By 2024 Sarah Longwell had conducted four hundred focus groups over eight years and she’s learned some things about American voters of every political persuasion, many of them quoted in this book. As she says in her introduction Listening to what Americans actually think is the only way we can understand why they think and…
READ MORE ➜Book Review Monday
Given today’s headlines, painfully relevant.
DCS Kat Frank of the Warwickshire police, back too early from bereavement leave, demands her boss put her back to work. Fine; he saddles her with the first AI policeman and sets them to work on cold cases involving missing people, mostly as a way to totally disprove the utility of AI in police work.…
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One of the best robot characters ever created in SF
I don’t much like reading books about time travel. Mostly it just makes me dizzy, I don’t deal well with paradoxes. There are a few exceptions, like Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp and Time and Again by Jack Finney. John Varley’s Millennium is another that has taken up permanent occupancy on my…
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“What is the achievement of a mere poet, compared to that of an Olympic victor?”
The Classic Age’s equivalent of the Grand Tour with a young Gordianus the Finder, in company with his teacher, Antipater, the dead epic poet. Yes, really. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the statue of Zeus at Olympia; the Colossus of Rhodes, alas fallen and in pieces but nevertheless awe-inspiring; the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (a…
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I can handle bad news, but not with every mouthful.
I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma thinking, “Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?” Although the mental image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, to the point that I started growing my own potatoes, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me…
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You’re grateful that no real terrorist thought of it first.
A police procedural featuring a murderer who chooses his victims by their street address. Almost everyone lives in a town with a Main Street. You said this wasn’t like any terrorism you had seen. That’s because we think of terrorism as something that happens in the cities. Nw York, Washington, DC, LA. This does something…
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