Last winter I passed by Strand Books and they had this gem of young adult fiction for sale for a measly 48¢. I wondered how this book differed from the movie I remembered as a child. I’m delighted to say that it doesn’t merely hold up, but is actually more rich and more enjoyable as an adult reader. This enjoyability is in part driven by some of the clever narrative structures Ms. Konigsburg used to frame the meta-awareness of the story as it is told. On top of this, it’s also a snapshot of New York before its gritty descent of the late seventies: it’s still a place where a visit with Grandma to the Museum and Schrafft’s with white gloves might have played out over a hazy, warm spring day.

I found this book on a sidewalk in Park Slope about four years ago and I just now got to reading it. I’ve seen Shirky quoted in tech media for many years and loved his talk on how the disruption of mass-urbanization during the 19th century occasioned the proliferation of gin-carts and kiosks that characterized the gin-swilling era we see humorously portrayed in “My Fair Lady.”

In any case, I’m sure this book was much more revolutionary closer to its publication date, but I appreciate that several of the central theses held up. Before getting to the content, I want to raise one frustration about the book’s structure.

Form

Non-fiction / pop-technical book are meant to be read and, in my experience, ought give their jewels away quickly so that the audience benefits and can decide when to go deeper (and how deep to go). This is the heart behind the inspectional reading technique: the belief that writers in this genre tell you what they’ll tell you before they tell it, so that you can track the arc before having made the first formal step.

While many parts of the book didn’t need a deeper read by me (someone within the industry), it’s structure left me guessing as to whether there was some important facet within the next paragraph. There was no real benefit in structuring the chapters like 19th century potboiler serials. The unveiling of the structure at the beginning is perfectly fine. To put it cynically, we’ve already bought the book, now it’s about our payoff, not the author’s.

To the content, though.

Content

The Thesis

Shirky, to his credit, never got too-terribly “Ooh” and “Aah” about insurgent technologies or the people behind them. A few of the technical sites used as examples have not aged well (poor Flicker, Dodgeball, etc.), but this is not a tarnish to Shirky’s observations in the least.

Ultimately, the argument that social technology will make it easier for groups to form and do work that could-not and would-not have been done within organizations like corporations and businesses has been borne out. Previously, to do something big, you needed to make sure that the outcome justified the overhead and synchronization costs. The Catholic Church or the US Army are examples of this. But if the costs of collaboration and group-forming don’t just drop, but fall to zero, people can choose to participate in “big things” for reasons like curiosity or interest. That’s the big idea, and it’s correct. Linux remains strong, the open source ethos has flourished, Wikipedia continues to grow.

Dangerous Possibilities for Collaboration

Shirky even points out that forms of undesirable collaboration were blossoming. While he mentions it at only a superficial depth, he’s diagnosing a lump that wound up metastisizing in the Russian interference with the 2016 election.

[media personality that mobilized a horde of collaborators to name, shame, and undermine someone] benefited from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it – the bargain he crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see.

Boy, that sent shivers up my spine. Consider the manufactured outrage through tools like Facebook.

“Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?”

Consider the “SWAT-ing” and “doxxing” operations that hijack the tools of civic order to harass and abuse.

Lastly, Shirky warns that the resiliency that social software offers also means that bad memes (Flat Earth, extermism) can find, organize, and deploy uninformed actors (in addition to bad actors) to create disinformation that can be used to undermine legitimate facts, institutions, and science.

It was a good read. A few highlights are below:

I’ve loved Debbie Harry and “Blondie” as along as I can remember. I remember seeing Ms. Harry hosting on The Muppet Show when I was a child, admiring the striking Parallel Lines album cover in my parents’ vinyl collection, and loving the rocksteady beat of “Tide is High” from the way-way back of my neighbor’s wood-paneled station wagon at the cusp of the 80’s. Blondie is tied to many of my earliest memories.

In college, I came heavily under the sway of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. From there, I learned more about Television, (early) Talking Heads, the New York Dolls, Berlin-era Bowie, the Stooges, Iggy Pop, the Ramones (under guidance from Stephen King), and…Blondie. That era of NYC creativity is so interesting as Woodstock’s “Summer of Love” faded into, just a few short years later, “NYC Drop Dead” in the Ford administration. In that moment visually “Saturday Night Live” was born and, borne on the shoulders of Long Island or suburban kids come to rest in the Lower East Side, a striking and new music scene emerged.

Ms. Harry was there.

From that punk-era, Harry then underwent a series of interesting artistic transformations: as Warhol’s muse in an Amiga computer art demonstration, as a fatal siren in the disturbing body-horror work of David Cronenberg, and as a canvas for twisted biomechanical ideas under the airbrush of H.R. Giger.

I expected her memoir to reflect and reveal what life at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s was like. I wanted to see the dirt and the grim that gave her faux-Marilyn angel an edge. But I also wanted to see how she contextualized that lightning-in-a-bottle moment and then how she made sense of what came after, including the Blondie reunion.

