By Any Other Nerd

The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink My rating: 4 of 5 stars We live in a culture that tells us we should have "no regrets"; we should be forward-looking, forget the past, and charge into the future, never pause to linger on mistakes we've made, opportunities we've missed, or considering how our life might have been different.  We'd be silly to be George Bailey of It's A Wonderful Life (of course, then, we'd also be dead and not able to regret or learn from our regrets).  That's the picture that Pink paints in his opening chapters as a means of justifying his book to explore regret.  How truly the average person ignores engaging in regret seems to still be up for question but Pink might frame it as a "no regret" epidemic.  If that opening sounds overly critical of the book, it probably is but that's because largely what Pink is offering is not the power of

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims My rating: 4 of 5 stars What does it take for something to show up on our door when we order it online?  Mims uses this premise as his starting point to dive into the deep and complex infrastructure creation, transportation, and delivery that fuels modern consumer capitalism.  It's a challenging picture to consider because on the one hand, it is filled with massive feats of humankind in terms of how we are able to make things, move things, and consume things (then create waste-removal systems that are equally complex) and yet, at every point in this process, sits (or stands or moves) a precarious class of workers who are often exploited in numerous ways and are often forgoing their health for often unliveable wages in order to deliver goods at an unnecessary speed (e.g. 1-2 day delivery).  Mims balances this picture for the m

Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau My rating: 4 of 5 stars Ladau proves an accessible and helpful guide on understanding the complexities of disability in modern society.  Her approach is a not a definitive guide but an introduction to the expansive and complex with an invitation to go further but by starting with this book, the reader is off to a good start.  She doesn't claim perfect knowledge or understanding of all the complexities of disability and comes to it from her own intersectional experience and her own research on the topic.  The book has a little bit of everything to offer if you are new to the topic from a brief history to explaining the different categories of disability, to examining language and appropriate ways to interact with people with disabilities.  On that last point, it boils down to treating people with disabilities as the humans they are, asking and not assum

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider My rating: 4 of 5 stars Schneider and Berkshire's critique of charter schools and the privatization of public education is a sharp and insightful analysis that helps unpack the complex forces at play in actively trying to dismantle public education. They demonstrate that the current push toward charter schools is part of an ongoing effort by right-wing conservatives that has moved from peripheral to center over the past 80 years.  Initially arising as a means to work around equally funding schools for Black children or allowing for integration, charter school's historical legacy and contemporary means of being able to do a great deal of harm to students and teachers without any public accountability raise a range of questions about who is benefitting (i.e. profiting) from these structures.  Schneider and Berkshire help to answ