- Review: The Scout Mindset
Julia Galef's book points out the dangers of motivated reasoning, and encourages us to be skeptical of ourselves.
- Reading A Journal of the Plague Year in New York
Daniel Defoe's account of London in 1665 is eerily like New York in 2020.
- The Antihero of Silicon Valley: My Review of "Steve Jobs"
Americans love an asshole, if he's a winner. My review of the "Steve Jobs" movie on Shambhala Sun's website.
- Review of "Write Great Code, Volumes 1 and 2"
An unfinished work, good but not great.
- Review of "Autotools: A Practitioner's Guide"
Not a fun read, but it tackles a tough job and fulfills its duty with honor.
- Zen at War
On the eve of war with Syria, it's a good time to republish my 2008 review of Brian Victoria's "Zen at War".
- Moraff's World
A very strange 1991 role-playing game, and the current state of videogame art.
- Review of "MongoDB Applied Design Patterns" by Rick Copeland
An excellent new O'Reilly book on MongoDB gives detailed, well-thought-out designs for a range of applications.
- Review of "Building Node Applications with MongoDB and Backbone"
The O'Reilly book on cutting-edge web development encourages some bad habits but also demonstrates a lot of useful, elegant patterns.
- Review of Roman Vishniac Rediscovered
In the big retrospective show at ICP, the best images are Vishniac's early, pure street photography.