But this book failed to meet my expectation. It lacked, and I think this might be an editing error, any “frame” to turn “and this happened and then this happened” into a grander narrative worthy of this icon.

I was a stranger to the writing of Ted Chiang until I saw the film Arrival, adapted from his story The Time of Your Life. My friend Linda suggested this collection to me and I’m glad she did. Chiang has a wonderful voice that has a mournful and elegiac quality I love about Ray Bradbury that complements his stories that think through the complicated twists and turns of time-travel, multiverses, and AI.

I’ll list some of my favorite stories in the collection.

About two paragraphs into this book, I wrote on social media that I just knew I was going to love this book. And I did. The book starts unconventionally, with single-person focused vignettes about the key dramatis personae. These vignettes stand solidly as wonderful character studies that might have come from Spoon River Anthology. With all of his richly realized pieces on the table, Powers uses the framing device of trees in their multitudinous ways of affecting us, to bring the characters, or the characters’ thoughts together.

It’s a beautiful book and is outstanding for its focus on character, beautiful language, and elegiac tone.

Rarely have I read a book whose introductory anecdote so well aligns what the book contains. Moller’s introduction describes the famous mural The School of Athens designed by Raphael in the Vatican. She notes that the popular perception of the Renaissance was that those artists and thinkers like Raphael woke up one fine day, went to a library, re-discovered Classical learning and — violà — The Renaissance. Suddenly science, math, architecture, and governance experience a quantum leap and “civilization,” in a form that the Western modern mind recognizes, returns.

But this is clearly impossible. Knowledge that is not practiced or archived will be lost. It must be curated, maintained, and transmitted.

Asks Moller:

One of his most significant achievements was helping to produce the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements, in 1570. But where had this text been and who had looked after it in the 2,000 years between Euclid writing it in Alexandria [and the 16th century]

They had thrived in the Middle East.

As anyone knows who’s played the empire-building video games like Civilization, first you establish a food supply, then safety as guaranteed by a professional military, and then you get the low-yield/high-payoff leaps forward provided by intellectuals. Because this formula had been lost in religious wars and hamletization in the former territories of the Western Empire, these books found refuge with inky-fingered scholars and magnificence-burnishing enlightened Emirs.

Moller shows that over and over when immigration, tolerance, curiosity, translation and respect thrive under secure conditions, civilization blossoms.

As a fan of Miller’s Song of Achilles, I was excited to read her latest novel, Circe.

Miller’s niche is thoughtful exploration of the society and psychology of the characters in the ancient epics. In particular, she likes to use the perspective of a “minor character” to examine the motivations of the “major characters,” explore the characters’ society, and provide poetic lushness to the stories' settings.

In Achilles she re-lenses the war at Troy through Achilles’ companion, Patroclus; in Circe she re-lenses The Odyssey as well as the Minoan / Argonaut cycle through Circe. Achilles focuses on lovers’ devotions and heroic violence, but Circe’s arenas of contending are intellect, bravery, and politics. Miller’s books are complimentary, but they each have a different perspective on the ancient world.

Circe is an excellent read, a fun story, and a beautifully rich envisioning of the Mediterranean world. Many of my favorite passages hinge on Circe’s description of sorcery and spell-casting. These passages will resonate with makers of things of all media and all capabilities (see notes after the jump). Circe’s language for this work is highly evocative of programming.

Miller also gives Circe some insights about the nature of religion. She notes that it’s a fear and bullying cascade from the top (Zeus) to the bottom (her) based in insecurity which compels the caprice of the gods to ensure lamentations, offerings, and begging continue. In short, to secure the adulation they hold dear, they have to ensure a cascade of misery.

The cruelest thing about depression, she said, is that it drains you of the desire to be as fully alive…(Lost Connections, 97)

As I’ve grown older, a staggering number of people have quietly confessed to me that they’re suffering from depression; that they’ve taken up anti-depressant (SSRI) medication, analgesic cannabis, CBD use; or that they feel no association to or joy from their religious/professional/social lives. Talking with a friend about it recently, the metaphor we arrived at was: “It’s like normal life but with the Technicolor ™ turned off or the sound turned monophonic.” The world wasn’t gone, it was just low-fi.

In this muted reality, my friends and loved ones faced a struggle, alone. This loneliness is made worse by the fact that conventional wisdom holds that artists (Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway) and geniuses (Boltzmann, Ehrenfest, Erdös) are the ones prone to depression, not us.

Yet American rates of suicide, particularly among the “not-sensitive,” working-class, “man’s men” of the no-college education, white demographic are surging. It seems no coincidence that this is the same demographic who’s recently driven the opioid abuse epidemic.

