Here's what I read in 2016 (and despite reading nearly a book a week, I feel dumber than ever) and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can see my eleven favorites . . . and if you're really feeling crazy and literary, you can check out my previous lists, but if you're going to read one book on this list, I would suggest Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather . . . I've read it twice, and I'll bet I'll read it again someday . . . anyway, here they are-- it's a little scary for me when I peruse this list, because I can't remember all that much about some of the titles, but I guess that's what happens when you read too much;
1) Trunk Music (Michael Connelly)
2) Hide & Seek (Ian Rankin)
3) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert D. Putnam
4) One Plus One Jojo Moyes
5) Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World
6) Death Comes to the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
7) The Milagro Beanfield War (John Nichols)
8) Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)
9) The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy (Tim Harford)
10) Tim Harford The Undercover Economist
11) The Expatriates (Janice Y. K. Lee)
12) Tim Harford The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
13) Dale Russakoff The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools?
14) Charlie Jane Anders All the Birds in the Sky
15) Mohamed A. El-Erian The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
16) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)
17) The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
18) Angels Flight (Michael Connelly)
19) Robert J. Gordon The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War
20) Tony Hillerman A Thief of Time
21) Peter Frankopan Silk Roads: A New History of the World
22) Tony Hillerman Hunting Badger
23) Tony Hillerman Listening Woman
24) Tony Hillerman The Wailing Wind
25) The Lost World of the Old Ones:Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest David Roberts
26) Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers)
27) Chuck Klosterman But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past
28) White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer
29) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will Shape our future by Kevin Kelly
30) Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
31) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Jerome K. Jerome
32) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
33) Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty
34) Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
35) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil
36) Ghosts by Reina Telgemeier
37) The Walking Dead 23-26
38) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy Leagues by Jeff Hobbs
39) The Nix by Nathan Hill
40) Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
41) Tim Wu The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
42) Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad
43) Nicholson Baker Substitute
44) The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts
45) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.
Showing posts sorted by date for query kevin kelly. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query kevin kelly. Sort by relevance Show all posts
The Future Hasn't Happened Yet
In one corner, you've got Robert Gordon claiming that American growth is over-- the greatest technological leaps happened between 1870 and 1970 and those kinds of radical changes will never happen again-- but his premise is challenged by Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . Kelly envisions a world where we don't own much at all and instead subscribe to services-- the Netflix, Uber model-- but we do this for for everything, and we participate in "dot-Communism" and do a tremendous amount of work for free (e.g. this blog and Wikipedia) including making and placing our own advertisements and photos on the internet for micro-payments, and we live in flowing "real time" of course, where everything happens instantaneously, and most of our jobs are replaced by robots . . . and if you don't think this is possible, check out Kelly's Seven Stages of Robot Replacement (of course my job won't be replaced by a robot-- you say to yourself-- a robot couldn't possibly do what I do . . . it could do some of the things, but not everything . . . and it might break down . . . ok, it can do the routine stuff: grade papers, ask questions, check for reading comprehension . . . but I need to train it to do new stuff and teach new lessons . . . ok, it can do my stupid boring job, but that's because teaching is inhuman and should be done by robots . . . and now my new job-- designing curriculum for robots to teach is much better than my old job and pays more . . . and I'm glad that a robot could never do what I do now . . . and so on) and Kelly readily acknowledges that what will be lost in this real-time, collaborative, cybernetic, collectivist, brand-based, robotic, completely searchable future is what scholars call "literature space," the place your brain goes when you read a book . . . according to scientists, your brain goes to a different place when it is immersed in a large linear logical piece of writing-- what is traditionally known as a book-- as opposed to what Kelly calls "screening," which is using various devices to browse the loosely connected miscellany that is the web . . . but maybe in the future there will be no reason to think that long about any one subject, and it will be considered antiquated to read in that fashion, and we'll be happy wandering from idea to idea, narrative to narrative, video to audio to text to who knows, adding a bit here, taking a bit there, like digital hunter-gatherers, wandering the binary plains.
Sorry Chuck, The Inevitable is Coming
Chuck Klosterman concludes his book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past with this thought: "I'm ready for a new tomorrow, but only if it's pretty much like yesterday" and while this is a pleasant thought, there's very little chance of it happening; before he gets to this romantic notion, he speculates on just how much the future will be different from the now, and how that will change the lens through which those future people view our time . . . and he also recognizes that not much will survive the test of time and that we have little to no chance of predicting what those things will be:
1) it's very difficult to predict what band will become the John Philip Sousa of rock'n'roll . . . no one can name another march music composer (and Klosterman points out that in one hundred years Bob Marley and reggae will be synonymous) so you can speculate: Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones? Def Leppard? who knows?
