Stop me if you've heard this one before. In the real world, Wade Watts is nobody, just a poor kid living in a slum on a dying Earth. But in the virtual world of the OASIS, he's Parzival, a hero questing after a holy grail. See, Halliday, the guy who invented the OASIS died and left his fortune and godlike admin powers to whoever could solve a series of opaque puzzles hidden in various Easter Eggs. Halliday was obsessed with the 80s pop culture of his youth, and the puzzles are based on that, leading to a mass nostalgic hunt through the past that Wade excels at with his deep base of trivia and skill at antique video games. Ready player One is a fast-paced power fantasy that's a decent bit of adventure fluff. It's also a existentialist horror novel.


Simulation and Simulacra. A copy with no original

The whole métier of Ready player One is nerd trivia. I actually like a lot of 80s stuff, like new wave music and classic synth pop, Dungeons & Dragons, Back to the Future, Real Genius and Commando. I'm even listening to the shameless neon drenched nostalgia of NEW RETRO WAVE as a I write this review. But this is just stuff I like.

In Ready player One 80s pop culture becomes a kind of fundamentalist ur-text, with the idea that obsessive memorization of a decade of mostly crap (Sturgeon's Law always applies, kids) somehow will make you an Actual Wizard, Harry. Wade is a decent enough guy, and does his fellow egg hunters a solid at the end when he wins, but there's no there "there", if you catch my drift. Wade's knowledge of the 80s is like the mental abilities of the Shas Pollak, who could tell which word on a specific page a pin inserted through the Talmud would hit, but who is in all other aspects a mediocre scholar.

Wade treats 80s emphemera like holy writ, and while in the story his obsessive knowledge brings him power, it doesn't bring any meaning, beyond "these things exist". Wade could have learned some lessons about confidence, coolness, friendship, imagination, or stubbornness, but nah, it's just a "media, created by XYZ in 198*". Ready player One smooth assurance that style matters more than substance is its own perfect anthesis, a stunning indictment of "fan culture" through the present moment.

And it's also a fun book about a geek who gets virtual giant robot and uses it to beat up an army of corporate drones before he gets the girl.

Everybody wants to ride a unicorn, take their IPO to the moon, party on the Playa with Elon, and generally be lauded as a genius. But the fact is, most startups fail. And while studies of some notably fraudulent failures have had a great deal of success: Theranos, WeWork, FyreFest, most companies fail for more mundane reasons. In the summer of 2015, Krubner was a software developer working at a startup in New York. The startup had a clever idea to allow salespeople to interface with their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database with a slick smartphone app using natural language processing (NLP) instead of doing incredibly tedious data entry. Krubner expected, well, a job that made sense. What he got was a six month journey into a vortex of deception and psychological abuse. Most of us have been in situations that were kind of messed up. Krubner took notes, and then he took the gloriously self-destructive step of publishing this book. The names have been changed to protect the guilty, except for his own.

I actually know a little bit about NLP, and while getting "okay" results out of NLP is pretty doable, getting perfect results is incredibly hard. Like, "the best minds Google can hire with all the cloud compute they want" hard. Listening to the business statement of the startup makes me want to reach for my gun. Hearing that anybody would rely on this for major deals makes me sure to save the last bullet for myself.

Krubner was hired for a pretty standard dev role, plugging an iphone app in development into an NLP model and then Saleforce's CRM database. The hard bit was the NLP model, and a quote-unquote "brilliant data scientist" Sital had been hired to build it. But Sital spent all day watching weight lifting videos on Youtube and had mediocre coding abilities. Two of the 'cofounders', including the Chief Technology Officer, vanished to Silicon Valley internships.

Krubner put in long hours, but bugs derailed demos and core pieces of the software simple didn't work. And this is where the pyschodrama began to unravel. The CEO was a young college grad named John, and his typo-ridden messages became increasingly erratic under pressure from the board of directors. It seemed that John was just the front for the most active member of the board, a man by the name of Milburn. Milburn was a middle-aged salesman who had taught himself enough Visual Basic in the 90s to claim to be a programmer. He'd had an idea, and picked the malleable John, the son of a friend and former intern, to implement it. As John failed, because the task was beyond the team's capabilities, Milburn became increasingly involved and manipulative, finally confronting Krubner in a barrage of insults and accusations that Krubner was sabotaging the company. That was the end for their relationship.

