How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell My rating: 2 of 5 stars You can sum up this book in a tweet: Put down the phone; turn off the computer. Pay attention to the physical (nature, people, and in her case - birds) all around you, right there in your own backyard. Accomplishing this requires a significant application of discipline, a point that she mentions but spends too little time exploring. I felt there were too many tangents that strayed away from the point: resisting the attention economy. View all my reviews
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed this book. We tend to glorify the big names: Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg -- but this book includes the people that worked with them and that sometimes provided more value! I liked the parts stressing how the computer should augment human abilities rather than replace humans. I joined the bandwagon in the early 80s and thought the computer would unleash a creative storm, and ultimately make us smarter. I was only partly right. The book was written in 2014, so it's a bit dated in one respect. He thought social media would connect people, create community. He was right to an extent of course, but I think he didn't foresee how much our data would be used to market to us, to manipulate us, and in a political / cultural sense -- separate us. I find it unfortunate that the original idea of computing and the internet (discussed nicely in ...
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought this book was very well written. Like any good story, I found it difficult to put down. It was very frustrating to see yet another venerable institution, the CDC, laid bare. If you a fan of big government (though some elements of the private for-profit sector do not fare well in this story either) you're going to be saddened to see how dysfunctional so many layers of government, not just federal, can be. "Political cover" is often more important than public health. Political appointees are selected for reason other than competence, and these appointees cannot be made to look bad, even though they are useless and not contributing to the solution. The sheer cowardice of our political class is depressing. Fortunately, there are some very smart people in the world who can get the right things done View all my reviews