By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Whistler presents and understands family less as a collection of heroes and villains, and more as overlapping, often contradictory stories that everyone tells themselves. You're never actually in the same family as your other family members. Everyone is in a different family together. Ann Patchett tells a tender, amusing, and deeply caring story about memory, regret, and the ways our lives change over time. At its center is Daphne's unexpected reconnection with Eddie, the stepfather who disappeared from her life decades earlier. On paper, that reunion could have become melodrama or nostalgia. Instead, Patchett turns it into something quieter and far more meaningful: a second chance at a deep human connection that isn't romantic but is every bit as profound. Eddie became one of the richest parts of the novel. He never presents himself as perfect, nor does he spend his time trying to justify the mistakes he's made. He knows he's impe...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Cat Love is enjoyable and playful, and uses that playfulness to explore the bleak realities of labor, care, capitalism, and exploitation. Morín explores the question of Schrödinger’s cat from the perspective of the cat. The novel then uses that setup to hold a mirror up to the systems we already live inside and remind us of their perversity.  In this funhouse world of desperation and fleeting opportunity, people train to become support animals to other humans and must fully play the part. It is absurd, but it also feels very present and very prescient to the moment we are in. Their training, the ridiculous quizing of right choices to random questions to become support animals, the performance of care, and the degrading expectations all feel like recognizable extensions of the world of work now. That is where the novel connects strongly to the last-mile automation problem. So much of the frictionless service of self-driving cars, perfect AI outputs...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Filterworld is one of those books that I appreciated as much for the questions it reinforced as for the arguments it made. Kyle Chayka offers a rich account of how algorithms shape the culture we consume and, in turn, the culture that gets made as a result of that process. I found myself nodding along with much of his analysis, though less engaged with some of his biggest conclusions. One of the book's greatest strengths is that it doesn't pretend algorithms emerged from nowhere. Chayka traces a longer history of recommendation and filtering before arriving at today's digital platforms, and that historical context gives the book a depth that many critiques of social media and algorithmic culture lack when they frame it as entirely new (that is the concerns that a media-ecosystem create). At the same time, I wanted him to push that history even further. Where I most disagreed with the book was its framing of what feels genuinely new. Chayka...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again. The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, ...