I've searched some other reviews of the book, and an older essay that had some of the same story. There is an air of incredulity from some of the commenters. There's no way Sital could be so incompetent, Milburn so Machiavellian, or Krubner such a stereotype of the stolid software engineer. I would sincerely like to have these people's blessedly competent lives, because I'm at a boring suit and tie company with good processes and stable cashflow, and I've seen everything he written about here in software development. And as for why he stuck with it. Well, apparently the incubator was really fun, and it beat the hell out of his previous job as a developer for a serially failed founder.

This little startup was likely doomed from the start, but some advice generalizes nicely. A startup has to be a radically transparent learning organization or it is dead. Lies and deception are fatal. A team is only as strong as its weakest member, and weak links have to be cut mercilessly. And the real leader has to be involved and accountable to the process, having enough strength of will to bring something new into the world while not being so caught up in ego that they're unable to admit mistakes.

And Lawrence, if you ever decide to do a PhD, please take some good notes.

Ted Chiang is one of the most remarkable voices in science fiction. Above all else, he is a living symbol that science fiction is a literature of ideas. He writes at a bonsai pace, perhaps 20 short works over as many years, but each of them is a masterpiece.

In Exhalation, Chiang wrestles with the paradoxes of predestination and growth. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a time travel story set in the medieval Arab world, where various characters encounter a wormhole through time, and discover that fate is exactly as Allah wills it, no more and no less. This is a theme returned to in What's Expected of Us, where a machine that blinks one second before you push the button causes mass hysteria, and more generously in Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, concerning a world with common communication with nearby quantum neighbors, and the psychological effects of being able to communicate with your paraselves.

The other major tentpole of the book is forms of childhood, particular through The Lifecycle of Software Objects which focuses on the growth of intelligent if not terribly bright AI pets in a virtual world, and the bonds they form with their humans as they reach a tentative adulthood.

But my favorite stories were Omphalos and Exhalation, relentlessly rigorous extrapolations of a single high concept that showcase a brilliant alternative takes on Young Earth Creationism and the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen makes a few good points about constitutions in its covered period of 1750 to 1914, but then loses itself in a morass of irrelevant detail about constitution writing. Colley makes two major points which are often obscured by the primacy of the American Constitutional civic religion. First, constitutions are not enacted out of high-minded principals, but instead tend to arise as a response to financial and political stresses, especially the stresses incurred by imperialist 'hybrid' wars on land and sea best exemplified by the globe-spanning wars triggered by the French Revolution and ended at Waterloo. Second, most constitutions are ephemeral experiments, being replaced after a few years. Even in the United States, state constitutions are hardly sacred writ, the Alabama constitution seems to have been amended regularly, mostly to keep down African Americans. The longevity and seeming immutability of the US constitution is a massive exception to the usual life of these documents.

And then comes the irrelevant fluff. Colley begins with the 1755 Constitution of the Corsican Republic and the career of its military leader Pasquale Paoli, and then ambles through the lives of people who did constitutional writing across the world. Somewhere about 300 pages in and around Pomare II of Tahiti, I realized that what I was reading was a political version of Lomask's Great Lives: Invention and Technology which I loved when I was 10. Page after page was filled with biographical detail, and almost nothing devoted to the political thought that constitutions represent.

This barest pretense of intellectual history is the most critical flaw of this book. For all that it's brought up, the "constitution" could be an abstruse form of poetry or perhaps some kind of sport. Having declared that constitutions served to stabilize states against internal pressures caused by taxation and conscription, Colley has little to say about political stability in constitutional regimes, except that London was spared both unrest and constitutions thanks to its victory over Napoleon and centrality to global trade.

