Blog
This Could Be Important, My Conversation with Pamela McCorduck
In 2019, the ETC Press published Pamela McCorduck's book, THIS COULD BE IMPORTANT. Here, I'm releasing clips of our conversation about her life as one of the early science + technology writers.
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Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel, Our #GenX Writer
Elizabeth Wurtzel's books helped explain and then define—as much as anyone could—who GenX was in the nineties.
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Review: Old Man's War (The Series)
John Scalzi's OLD MAN'S WAR series takes you into a world where humans are competing with aliens to colonize our galaxy.
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A SXSW Guide to Surviving the Nerdpocalypse
A compendium of what I've learned in my twenty-five years navigating SXSW Interactive, the greatest show on earth.
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Review: A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman's book begins with the grumpy old man trope. But, if you hang around past the first few chapters, you'll find a story about community, history, and kindness.
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Review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
As a long-time fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was long overdue to learn about his life through different eyes. Therese Anne Fowler's Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald was a heartbreaking tale that traced the Fitzgerald's slow decent into misery as F. Scott chased his white whale: literary fame and respect.
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Review: Janelle Brown's Fiction (Three Books + Counting)
My old friend Janelle Brown left journalism (we worked in San Francisco during the Dotcom Boom + Bust) and took up writing books about our generation in a post GenX world.
Read More ›Elizabeth Wurtzel: She Was Our Rock God Writer
Elizabeth Wurtzel was—and forever will be—our GenX Rock God Writer.
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GenX, That Damned Newsweek Editorial, George Michael, and the Twitter Hellscape
In 1993, Newsweek labeled GenX as the "The Whiny Generation." We've been not giving a shit about that since. Also—George Michael is pretty great.
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Review: The Last Days of August (Audible Original)
Jon Ronson came to the story thinking it was about one thing (cyberbullying), but quickly found the threads took him elsewhere (mental health in the porn industry).
Read More ›Review: Christmas Eve, 1914 (Audible Original)
The audio play is short, just seventy-three minutes, but that’s more than enough time to take you on a melancholy trip through the hours leading up to the impromptu Christmas Eve truce in World War I.
Read More ›Review: The Man on the Mountaintop (An Audible Original Drama)
The play is a series of parables told through the stories of people who are waiting in a long line to meet with Joe, the Holy Man, who lives in a hermitage at the top of a mountain.
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GenX Tribe: Breaking Bones and Other Stories of Walking it Off
GenXers grew up breaking bones, having accidents, and dealing with mayhem—and many times going to the doctor was the LAST thing we did. So—share your story of GenX Catastrophes!
Read More ›Review: The View from Flyover Country
This is less a view of flyover country and more a response to flare-ups in flyover country. Still, I sat down and read the book in one sitting because it's smart, well-written, on point, and unapologetic. I dig that.
Read More ›Review: Alien: Out of the Shadows
While the story doesn't really add much to the Alien universe—it really is a mash-up of the two movies—it's still fun as hell to be back with Ripley (although she feels a little less feminist badass in the book, but not offensively so).
Read More ›Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind
The book chronicles the rise of Homo sapiens from our earliest days on through the very near future, gently walking the reader through the complex issues of empire building, the development of cultures, and the ethical examinations of what it means to even be human.
Read More ›Review: It Didn't Start with You
The book was okay, but not great. I was a technology journalist (Wired, MIT's Technology Review) so I'm reluctant to recommend books that get the science not exactly right.
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The Books that Influence My Writing Life
My favorite conversation: What books influenced you? These are the books that influenced my life as a writer.
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The Fourth of July and the Meaning of the Declaration
My middle school history teacher John Viall—a dedicated and decorated teacher—wrote a wonderful post about America, the Fourth, and e pluribus unum.
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Won't You Be My Neighbor, or How Mister Rogers Took on a Border Wall
King Friday XIII orders a border wall to be built. Lady Aberlin takes balloons, tied with messages of peace and love, and floats them across the wall.
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Free eBook on Machine Learning, A.I., and the Modern World
Sign up for my mailing list and get a free PDF of my latest book, Frankenstein's Legacy: Four Conversations about Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and the Modern World.
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"We Are Not A House Divided"
My friend KT Peterson and I embarked on a writing challenge on August 4-5: write 10,000 words and the read an excerpt from it. The title of this piece is "We Are Not A House Divided."
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About That Thing You Ask Me About Hillbilly Elegy
That's where the single narrative becomes so dangerous. Because people don't know the history of the region, and they don't understand its problems. Yet many of those same people have a great number of preconceived notions they aren't afraid to unleash.
Read More ›Review: Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place
I'm still trying to wrap my head around Crapalachia. It's not quite memoir, it's certainly not a biography of a place, and as we find out at the end of the book it's not entirely real.
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