ThinkHarder

Exhalation

By Ted Chiang

I don't usually go for short stories as a format, but Ted Chiang is just a master of his craft. And even though the stories in this collection were written over a period of many years, it is amazing how there still a coherent set of themes which tie them all together.

Grand Marronage

By Irene Mathieu

I don't usually read short stories but I almost never read poetry but picked this collection up due to some particular circumstances. I can't say that I have anything interesting or insightful to say about it other than the poems are beautiful. It is natural if you are unused to reading poetry and very used to reading prose (especially non-fiction) to approach it as something whose intent is to convery information. But I think it is more useful to approach it in the way you would visual or audio art. It may be telling a story in some sense but the “point” is to evoke a subjective experience in the viewer.

Lost In a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections

By W. Joseph Campbell

I did not make it that far. The level of argumentation seemed pretty sloppy and inumerate so I figured it was only going to get worse.

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unravelled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

By Kim Ghattas

I don't think we really appreciate the tragedy of the Islamic world enough. This was the region where civiliazation began, that was the center of learning on enlightenment before the enlightenmnent in the West, keeping the knowledge accumuluated prior to the dark ages in Europe safe from the barbarians in the early Catholic Church and created a model of multi-ethnic governance centuries before we in the West figured out that we didn't have to murder anyone who looked different from us. And in just 40 years it has been erased.

Not only is this a tragedy in it's own right, it makes me deeply depressed about the future of my nation. How it can be so easy for those who lack a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves can exploit divisions to keep themselves in power.