And this is a shame, because constitutions are fascinating documents full of contradictions. They're utopian designs for a more perfect union, and pragmatic attempts to stabilize unruly minorities. The American Constitution was silent on the subject of slavery and explicitly excluded Indians as part of a settler-colonial project to seize the West. Meanwhile, the post-Bolivarian constitutions of South America enshrined (male) legal equality between the castes, including African slaves, though actual power reminded in the hands of a criollo elite. And as I recall from my serious academic years, a constitution must be created and enacted by a process outside the constitution itself (Jasanoff, Agamben, Graeber? I don't care to track down the exact reference). In a legal society, a constitutional moment is one when the raw power of political violence surges close to the genteel debates of the legislature.

I'm most familiar with this period through Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, and Colley captures almost none of the drama or weight of the era. This was a time when people were actively redefining the nature of politics in debate, mob violence, and massive wars. Colley brings forward peripheral voices, so points for talking about non-Europeans here, but in a broader sense, the debates of the French Revolution and 1848 between liberals, autocrats, and radicals about who wields power and to what ends, are the same debates that we have today. Good history shows us what people in the past thought, and the sources and consequences of their actions. On this measure, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen fails entirely.

I read this book thanks to a glowing review in the New Yorker. "Nobel prize in history" my ass. I may have to start skipping the book reviews along with the fiction if they're this unreliable.

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto,
I've lived all over this town
--The Talking Heads - Life During Wartime

Conroy is American journalist who had a sense that The Troubles, the ongoing violence in North Ireland, was being woefully misreported. He got a grant to spend a year in Belfast, researching just one story. He wound up in a boarding house in Clonard run by Mrs. Barbour, where he experienced 1980 and 1981 from the Catholic perspective.

Conroy's story is one of tension and life under occupation. At this point, a decade into the Troubles and a half century into partition, violence in Belfast was ritualized, professional, but also frighteningly random. The Provos (Provisional IRA) took aimed shots, mostly at the British Army and the police. The counter-force of police sweeps was equally arbitrary, seizing local men on flimsy pretexts. Violence between the Catholic and Protestant communities was mostly ritualized into Marching Season and schoolyard beatings. The extreme segregation of Belfast prevented more frequent encounters, though both sides feared a common holocaust of mass violence, a repeat of the riots which had burned out Bombay street a decade prior. Low level street crime was omnipresent among youths who had no opportunities for legitimate advancement, and were mostly sealed off from the tightly compartmentalized world of IRA operations. Muggings and robberies were omnipresent. The Catholic community distrusted the Protestant police on matters of ordinary law and order, and so the IRA stepped up with rough vigilante justice, kneecapping boys who were particularly troublesome. Belfast was surprisingly livable for a city at war, except when it wasn't. Conroy was held at gunpoint by both sides, and the IRA repeatedly occupied the boarding house to use as a trigger point for a roadside bomb. Even in the drama of the hunger strike by Bobby Sands and nine other Irish martyrs, Belfast mostly gets by.

With present eyesm what is striking about Belfast in the Troubles is how well it set the pattern for the War on Terror and the militarization of domestic policing. Decades before the Patriot Act, the British had their own special laws and courts for dealing with IRA suspects. Twenty foot walls blocked neighborhoods of opposing sects in Belfast before similar barrier went up in Baghdad. And for all the bloodshed, the attitude in London was one of imperial neglect. Of course, Northern Ireland was a vital part of the United Kingdom, but god forbid Britain give civil rights to the entire population, enforce laws on the Protestants' paramilitary groups, or do anything to improve the material conditions of the people of Belfast. Instead, regiments would rotate through, the war would go on, and nothing would change. Because the only thing worse than committing to an unjust and unworkable policy is admitting that it failed.

If you weren't in one of the ghettos, Belfast could be a prosperous, successful, safe, international city. But the imperial border and the so-called 'barbarians' are right there, a few streets away rather than on the other side of the world. As Conroy puts it, the most dangerous wall is the one that runs through the heart, the wall that teaches the next generation who to hate, and who not to care about.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a lot of fun, with a sharp sense of humor and good use of historical analogies. Orhan is a colonel of engineers in a Byzantine Empire expy. While he's in the army, he builds bridges rather than kills people, getting the job done through solid technical design and bureaucratic trickery.

