Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “media”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Liars' Gospel, by Naomi Alderman
- kudos:Some of my favorite stories are those that are big and well known enough that they have invited us to retell them over and over in new ways. This is why I will never tire of new takes on Spider-Man even if I agree that cinematic takes on the character have been rebooted too many times recently (also, put classic Marvel characters in the public domain!). It’s also why, after reading The Future, I was drawn in by Naomi Alderman’s take on the four gospels, writing four stories that barely intersect with each other and barely intersect with Jesus, retelling the gospels in a new way.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff
- kudos:Cory Doctorow’s review of Naomi Alderman’s The Future mentioned this book, so after wrapping up the former, I decided to start the latter. It’s not what I expected—Doctorow’s comments suggested the whole thing might be about billionaire survivalist bunkers—but in a good way! It turns out that it’s a broader take on a broader attitude behind survivalist bunkers and the way that attitude manifests in other ways. I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Spill, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories about People Who Know How They Will Die, by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki !
- kudos:This is one of the first books I bought for a Kindle I got in 2010. I don’t know why, but it popped into my head recently and I decided to reread it. Filled with a post-election feeling of wanting to do something amid all this powerlessness, I decided to buy a DRM-free ePub off Gumroad instead of reread the Kindle version, since it was pretty cheap and I want to further reduce my support for Amazon.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, by Jonathan Alter
- kudos:I am too young (and was for too long too disconnected from politics) to know much about Jimmy Carter except for a vague understanding of the common wisdom that he had been a poor president and of the progressive reclaiming of him in recent years. I’ve had my eye on this biography for a while: I nearly bought it at full price from my local bookstore, but when a used copy was on sale at the library for $3, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Agatha All Along
- kudos:This was fun! Interesting characters and stories, and that gets it a lot of credit. Not a lot of it holds up to close scrutiny, though—character motivations don’t always make sense, and plot explanations can feel unsatisfying. Glad to have tried it, though.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Future, by Naomi Alderman
- kudos:This book has everything: critiques of tech billionaires, a crazy heist, and some fantastic riffing on Abraham and Lot that could make it into a sermon one day. I regret not reading it earlier and look forward to my next read of it!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, by CRC Payne
- kudos:Look, I’m still tired of Batman stories, and I don’t think this series really pushes back against the grittiness and violence that finally pushed me over the edge, but this is as close as you get to “wholesome Batman,” and it’s kind of fun.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Diplomat (Season 2)
- kudos:I still enjoyed this season, but I don’t think it’s as good as the first one. The characters and situations remain interesting, but the plot feels more slapdash and less carefully constructed than it did in the first season.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Batman: Failsafe, by Chip Zdarsky
- kudos:I picked this up because it had Zdarsky’s name on it, and Jorge Jiménez’s art looked gorgeous. It was a fun read, but there are all the problems with it that I have with most modern Batman: It’s violent, absurd, and bogged down in continuity. I’m glad I tried it, but I don’t miss Batman all that much.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, by Glenn Fleishman
- kudos:I’ve listened to Glenn on The Incomparable for years, and a rule I try to follow is to pay for creative works from creators whose content I’ve often consumed for free. This sounded interesting, I do like comics, and so I bought it on a whim. I don’t think buying a print copy was ever in the cards for me, but I wish I’d at least read it on a bigger screen than my phone: It’s beautifully designed, and there are lots of visual goodies in there.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus for President, by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw
- kudos:I’ve seen a newer edition of this book on the shelves of my local indie bookstore and been curious about it for a while. So, I decided to look it up when searching for a new hoopla audiobook. It’s a breathtakingly radical book in its aspirations, and I loved that. It captures the kind of nonviolent radicalism that I want to explore more in this period of personal faith and world politics.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, by Colin Ward
- kudos:I have Ward’s Anarchism in Action waiting for me on my nightstand while I work through a Jimmy Carter biography, so I thought I’d listen to this on hoopla in the meantime (since I regularly do an ebook, an audiobook, and a print book in parallel). It’s an interesting and helpful overview of a political philosophy that I’m still trying to understand. Lots more to be read, but this gives some context.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus and the Abolitionists: How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People, by Terry Stokes
- kudos:I enjoyed listening to this book: Stokes writes well and reads his own writing well, too. It’s funny and (mostly) accessible, and it has a lot of ideas I can get behind. I also have a list of nitpicks, though. Stokes wants to have it both ways with critical Biblical scholarship, accepting (for example) that the Garden of Eden story is allegorical rather than literal but then also running with traditional interpretations (e.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, by Matthew Harris
- kudos:I’ve read a number of books on Mormonism and race, but this one might be the most compelling. Its focus on the 20th century is important, and it has the most thorough discussion of the 1978 lifting of the priesthood and temple ban that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to see all these details in one place, but I’m grateful that Harris made that available to readers.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I had some driving to do this weekend, so I tore through the audiobook of this at 2x speed. I may be a but harsh on it with my rating, but I just didn’t really love it? It’s well written and interesting but didn’t cohere enough for me. I wonder if reading it 20 years ago when it first came out might have changed my views. Some of it might have seemed more prescient, and some of its attitudes less problematic.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
