I should have loved this book. It featured many of the concepts that define my interests and work and therefore my life:

• Information storage and retrieval
• Card catalogs and extracting meaning from raw token
• Monks speaking Latin in the middle ages
• Philosophers asking what one’s relationship to a topic is when one only sees a index covering a book on that topic

But I didn’t. The main arc was interesting and compelling and would have been fine as a 50 page book, a multi-post long-form article, or a multi-part podcast. In a way oddly similar to The Man from the Future, there was a simple and lovely gem of a story at the heart of the book, but then somehow extensions got tacked on that made me forget about the story I had been enjoying. It was a bit like eating an amazing dinner with wonderful service: glasses refilled, well-chosen wine, witty repartee from the service staff where, after the check was dropped, the staff disappeared for an hour and thereby wouldn’t let us leave. Thus while the first impression was amazing, the last memory was idly shuttling breadcrumbs back and forth on the tablecloth.

For much of my life, in multiple ways, I have been exposed to the myth and mystery of the mathematician, scientist, physicist, and general smart fellow, John von Neumann.

Name an area of scientific or mathematical advancement in the 20^th century, and you’re likely to see von Neumann’s thumbprint somewhere in the mix. Computers, today, run on von Neumann architecture, von Neumann’s hawkishness defined American foreign policy, he was at the Trinity atomic bomb test in Los Alamos, he defined concepts in game theory and abstract computation. He was an intellectual titan. I was absolutely in the target market and…

I was really bored throughout most of this book.

A Questionable Shape is a strange book with an unusual proposition: the zombie apocalypse has come and its end is in sight. Mankind mastered the disease, learned its contagion vector, and has even faced the bureaucratic knots of the personhood status of the infected (still human, but incapacitated as in the case of Alzheimer’s or some other degenerative disorder).

In this strange lacuna of time and ontological status, AQS’ drama finds place. Vermaelen, his friend Mazoch, Vermaelen’s girlfriend Rachel, and Mazoch’s recently-infected father are the bare-bones dramatis personae of the story. They reflect upon “when do we call this thing over” and “what’s an acceptable risk?” Strangely, this story came to me right as we mulled the same questions in the (hopefully?) waning days of the COVID pandemic.¹

Bob Odenkirk is one of the most impactful comedians of my life. He brought life to one of the funniest SNL characters ever: Matt Foley (played by Chris Farley):

Also, Julia Sweeney, Phil Hartman, David Spade, Christina Applegate…just…so much comedic talent on one stage. And, my god, Applegate and Spade trying to resist breaking.

And then, on top of that, he and David Cross produced the sketch comedy series that quite possibly broke one of my ribs, Mr. Show.

WHO SPEAKS ILL OF PORNOGRAPHY?

And then, when you’re like, that’s cool, what else, he gives the cripplingly haunting portrayal of Saul Goodman / Jimmy McGill on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Unbelievable.

OK, so how’s the book? It’s good! It’s a pleasant chronology about how this unique comedic mind got started, and it shares some enjoyable anecdotes about the scenes and players he encountered along this storied path. If the book communicates anything it’s:

1. You never know where your failures are going to take you
2. Never stop at that grind

I’ll readily grant that this book might not be for me: I’m neither Black, nor woman, and my genealogy doesn’t run out at the historical Mason-Dixon line where my people suddenly return to being nameless property. Nevertheless, to be Southern-born and dwelling in the North is a kinship of sorts. I find the same recipe my grandmother made in Texas in Harlem: a gastronomic treasure borne North in the Great Migration. In some ways all exiles need each others' stories to remember the good that is there as it slowly becomes a memory, a ghost’s whisper of an era whose ever-more primary purpose is to be the part before here.

I loved this book. The baseline narrative is what the cover suggests: here are 7 games, each with a subtle twist or wrinkle (e.g. chance, bluffing, etc.) that allows humans to discover something about themselves or society while playing it. If there were nothing else to the book, this would be a very abridged “According to Hoyle,” or it could have been the basis for a seven-part premier podcast on NPR.