Orhan is procuring a large quantity of rope at a central naval depot when pirates attack. But these pirates aren't after gold and rum. It's a raid to steal military equipment and burn naval stores. In the name of efficiency, the Empire has stored military supplies at key depos, and fleets can't sail without rope and barrels which have all gone up in smoke. Over the next few months, more precise attacks cripple strategic points throughout the Empire.

By the time Orhan and his engineering detachment make it back to the City, they're all that's left. The local defenders have been annihilated, there's an enemy army on the doorstep, the Emperor is a vegetable, and all Orhan has to defend his city are a few thousand engineers, some corrupt city watch, feuding gladiatorial criminal gangs, and the stalwart landscapers of the parks department. It'll take every clever trick in the book, and some that aren't to save the city.

Orhan is a delight as a narrator, an ironic wit and technical man called far out of his depth in a crisis. The guiding principle of his life has been harm from his friends and gifts from his enemies, and each inversion adds to the fun of the book. And yeah, the Empire is a shitty place, racist, sexist, homophobic, unworthy of saving. These flaws make the book all the better. The things we love don't deserve our efforts to save them. Anybody who'd been the only sane man on a technical project will love this book, and I'm off to see how Parker's others books are.

The Sympathizer is a burning brand of a debut, a truly brilliant novel that delves deeply into issues of identity, memory, and myth. I can picture Nguyen, trembling with victor's exhaustion as the awards and accolades roll in, lifting up a thick contract from the publisher and crying out "They want a sequel!"

And so a finely complete story is pried back open. Our anonymous narrator escapes from the reeducation camp with his bloodbrother Bon, and having committed several murders in America, set out for Paris and the other major Vietnamese diaspora. There, our narrator deals with French racism, his deteriorating mental state, and the consequences of crime and drug addiction while dealing with some unfinished business from the first book: his love of the star of Vietnamese exile variety show Lana, and his friend's Bon plan to murder the faceless Commissar, who Bon does not know is their third blood brother Man.

The Committed has good parts, but suffers from a bad case of flab. The book dances around what literature professors think is interesting: unreliable narrators, French theory, fathers, cocaine and orgies. The satire of The Sympathizer was bitingly accurate. That of The Committed is diffuse, anti-Parisian stereotypes rather than acid caricatures.

The Sympathizer is a hard act to follow, and this sequel is simply okay.

Chapman is a pastor and marriage counselor who had an insight that there are multiple ways of expressing love, and turned it into a small self-help empire.

The five love languages are words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. In Chapman's analysis, relationships start with couples falling in love, and this mutual infatuation leads to a stage where people tend to speak all of the love languages at once. As people settle into a stable relationship, this tends to fall off. The problem is when one partner's expressive love language isn't the same as the other partner's receptive love language. Then you have couples saying "Well, I do XYZ, but they don't really love me." And if your love tank run outs, a relationship falters.

One of Murphy's Laws, "If it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid." Love languages is a lot less sophisticated than Esther Perel's psychodynamics of intimacy and desire, but it also explains why when my wife lets her discarded shoes pile up around the living room and forgets to put cereal back in the pantry it feels like a personal attack. Chapman ascribes near miraculous powers to love languages, fixing marriages most people would have bailed on. For what it's worth, Chapman is rather churchy and traditional in his approach to gender roles, but I think the underlying ideas hold regardless.

A tech start up has three layers. There is The Money, there is the Talent, and there is Everybody Else.

Wiener was the Everybody Else at three startups, going from a stalled low wage job at a New York literary agent, to an ebook startup, then a data analytics firm, and then Github. Meanwhile, she wanders through the back half of her 20s, meets some odd people, and wonders if the internet is eating our brains. As a stylistic aside, the book studiously avoids proper nouns. I can get that maybe Wiener doesn't feel like getting sued by a former employer, but she doesn't take a Lyft home, she hails a ridesharing app. No, not that one. The one with cuter branding but the same exploitative labor practices. This affectation wears out its welcome.

