splatters all over her rug. Glorious.

I really enjoyed this one. It was basically a PG-13 thriller, not too gory (thank God), centered around - ahem - “women's issues”. And y'all know how NUTS - NUTS, I TELL YOU - 39 year old women with their biological clocks can get. I was cackling with demented 40-year-old glee throughout.

Ever since becoming a parent and, much more importantly, an AUNTIE, I feel like I've graduated into this weird new realm of middle-aged womanhood. And it's great. Now I get where “old wives tales”, etc, come from. I UNDERSTAND THE MYSTIC WOMANHOOD. That shit comes from this off the rails brew of aunties cluckin' and judgin', generation upon generation. Doing all the laundry. Getting crapped on by the patriarchy. And having just a helluva time.

I should also specify: an aunt is someone whose sibling has a child. AN AUNTIE is someone who is just a middle-aged lady UP IN YOUR BUSINESS and ready to hit you with a shoe. “Auntie” is what kids in India call you when they perceive you as OLD - believe me, the pain was deep when I was “auntied” in my early 30s, after many years of being called “didi” (big sister). But now that I am here, in my - as Gloria Steinem promised - increasingly fem radicalized middle-aged, I AM PUMPED.

Anyway, so this is, what I would like to call, AUNTIE LIT. It features tiny babies, incompetent and competent mothering, 1 stupid man, and just all sorts of catnip for the auntie set. I AM HERE FOR IT. Also, give me that baby, I will take care of it, you don't know what you're doing.

Wow, what in the heck is going on in South Korea!!

This ties together a bunch of different news tidbits I had been seeing over the last few years. The pinching emoji drama (I remember thinking, “people are upset about THAT?! what in the world”). The cratering birth rate and the suggested “birth strike”. The high-pressure corporate work culture.

This book tied it together and educated me a LOT about the recent wave of feminism that took over South Korea in the last 5-7 years (from 2015 to 2022ish), and the attendant reactionary “men's rights”/MAGA-esque response of the last couple years. Much of the book is really depressing, angering, and inspiring. Aka, classic feminist lit, lolsob. I was very very upset by a lot of what I read - the ubiquitous spycams, wtfff - but I was also kinda amazed by some of the feminist pushback - the birth strike being the big one, but also the amazingly interesting “single women communes” that cultivate an alternative to traditional families in otherwise-alienating urban circumstances. Really amazing stuff.

What a terribly sad book.

I read this as a mom and as a daughter, and just really really felt for Jennette McCurdy. The earlier stuff, when she's 6 and her mom is pushing her into acting, was so heartbreaking. I just saw a little girl that desperately wanted to be loved by her mom, desperately wanted to connect and be comforted and see her mom be a warm, stable, happy person. Something that that mom could not and would not ever be. The mom definitely had a bunch of unaddressed mental health issues. Watching McCurdy live within that universe of mental illness - and her mom definitely created an entire microcosm of crazy, in a household where everyone bent to her whims, basically - oof.

Later in the book, as McCurdy makes tentative steps towards leaving that little cosmos, a therapist gently notes that what McCurdy's mom did was abusive. McCurdy's intense reaction shows us just how powerful these blind spots can be - when you grow up in crazy, it can take a LONG time to free yourself of it. Indeed, I kinda wanted more catharsis - I wanted to see McCurdy evolve and grow and heal more. I guess the book itself is a testament to her progress, but I was left pretty unsatisfied with the ending. Please tell me how your life eventually did get better, you poor girl!!

Honestly spent the whole book pumping my fist and going, YES. YYYEEEEEESSSSSS.

I think I also highlighted more than half of it.

Some highlights of the highlights:
- Structual adjustment programs, the World Bank, the 1990s, and how they killed growth.
- Protectionism as a good thing.
- REALLY fun/interesting/provocative stuff about global labor competition - wages in rich countries being a function of immigration control. Really interesting stuff about the interaction effects between immigration control, wages, and class.
- The rise of shareholder capitalism, and its perverse incentives (e.g. businesses avoid making long-term investments, and instead focus on short-term cuts like layoffs and finance tools).
- Lots of really cool historical economics about the “Asian miracle” - e.g. the ENORMOUS and mind-boggling growth + development of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan. Very very cool.

Anyway, a lot of this stuff was also covered in Doughnut Economics. I wish I could take a class with Ha-Joon Chang. I got a lot of other books added to my want-to-read list thanks to this one. Woohooooo economics

A fun, wide-ranging, and provocative non-fiction book about the ethics and possibilities of neurotech (aka brain-meddling!!).

So I spent most of this audiobook running and arguing with it in my head. I almost threw the headphones off in an angry huff during the “why ADHD meds are cognitive enhancers and totally fine ok” - I stuck with it, if only because I enjoyed the ethical debating. (Even though I do think the ADHD meds chapter was GOODNESS ME, really eliding some big, obvious downsides to ADHD meds (and steroids). Like, that shit can fuck you up.

The author, Farahany, is a law prof and was on Obama's bioethics committee. So I do defer to her authority. At the same time, I feel like I'm kinda not into the Singularity/transhumanist world anymore - and I did sense some techbro enthusiasm in Farahany's writing, which made me eye-roll. But I can't criticize her too much; she did a decent job of outlining the ethical debate.

I read this in two sittings - including one 3-hour sit while my arm was tattooed and very loud Latin pop blared. The music was often in sync with the story's emotional beats!

So this is a memoir by Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel for Medicine/Physiology in 2023 for her work on the mRNA Covid vaccine. I had read one other article about Kariko, basically exclaiming how incredible her win was, given that she spent almost her entire academic career languishing as a poorly-paid, non-tenured, postdoc-type. If you've ever spent any time around academia, that is remarkable indeed. AND OOOHH THE JUSTICE!!!! (everyone hates academia's dumb power politics)

And I did love her underog-triumphs conclusion, but I also, well, just loved her heart of gold, pure of spirit LOVE/obsession with science. And her nerdiness, and her sassiness, and - tbh - her writing! I was like, HOW is this woman who claims to care about nothing beyond the cell SUCH A GOOD WRITER? I laughed and teared up several times. Honestly, I just loved spending time with her and sharing her life with her. A really warm, inspiring story!