2) once a genre becomes insular and arcane, it's the "weirdos" who get to curate the art form, and select what is great;
3) American football now seems to be on the outs, as everyone educated knows that the sport is too dangerous because of the head injuries-- but Klosterman points out that this is because football is trying to become the sport for everyone . . . everyone watches a game or two, and almost everyone belongs to some kind of fantasy league or pool and everyone watches the Super Bowl . . . so this is too much exposure for something so dangerous, but there are plenty of sports that are more dangerous-- auto racing, UFC, base-jumping-- but they don't command such a large audience, so football may become less popular, and that may save it-- it may have a core group of diehard fans and to them, the sport will represent valor and fortitude and toughness and all kinds of conservative values, and the rest of society will look upon it like auto-racing . . . or it may be deemed too dangerous and expensive it may die at the youth levels and go the way of boxing and the dodo . . . we won't know until the future;
4) folks in the future may look at The Matrix as a seminal film not because of the groundbreaking "bullet time" effects, but because the Wachowski Brothers transitioned and became the Wachowski Sisters, and so the world-within-a-world theme takes on an entirely new (and possibly more compelling) spin for future generations;
5) Klosterman concedes that important art from our time should reflect the most important elements of our time and he gives a list of these possibilities, while admitting that we see these through the cloudy and low vantage point of the present, but here are a few . . . and while I don't use quotes, I am usually using his exact words, just truncated: the psychological impact of the internet, the prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, an unclear definition of privacy, a hatred of the wealthiest one percent, the artistic elevation of television, the recession of rock'n'roll and the ascension of hip-hop, a distrust of objective storytelling, the prolonging of adolescence;
BUT, while I love Klosterman and had a great time navigating his ambiguous, philosophical arguments about how we can't predict the future, or how the future will view our present, Kevin Kelly does present a convincing counter-argument in his new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . I'll save the summary of his most interesting predictions for another sentence, but, Chuck Klosterman, I'm warning you: tomorrow is going to be nothing like today, and the day after that is going to be exponentially even more wild . . . we've leapt over the edge and into the realm of the zillions . . . zillions of bits of interconnected information, zillions of smart objects, zillions of interconnected screens, zillions of hyperlinked pages, zillions of sprawling dendritic tendrils, stretching across the earth, in an ever-expanding, self-revising smart tangle of digitally connected humanity, so strap yourself in and get ready for a wild ride: we'll be in the future before you know it.
1) it's very difficult to predict what band will become the John Philip Sousa of rock'n'roll . . . no one can name another march music composer (and Klosterman points out that in one hundred years Bob Marley and reggae will be synonymous) so you can speculate: Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones? Def Leppard? who knows?
2) once a genre becomes insular and arcane, it's the "weirdos" who get to curate the art form, and select what is great;
3) American football now seems to be on the outs, as everyone educated knows that the sport is too dangerous because of the head injuries-- but Klosterman points out that this is because football is trying to become the sport for everyone . . . everyone watches a game or two, and almost everyone belongs to some kind of fantasy league or pool and everyone watches the Super Bowl . . . so this is too much exposure for something so dangerous, but there are plenty of sports that are more dangerous-- auto racing, UFC, base-jumping-- but they don't command such a large audience, so football may become less popular, and that may save it-- it may have a core group of diehard fans and to them, the sport will represent valor and fortitude and toughness and all kinds of conservative values, and the rest of society will look upon it like auto-racing . . . or it may be deemed too dangerous and expensive it may die at the youth levels and go the way of boxing and the dodo . . . we won't know until the future;
4) folks in the future may look at The Matrix as a seminal film not because of the groundbreaking "bullet time" effects, but because the Wachowski Brothers transitioned and became the Wachowski Sisters, and so the world-within-a-world theme takes on an entirely new (and possibly more compelling) spin for future generations;
5) Klosterman concedes that important art from our time should reflect the most important elements of our time and he gives a list of these possibilities, while admitting that we see these through the cloudy and low vantage point of the present, but here are a few . . . and while I don't use quotes, I am usually using his exact words, just truncated: the psychological impact of the internet, the prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, an unclear definition of privacy, a hatred of the wealthiest one percent, the artistic elevation of television, the recession of rock'n'roll and the ascension of hip-hop, a distrust of objective storytelling, the prolonging of adolescence;
BUT, while I love Klosterman and had a great time navigating his ambiguous, philosophical arguments about how we can't predict the future, or how the future will view our present, Kevin Kelly does present a convincing counter-argument in his new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . I'll save the summary of his most interesting predictions for another sentence, but, Chuck Klosterman, I'm warning you: tomorrow is going to be nothing like today, and the day after that is going to be exponentially even more wild . . . we've leapt over the edge and into the realm of the zillions . . . zillions of bits of interconnected information, zillions of smart objects, zillions of interconnected screens, zillions of hyperlinked pages, zillions of sprawling dendritic tendrils, stretching across the earth, in an ever-expanding, self-revising smart tangle of digitally connected humanity, so strap yourself in and get ready for a wild ride: we'll be in the future before you know it.
Worst Song Ever
I'm pretty sure my friend and colleague Kevin is losing his mind; he forced me to watch the Miley Cyrus video for her song "Wrecking Ball," which he claimed is "a great pop song" and, apparently, he finds the video titillating as well . . . but I didn't find it sexy at all, it her attitude seems awkward and feigned -- and those white undies are matronly -- and, more importantly, I couldn't remember the melody of the tune two hours later (or any of the lyrics except "wrecking ball") and it's not like I'm immune to pop ear-worms, as I had that Kelly Clarkson song "Stronger" song stuck in my head for days.
Dueling Definitions
Kevin Kelly juxtaposes two definitions in his new book What Technology Wants; the first is Alan Kay's: "Technology is anything invented after you were born," and the second is Danny Hillis's: "Technology is something that doesn't quite work yet," and the first definition makes me think of that awesome yellow first down line that appears on the television screen during football games, and the second definition makes me think of FoxTrax, television's failed attempt to animate a glowing hockey puck.
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