My hypothesis (with no scientific basis) is that we as a society are exhausted from modern life (“influencers”), modern noise (“Swede-programmed pop music”), modern distractions (“Red dots with numbers on smart phones”), modern struggle (“Will no one call me back about whether I need surgery or not?”), and grinding capitalism. Some are simply and permanently opting out. To get a better sense of what was at play, I turned to Johann Hari’s book, Lost Connections. The book provides a compelling thesis: that depression is the natural and right reaction to a society whose operations are at odds with our evolutionary prerogatives. Writes Hari: “…we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness (90).”

If you’re short on time, most of the major points addressed in the book are covered in an hour-long conversation between Hari and Sam Harris on the latter’s podcast.

In 2013, I purchased And Man Created God amid a wave of the rebirth of a rationalist, athiest wave of thinkers coming to the fore. In retrospect, this movement is commonly called New Atheism. Around that time, Christopher Hitchens published God is not Great; Sam Harris, The End of Faith; and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Amid this shift in honest discussion of anti-theism, atheism, and belief, I was curious as to when and why theism became a core part of mankind’s lifestyle. Why posit this thing that so clearly lacks evidence? Whence this desire?

This books does not answer those questions. Indeed, they might not have any answers that can be reliably extracted from the historical record. Rather, the book performs an inventory on the characters and propositions of religions near the beginning of the common era (AD, if you’re old school) and what happens to them around the time of the rise of Christianity.

In the time covered, religions had reached a stunning level of vibrancy and diversity: god-kings of Africa, an organized Greco-Roman pantheon, the sons and daughters of jealous Yahweh, the binary split of evil and good in Zoroastrianism, etc. By the end of this period, the widest-reaching religions that will spread to the most adherents have adopted a common character:

urbanist, universalist, personalized mystery religion appealing to supernatural agents of divine law on behalf of the humiliated.

I thought this book was dreadful, and it is one of the few books I’ve tossed in the recycling bin after reading.

In the 90’s, I went through notepads and erasers grinding through the work required to earn my philosophy degree’s required symbolic logic credit. I took simple proofs to dead-end after dead-end. I remember silently scratching away at sheet after sheet of green engineering paper that had been gifted to me by my roommate Justin on many late nights trying to get those damnable proofs to work out. Every failure or wadded-up paper was an opportunity; it was a chance to start over and see the problem differently. It was laborious, but I felt better after every surmounted obstacle.

Every textbook section or class would introduce a new spell: DeMorgan’s Theorems, modus ponens, modus tollens, “existential instantiation,” etc. and then throw terse, dense premises at us that we must transform to a conclusion. It’s in this class, under the guidance of my then-TA, Tracy Lupher, that I learned debugging in its most essential form. I eventually earned an A in the class, acing the final. My 5^th edition of Irving M. Copi’s “Symbolic Logic” will travel with me as long as I have a pulse as a testament to that challenge.

As such, I take logic pretty seriously. Decades on now, I still love the topic and, sadly, have gotten a bit rusty. While visiting Foyle’s in Charing Cross last year, I saw The Art of Logic and thought a refresher from a “lay” book would be nice. As a writer of curriculum, I’m always keen to see how others take the difficult palatable as well, so I thought the book might serve in both of those capacities.

Sadly, my high expectations for this book were not realized. Instead, it:

• Failed to provide substantial footing as an introduction to logic
• Lost its way both by structure and poor editing
• And had an odd fixation with using distracting and contentious social-justice scenarios for demonstrating the poorly-introduced logical concepts — and I’m a liberal!

In total, my dislike for this book was so great I had to write a lengthy post about it. I’ve included notes about the few bright spots as well.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I bought a copy of Reed & Kellogg’s Graded Lessons in English: a grammar book in the Euclidean pedagogical tradition dating from the late 19^th. Having read it, I really enjoyed it and extracted notes from it; since the material builds axiomatically, proposition by proposition, it’s very easy to extract notes for.

I think there are two good reasons for a modern person to read the book.

1. It is a clear, reasoned, adult-ready book of the grammar of the English language. I’m not sure it’s the best way to learn English, but as a summary, or a review, or a coalescing document, it’s lucid and enjoyable.
2. It introduces the abstraction of the sentence diagram as a learning aid. I think this is worth seeing in the primary source for two audiences:
3. Those who create learning materials: How the learning aid and knowledge organizing tool is introduced (the diagram) never loses sight of the fact that it is in service to the material, it is not an end in itself. That’s worth remembering!
4. Those who need tools for studying other grammar (linguists, foreign language learners, etc.) Knowing the grammatical terms and their notation in English sets one up for porting a diagramming framework to other languages under study

Find my notes after the jump

That this book is worthy and carefully crafted is a mystery to no one. The language is spare and spare and has, honestly, a faint patina of gimmick on it — but for a powerful meditation of a young man facing adulthood set amid conceits of absolute brutality, it stands singularly along with the other McCarthy I’ve read: The Road.