One-A-Day: Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays in Algorithimic Culture
Remember: these aren’t reviews. If I were reviewing Galloway’s Gaming, I’d spend a long while talking about why I like much of it, and think it works very well alongside similar works of critical...
View ArticleOne-A-Day, David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin, eds., History of Central...
Students looking at the piles of books strewn over my desk, my windowsill, my bookshelves and my floor sometimes understate things a bit and say, “You have a lot of books”. (One reason I don’t really...
View ArticleOne-A-Day: David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous
Cory Doctorow makes a lot of sales to me through his recommendations on Boing Boing. He tends to have an eye for things that I at least think I’m interested in. Sometimes, though, I feel a bit let...
View ArticleOne-A-Day: Norman Rush, Mating
This is an essay on Norman Rush’s Mating that I wrote up for the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors blog, Critical Mass.
View ArticleOne-A-Day: Oona Strathern, A Brief History of the Future
Historians divide themselves by areas and by periods of specialization, but also by the methodological focus of their scholarly work: social history, political history, economic history and so on. This...
View ArticleOne-A-Day: Louis Sachar, Holes
I know some people are skeptical about whether you can teach people to write fiction in a conventional classroom. At the very least, I think aspiring writers can benefit by reading marvelous examples...
View ArticleOne-A-Day: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of...
I’m going to start trying again to write comments on the reading I’ve been doing over the last six months. It hasn’t been quite one-a-day, but there’s a lot of books and articles in my backlog to talk...
View ArticleFantasy Bests
It’s a New Year, so I’m going to get back in gear on this blog, which I’ve had to leave a bit moribund for a while as I concentrated on some other things and did some travelling. Many entries to come....
View ArticleMy Books, My Selves
Having one of those stretches where it is really hard to get my head above water. Most of the time March and April are like this. One thing I’ve been doing when I have a spare moment is adding books to...
View ArticleA Generalist’s Work, Day 1
I’m still feeling rankled by various casual dismissals of generalism and synthesis as a mode of academic and intellectual labor. It’s particularly odd coming from humanists given that the cultural work...
View Article
