I haven’t kept up as regularly with these monthly updates as I had hoped, but I did keep reading through the summer. I stayed really plugged into my dissertation reading and research, which really cut down my leisure reading, but I still managed to get through several books that struck my fancy in some way or another.
Books
William Langewiesche's Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight. Saw it at a library book sale, and thought I'd give it a try. I've always enjoyed Langewiesche's writing in Vanity Fair and other longform venues, and my father was a navigator in the US Air Force, so I figured I ought to be at least somewhat interested in the topic. A quick but satisfying read.
Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law. The best nonfiction book I've read all year. Outstanding look at de jure residential segregation in the United States.
Simon Reid-Henry's The Political Origins of Inequality. A very important topic, but only occasionally interesting. Glad to have an intelligent geographer's perspective, but little pleasure in his prose or points of real, curious interest for me.
David Lagercrantz' I Am Zlatan. Fun, light reading--I read most of it on airplanes/in airports while traveling this summer.
Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy, read on recommendation from our friends Josh and Jeff. I liked the first book best, but all three were fast, engrossing sci-fi stories. Read them mainly at night after putting our son to bed.
Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. Read so I could have something to talk with my friend Dave about. Didn't hate it, but didn't really like it, either. Better than mindless reading, but only just.
Patrick O’Brien's Master & Commander. I actually really liked my first exposure to the Aubrey & Maturin series. My friend Dave's been recommending these books to me for years, and I never took the plunge until I went to Chicago for a conference and had 5 hours in a hotel room next to the airport and a shopping mall. Reading was the best way I could have spent my time, and so I read Master & Commander. I'm glad I did. At times, all the 19th century references and nautical terminology were like reading an untranslated work or a work in dialect.Longform Journalism
I read so much longform over the summer on Pocket (reverting back to bad habits). A fair amount was about sports and politics, which I won’t share here, but I also read pretty widely outside of those two ‘guilty pleasure’ interests. It’s hard to pick just a few of the best pieces, so here’s a longer list of what I’d recommend from the last three months of my reading:
On Technology:
Ian Bogost writing for The Atlantic on useless apps and how we're already living inside of a computer.
A Wired feature on Tristan Harris' work to lessen the intrusive impact of technology on everyday life.
Ed Finn writing for Aeon about algorithms and the roles of human creativity and machine learning
Jean Twenge's piece in The Atlantic smartphone usage and mental health impacts on teenagers.
Michelle Dean's article about the founding of Snopes and the messy divorce that has caused them to revise their own founding story.
Emma Hogan writing for 1843 about the surge in interest in micro-dosing with acid to achieve productivity gains.On Higher Education:
Tom Farrey's article about for the Undefeated about the disappearance of first-generation college attendees among D-1 basketball scholarship recipients.
Todd Gitlin writing in The Washington Post on the long history of free speech challenges on college campuses.
Three reporters' data-driven story about affirmative action and the persistent (and growing) gap in college attendance at elite schools for African-Americans and Hispanics.
John Warner on what we know about teaching writing effectively.
Kyle Siler on future opportunities for scholarly publishing.
Ashley Powers' feature in The California Sunday Review on the costs of college attendance.On Race, Gender, and Social Issues:
Larissa MacFarquhar writing for The New Yorker about family court and its role in deciding when children should be taken from their parents.
Paul Kiel and Hannah Fresques writing for ProPublica about racial disparities and types of bankruptcy filings.
Rebecca Solnit writing about feminism and occupying space in Harper's and for The Guardian imagining what life would have been like had she been born male.
Albert Samaha writing for BuzzFeed News about why police officers file reports which contradict video footage of their actions.
The letter The Economist wished Larry Page had written in response to James Damore's infamous memo.
Rachel Monroe's article for The New Republic about real estate speculation and its impact on urban blight in America's cities.
Mina Kimes on Kim Se-hyeon, eSports and sexism.
Danah Boyd writing on her own blog about on empathy, privilege and perception.
Ben Schmidt writing on his own blog about the usage of 'public' vs. 'government'.
Sarah Sentilles writing in The New Yorker about how we ought to respond to images of human suffering.
Mark Boyle writing for The Guardian about herbalism and rejecting modern industrial medicine.
Atul Gawande writing in The New Yorker about health care and insurance.On Literature/History:
Ron Rosenbaum writing in Tablet on Elie Wiesel and Jewish anger. I also liked Paul Berman's essay for Tablet on Philip Levine and Spanish anarchism.
Sam Anderson's feature in The NYT Magazine on John McPhee.
Martin Puchner writing for Aeon about Goethe and the invention of 'world literature'
Jeremy Adelman writing for Aeon about nationalism and the rise and decline of 'world history'
Jacob Soll's article for Politico on the long, sordid history of 'fake news'.Miscellaneous:
Joshua Hunt writing for The California Sunday Magazine on the investigation of counterfeited goods in China.
Evan Osnos' New Yorker feature on the risks of catastrophic conflict with North Korea.
Natalie Angier writing for the NYT about the praying mantis.
Alice Gregory writing for The New Yorker on what it's like to accidentally kill another person (often while driving).
Will Boast writing about kokpar, a horse named 'Lazer' and Kazakhstan for VQR.
Julian Baggini writing for TLS about 'truth.'Book/Film Reviews:
Bradley Babendir's review of Evan Kindley's Poet-Critics and the Administrators of Culture.
Benjamin Schwarz' grumpy review of Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class for The American Conservative.
Robert Christgau writing a Terry Eagleton omnibus review for Barnes & Noble(!)
Carlos Fraenkel's review of Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, volume 3: Philosophy in the Islamic World.
Oliver Burkeman writing in The Guardian about 'the new optimists'
Robert Minto's review of Philippe Desan's biography of Montaigne.
Geoffrey O'Brien's review of the new Otis Redding biography.
Santiago Zabala writing for the LARB about Richard Rorty, 10 years after his death.
Marina Warner's review for the LRB of Thomas Laqueur's The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.
Sarah Cowan writing in the Paris Review about American designers and filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames.
Sean Cooper writing in Tablet about the great American documentarian Frederick Wiseman.Writing by friends:
Spencer Gardner's excellent 3-part series for Strong Towns on zoning: part 1, part 2, part 3.
Colin Gillis writing for Avidly about living in a smaller body after weight loss.
Kyle Johnson's podcast series about Olivier Messiaen, birdsong and classical music for Edge Effects.
Julia Dauer writing about names and St. Jude for Entropy.
Tom Schaub with the best story about Thomas Pynchon I've ever heard.Featured image by Steve Halama