- kudos:I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series earlier this week and decided to give the book a try. It’s a quick listen, though I probably should have read it to really lean into the metafictional aspects. Weird in all the right ways and got me thinking.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, by Sara Horowitz
- kudos:I picked this book up at an anarchist bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the books I was considering, this one seemed the most likely to give practical advice: How can we practice anarchist forms of living today? Horowitz never uses the word anarchist—which doesn’t bother me—but it’s also more ruminations and abstract ideas than specific calls to action. I enjoyed the book fine and “appreciate its rhetorical goals” (to quote Dan McClellan), but it wasn’t as helpful as I hoped in terms of concretely imagining better futures.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Animal Man 30th Anniversary Edition (Book Two), by Grant Morrison
- kudos:I like this volume better, but it still doesn’t quite land with me. I suspect it’s because I’m so used to metafiction in more recent comics that I don’t appreciate the sources they’re building on! At any rate, I’m glad I read these, but I can’t say that they were life-changing for me.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Animal Man 30th Anniversary Edition (Book One), by Grant Morrison
- kudos:I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much. I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
- kudos:Like Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, I think this book will be even more valuable in the future than it is right now. I also wish I’d waited to read it for a bit instead of so soon after Schiffer’s book! What a wild, depressing story the Musk acquisition has been. I appreciate this book for giving more insight into the pre-Musk troubles of the company, but it still doesn’t shy away from how disastrous one billionaire’s ego has been.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Slow Horses (Season 4)
- kudos:I’m surprised to be rating this higher than previous seasons, because it’s based off of one of my least favorite books in the series. I like the series more when it leans into the petty and mundane, and this book feels almost like a blockbuster spy movie with its unstoppable bad guys and conspiratorial plots. That turns out to make for good television, though, and I thought the season finale was particularly good, in a way that raises my opinion of the whole season.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for WandaVision
- kudos:I tried the first episode of Agatha All Along with my spouse, and we both agreed we needed a refresher on this series. I think this is one of the best entries in the MCU—certainly for TV. The premise is weird and is committed to it; it’s comic book-y but mostly in a fun way; it explores deep questions alongside action and humor; and it’s willing to show how scary superpowers are.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Sex Criminals (The Complete Edition), by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky
- kudos:I am by nature pretty prudish, and even though I’ve been successfully dialing that down recently, I still feel weird about having read this and even weirder about acknowledging that on a public website. That said, I’ve always felt like I should give this a try since it’s well regarded in comics, and after a few failed attempts in earlier, more prudish years, I powered my way through this complete edition over the past few days.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- kudos:This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook. It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Great War: American Front, by Harry Turtledove
- kudos:I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting. The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Biggest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox
- kudos:This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Glass Houses, by Madeline Ashby
- kudos:I put this book on hold at the library after Cory Doctorow recommended it on his blog. It became available at the same time as two other Doctorow-recommended books that I’m now trying to rush through before other holds take them away from me. This is a book about the great excesses of tech bros and the many tiny excesses of the people using their tech in slightly off ways. It’s about misogyny, both subtle and severe, and (in the background) how scary climate change, American politics, and the Internet of Things are.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Public Domain (Volume 1), by Chip Zdarsky
- kudos:I’ve passed this up a couple of times at the library, but an article at BoingBoing got me to give it a try. It’s a fun, meta take on the comics industry through comics themselves, even if it feels melodramatic at times.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for We Should Improve Society Somewhat, by Matt Bors
- kudos:Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells
- kudos:I’ve read this at least twice before, but it’s a fast read and a delightful one. I know it’s my favorite of the series based on my fuzzy recollections of the sequels, but reading this one again makes me feel like I should give the sequels another shot.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, by Zoë Schiffer
- kudos:I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up. Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, by David Graeber
- kudos:It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for After the Downfall, by Harry Turtledove
- kudos:This story has an interesting premise—a Nazi officer is plucked from a falling Berlin into a fantasy world where he learns a lesson about all peoples being people—but both fails to deliver and muddles its efforts. I like didactic fiction fine (it’s the reason I love Cory Doctorow so much), but the intended lesson of this story is clear from the beginning, and it’s never really obvious whether or why the main character undergoes any personal development.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.