Tag Archives: Non-fiction

August 19, 2025 · 12:40 pm

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.

I may be a bad feminist, but I found Jeannette Winterson’s 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next far too focused on proving that women can be/have been computer scientists and can be/have been important to understandings of artificial intelligence. Like sure, yes, this is all true. And also so what. Okay, I know that in the case of the essays, the so what is that as we construct new forms of intelligence – or as new kinds of intelligence and beings emerge in the transhumanist future – we ought to learn from the past and create this future in more equitable ways. But it just read to me as… obvious?

Though clearly it is not obvious when it is the tech bros creating and profiting from new forms of AI and new AI products – and as Winterson argues the risk in all of this is that these men – like the industralists before them – will seek to maximize profit at the expense of the labour or women (and children). Though with AI less so the labour and more so the data or the ways in which these systems are designed, optimized (and implicitly, aligned – or not). I’d not call this one deeply researched, but with that it’s also not overly technical – and so if you wanted an accessible (and perhaps a bit surface) exploration of current (well now not so current because of the publication date of 2021 makes this ancient) technology then sure.

So while most of the book I yawned my way though, I did find the last essay (I should mention its a series of – sometime repetitive – essays about AI/technology and the past and future) on a future where a transhumanist self is defined not by intelligence but by love to be compelling. Oh I know it’s the Unitarian in me, and I know its a desire for there to be something that connects us, but that call to love as the ultimate end is well, deeply appealing. Even if Winterson doesn’t attempt to define what love is (or where, how, when it operates – or operates differently from a god BUT WHATEVER).

Leave a comment

Filed under Non-fiction

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

February 16, 2025 · 2:23 pm

All the Worst People: In which you accidentally think something

Phil Elwood worked in PR for a lot of terrible people: dictators and tyrants and etc. Then he wrote a book about that experience All the Worst People. And in the book makes the argument that whoever controls the narrative controls what people think. So one cannot help but think that the book itself might just be one such effort to make us readers think particular things about Elwood.

While the explanatory frameworks of mental illness, or desperation, or youth make his individual actions comprehensible, the book casts the larger structures of extreme wealth and connection are the real problem.

And while I’m inclined to agree with the argument, in a book about how feelings and thoughts get constructed and manipulated, this reader could not help but be suspicious that the same was happening. All the while enjoying the narrative intensity of Elwood’s anecdotes of adventure and misadventure amid piles of cash or injections of ketamine (which, let me say, the book does a great job of convincing the reader is a Good Idea).

As I continue my tentative exploration into more non-fiction by way of very fiction-like non-fiction, I’ll say this one does much to build and maintain narrative and character.

That’s it – no strong endorsement one way or another. If you’re looking for that, the NYTimes put this in the top 100. Maybe 10? Who cares.

Leave a comment

Filed under Non-fiction

Tagged as , , ,

July 3, 2024 · 3:24 pm

The Wager: Fun summer read of mutiny and murder (and a dose of colonial introspection)

David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is spectacularly good. Non-fiction, spectacularly good you say? Well, willing to try because it’s as close to historical fiction as it comes while still being non-fiction. Told with all the narrative oomph you’d expect of a thriller, The Wager charts (get it? a nautical joke?) the efforts of the British navy in the mid 1700s to secretly capture a Spanish ship filled with gold and treasure in some hard-to-understand war between the two empires.

From the beginning the expedition seems doomed. The book catalogues the near-impossible effort of just finding enough sailors as almost everyone – rightfully – viewed naval war as doom and ran away. Like soldiers running through the street capturing any able-ish bodied man or boy and forcing them on board. As you can imagine truly committed to the war effort. And then setting out with barely a plan, at the wrong time of year, with not the right crew and you can imagine things did not Go Well. Enter lots of waves and broken ship parts and some light cannibalism and casual encounters with naval battle.

After the ship wreck (spoiler: there is a ship wreck) and the mutiny and the two incredibly improbable successful returns to England, what really captivates -and what Grann does so well to weave throughout the book – is the importance of owning narrative. As the two different groups try to persuade the public and the naval authorities of their version of events the reader comes to recognize the way the very history they’re reading – contested, partial, necessarily incomplete – does similar work. Toward the end and in the concluding chapters Grann makes more explicit the way Britain and all empires used this narrative authority to justify their colonial ambitions and violence, and the way this pattern of declaring authority by means of ‘owning the narrative’ persists in the present.

Leave a comment

Filed under Fiction

Tagged as , , , ,

November 24, 2021 · 3:19 am

Empire of Pain: It Won’t Feel Good (and not just because it is literally very heavy) But A Must Read

I did commit to reading more nonfiction this year, and so in the waning months of 2021 I thought, why not read something cheerful, like a 560 page deep dive into the Sackler family and their obscene greed that brought the world mass marketed pharmaceuticals and Oxycontin and the subsequent hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths?

I didn’t realize when ordering it from the library that it was from the same author, Patrick Radden Keefe, as my previous 2021 nonfiction win, Say Nothing. But happy discovery, as like Say Nothing the writing is ‘novelistic’ in that people (cough characters) are afforded full depth and complicated motivations and that there is a plot that one can latch onto. So no dry, dull non-fiction for this reader. (Sure, sure, I get it, 2021’s experiment has proven that non-fiction is… pretty great. Don’t rub it in, NHFH.)

What this one offers is on the surface a biography of the Sackler family, beginning with the three brothers that found Purdue pharmaceuticals, but chiefly Arthur, who is something of an impossible figure to believe in the range of interests, the maniacal pursuit of them and the ‘success’ he brought in merging the fields of advertising, medicine and drug development. We then follow the subsequent generations of Sacklers and their truly relentless and amoral pursuit of profit over the clear and consistent and unequivocal proof the dangers of their opioid products. The level of corruption within the government and government agencies, of doctors and pharmacies, the collusion and feigned ignorance, it’s all… a lot, and yet, somehow not at all surprising.

The book explores with some complexity the complicity of later generations and what level of involvement within the Sackler business should ‘taint’ a Sackler family member. Or whether benefiting – directly or indirectly – from Sackler profits besmirches the character or actions of an individual family member, some of whom (though not many) were tangential to the direct business dealings.

I especially appreciated the section detailing the work of activist artist, Nan Goldin, and the demonstration of the power of art to unsettle and unseat power. A meta commentary, I’m sure, on the potential of the book to provoke change, of books to make a difference.

2 Comments

Filed under Bestseller, New York Times Notable, Non-fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , ,