Tag: history
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Music is History by Questlove
Questlove’s history lessons fall pretty flat.
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Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman
Bergman’s history of extrajudicial killings by Israel’s government is essential, gripping and alarming.
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Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista
Part memoir, part political history and part English lesson (I’m not kidding, I learned a bit about language from this). Evangelista is a reporter for a news outlet in the Philippines, and she details the historical, political and cultural context during the lead up to Duterte’s election, and the unbelievable number and brutality of state-supported…
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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
Having read Wu’s books in the reverse order of publication dates, this book felt a bit underwhelming. What’s interesting is how clearly the seeds of his follow up work are here. It’s a history of ‘information empires’ which includes telephone, radio, film and television. Wu is clearly trying to draw some parallels that can predict…
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Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson
This is an excellent progressive history of the United States, and contextualizes a lot of our modern moment for people who feel like America has gone crazy since about 2016. Problem is, I’m a history and politics nerd, so for me there wasn’t a lot to chew on here. That’s my problem though, not the…
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You can’t just be the most powerful observer in the world for two decades and not deeply warp what you are looking at.
It’s taken me all day to read this, but it’s worth it. In The Verge, Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive into SEO – the scammers, honest brokers and how (whether?) Google has gotten mostly useless these days (hint: it’s less about AI than you may think.) I’ve run web design and dev teams…
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Remembering AltaVista
In the late 90’s, your choice in search engines was like a social marker. Yahoo! was basic, WebCrawler was kind of standard, but real ones used AltaVista. Vice has a history of the first great search engine.
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The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood by John Lorinc (ed.)
Bite-sized Toronto history that will send you on a scavenger hunt.