Tag: history
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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.
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A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
This is a riveting story that I knew nothing about. Part shocking history of the KKK in the 1920’s midwest, part Criminal Minds-style crime story, part legal drama. It’s fantastic as all three, and kind of even works as commentary on today’s politics, without ever claiming to be. Egan is a great writer, the story…
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Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century by Josh Rogin
This is pitched as a Trump Book – and while the incompetence of Trump and his gang does play a clear and critical role in the book, there is a lot more here than cheap dunks on a clueless regime. And having just finished Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, I…
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Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
This is kind of two books. The first half is basically the post-WWII history of computers, full of colourful characters and rich (if too brief) stories. It reads like an abridged version of Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution – there are even several sections which could make…
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro
The Power Broker is a masterpiece. Essential reading
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The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
It’s pretty overwritten, but it’s worth it. This book is fascinating in how banal it seems. The work culture described here is so common now, so the book is often inadvertently funny. As exploitative as it is, it reminded me of some of my fondest work memories and some of my favourite people – lifelong…