Roeder, however, with his background in programming and game theory, adds to this preliminary angle a modern layer: how have programmers sought to find perfect games and optimal moves within these games? Some games can be perfected by powerful computers; other games cannot. What does that say about us? What does that say about the game? And who are these code-obsessives and how are they different (if at all) from the obsessives that master these games?

With these two layers in place, the means for driving a tension that drives the narrative is established:

1. An anthropological study of gaming
2. Describing the seven games themselves and their strategies
3. The arch-nerds seeking to crack the games’ Platonic code with CPUs

Again, this would be a more satisfying podcast, but it would still be on familiar ground. I think Roeder opens the gateway to a deeper and an more interesting consideration of games when he brings in the observation that programming is like unto magic/divination is like unto playing games. And that made me sit up and read with deepened enthusiasm.

When one visits Amsterdam, one is constantly confronted with monuments to those who died in the Holocaust, those dockworkers who resisted the all-too-easy accommodation of the Nazi occupiers, and those who bravely burned typewritten records that would have helped the occupiers find victims for their international campaign of murder. This is the easy story.

But when you lives in the Netherlands and sticks for longer than a 3-day lost weekend amid the canals and cannabis, one starts to understand that the reality was a bit more dirty.

As Sullivan notes:

…by the end of World War II, the Netherlands would have the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: 73 percent of Jews in the Netherlands died. In Belgium, 40 percent of Jews were killed; in France, 25 percent; in Denmark, .6 percent. In Fascist Italy, only 8 percent of Jews were killed.

What accounts for that percentage being so much worse? Humans are awful at statistical thinking. So this holocaust hidden by statistics is offset by the very personal and non-statistical, very real, very gripping tragedy of Anne Frank and her tragically brief life. By asking the question of who betrayed Anne Frank, Sullivan takes us on a longer journey into the uncomfortable truths of collaboration, cooperation, and betrayal within occupied Amsterdam.

I remember that I read in the Dutch journalist Geert Mak’s De Engel van Amsterdam (The Angel of Amsterdam) that the city had offered safe haven for iconoclasts, the intellectually persecuted, the religiously persecuted, the different for centuries. Its promise was tolerance if not acceptance. Mak concluded, as I recall, the first chapter with the ominous sentence that the only time it betrayed that promise was to its Jews under the Nazi regime.¹

This book is also available freely via Project Gutenberg Australia.

One of the best parts of living in New York is our custom of leaving finished books out on stoops or leaned against apartment buildings for others to pick up.¹ I was walking back with my cart from Trader Joe’s a few weeks ago when I found Only Yesterday and picked it up. This book, written in the early 1930’s, was a chance, on the morning after the party, to answer “What the hell just happened?” for the decade that had just gone past.

As a history, it’s a lot more jaunty and fun than you might expect, and Lewis has dozens of delightful turns of phrase that really put the screws to the malefactors and high-minded boobery of the era: Prohibition, Teapot Dome, and religious fundamentalists meddling with science in schools, et al.

I love The Third Man, it’s a film with possibly no equal. I’ve always known its author, Graham Greene, to have been an English wordsmith of the highest order. The idea of him covering the humid, malarial, slow-motion blunder of the US in supplanting the French in Indochina-to-Vietnam, has always seemed fated, doomed, damned, and beautiful. It was.

A painful childhood is made more painful by a narcissistic mother’s use of religion, and its more plainly anti-modern tenets, to abuse her daughter. Along the way, the author reveals her experience as a woman in a secular society that shirks its responsibility to confront inhumane abuses under the progressive rubric of “tolerant, liberal society.” Along the way, she ends up being forced into a marriage with an al-Qaeda operative.

For some light vacation reading during my trip to Aruba, I finally took my the recommendation of my colleague Abid to check out P.G. Wodehouse. I went to the Strand UWS bookshop and picked out a book at random and Code of the Woosters was it.

I was familiar with the Jeeves & Wooster characters by Fry & Laurie televised presentation through my general awareness of global humor, but I didn’t know that Wodehouse was the originator of these trope characters.

I re-read the novel that defined the cyberpunk genre for the first time since the 1990’s