Wiener's basic job was customer support, helping engineers at other companies get the most of the analytics software, and then content moderation at Github. But the job is just an excuse for observations on tech culture circa 2013. These are not particularly novel. Programmers generally are not malodorous antisocial freaks. Instead they tend to tanned fitness fanatics, curious life-hacking optimizers who carefully balance self-improvement exercises and career networking with psychedelic excursions. Wiener has an attitude of genteel snobbery towards these people. With their belief in technical fixes, heirloom 60s counterculture utopianism, and desire to make lots of money, they're simply less cool and less authentic than the Brooklyn hipsters she decamped from.

As a programmer myself, I don't have much glamour about the profession. There's a sorcerer's apprentice joy at getting a piece of code to run, at scaling it to do a tedious task much faster and more easily than a whole stadium of people could. But honestly, it's mostly plumbing, making sure the data flows correctly. And Wiener tries to learn to code over a weekend and decides its not for her.

The Money, the venture capitalists and FAANGs who are the apex predators of the startup ecosystem, are briefly touched on. Two founders appear, one Wiener's boss, an erratic manchild who leads a small reign of terror at his profitable workplace. Another is CEO she befriends after a twitter fight, someone named Patrick who ends the book a billionaire. Wiener chronicles the descent of two unique cultures into generic corporations as they grow and salespeople show up, along with people with actual managerial expertise.

There are obligatory gripes about San Francisco's inability to humanely care for its homeless population, the ways that an endless stream of content is eroding all other human forms, that pointedly contrarian ideologues may not actually be good at compromise and running things. And of course, there are not enough women in tech, and those that are suffer from harassment. But at the moment that formerly beloved startup Basecamp is imploding over a racist list of funny client names, I think we can demand better takes.

Even the descriptions of San Francisco excess are bland, 20 somethings doing shots in an over-designed bar while wearing company hoodies. I've heard some things ("we spent the whole retreat looking for the CEO, who was also our ketamine dealer"), and I'm wholly peripheral to the startup scene.

I'm waiting for a good critical book on the startup ethos, but this isn't it. Its a memoir with the lesson that if you work at being an outsider, you can be one.

Your Move is a series of essays about boardgaming by Joan Moriarty, game sommelier at Toronto game cafe Snakes and Lattes, and Jonathan Kay, an avid hobbyist gamer, journalist, and currently editor at Quillette*. The essays are pretty populist and surface level. Table top games are fun because we can step inside a magic circle of play and commit fully without having to live with the consequences. They give us something to go with our friends, and offer levels of involvement from the minimally interactive Apples to Apples, to the elegant decision spaces of eurogames, to the grand strategies of complex supergames. Tabletop gaming experienced a massive renaissance in the 2010s, with the whole field growing several times over. Today, there are games for almost any taste!

The essays are best when they get away from the bland generalities. Kay likes Monopoly as an example of an unstable equilibrium, while Moriarty holds to the conventional wisdom that it's one of the worst games you'll ever play. Moriarty's deconstruction of Scattergories as a relationship killer which is actually about political skill in playing the table is brilliant deconstruction. Similarly, while Kay is not a fan of Scrabble, he has affection for the unique skills required at high level play. Nigel Richards won the French national Scrabble tournament by memorizing dictionaries, and still cannot speak French.

Where this book gets weird is when Kay starts inveigling against political correctness, even as Moriarty calls for a more diverse gaming community. I didn't discover the association with Quillette until after I had finished the book, but Quillette is a publication which spends a lot of time promoting discredited racist theories, employs Proud Boys information operative Andy Ngo, and generally is trying to make fascism an acceptable political viewpoint. So when Kay argues playing Phil Eklund's Greenland (and Eklund has his own issues), is a better way to gain respect for Indigenous people than the media growing out of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools, I roll to disbelieve.

So hey, its a decent set of introductory essays, except half the proceeds go to a guy who's making a career out of destroying Western democracy. Quillette fucking sucks. And to Libertarians and Conservatives out there, happy to have a discussion about regulatory overreeach or anti-competitive tax policy or whatever it is, once you deal with all the racists and actual Nazis you call buddies. Show some actual integrity, and stop making everything about 'triggering the libs'.