Category: nonfiction
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Book Review: How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, by Gerd Gigerenzer
How smart is it to trust ‘smart’ technologies? That’s the question at the heart of this book, which I picked up at Salted Books in Lisbon, Portugal (book-lovers, you will love Lisbon), where I also got this amazing tote bag. It was the first physical book I purchased in 2025, but in my typical fashion,…
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Book Review: Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
I am naive. I bought this book imagining it had something to do with Gessen’s time growing up in the Soviet Union. I was wrong; it was a book written towards the end and shortly after the first Trump term — an attempt to reckon with that brief but irreversible period in American life. This…
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Book Review: Econobabble, by Richard Denniss
A short review — I will read anything Richard Denniss writes, if only because he is one of the few voices in Australia that actually makes any sense. This book is basically just a leftist’s funny and logical attack on contemporary conservative talking points, yet it also brings real insight and clarity to topics that…
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Book Review: Feeding the Machine, by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant
A wide-ranging book that lays bare the staggering human consequences of the AI industry. Perhaps it’s a byproduct of growing up with the Internet, but I distinctly remember the day it dawned on me that ‘the cloud’ was in fact just a bunch of servers sitting in data centres, connected to the rest of the…
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Book Review: On Freedom, by Timothy Snyder
This beautiful, intimate book about what freedom really means is the book we all need as the term becomes increasingly abused by the far right.
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Book Review: Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Sarah Wynn-Williams’ passenger-seat ride through the chaos years of Facebook is riveting, shocking, often funny, and perhaps a little too perfect.
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Book Review: Bookish, by Lucy Mangan
Books really do furnish a life, and this short memoir of sorts will validate book-lovers everywhere.
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Book Review: Doughnut Economics, by Kate Raworth
I’m now in my fifth year working in climate and sustainability, which is far too long to not have read Doughnut Economics until this Christmas. I wish I’d read this book years ago, because it gave words to concepts I’d been thinking and feeling but couldn’t clearly articulate. Here’s the basic idea: for a long…
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Book Review: Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lembke
Recently I listened to an episode of The Interview featuring Anna Lembke, MD, a professor and medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University. I was fascinated by the discussion and struck by her calm, open, and measured demeanour. It made the listening experience far more soothing than my typical 2.5X speed political analysis podcasts. Last…
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Book Review: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
On March 18 — release date — I downloaded Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance to my Kobo. Despite being in a foreign country with no access to English-language new releases, in a couple of clicks, I had in my hand what friends in New York, London, and Melbourne were all also reading at the…