The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Etherium

By Camila Russo

The rise and fall and rise again of Etherium and the cryptocurrency ecosystem more generally. Written by a Bloomberg journalist so her grasp of the technical issues is a bit tenuous but informative on the organization and sociological phenomenon. Something about this story speaks to a more general theory of innovation. New technologies are often adopted “too fast” in the sense that they are used for some rather important things before they are fully mature and cracks in the underlying systems can have somewhat dramatic consequences, but is it possible for innovations to take root without that happening? I couldn't help but think that the security issues in the Ehterium protocol that cause major issues early in it's development had a dramtically higher impact given the rapid adoption of the network, but they would have come up one way or another eventually. And if those flaws surfaced before a lot of people had a lot invested in the success of Etherium, would hey have been fatal? Seems likely. Maybe irrational exuberance is required to really bring something new into the world. Without the sunk costs driving us to bite the bullet and grind through problems, no new technology would ever survive it's infancy.

Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan

By Joanna Lillis

Less dark than the title might imply. Or rather, this is really three separate books. One on the political situation in Kazakhstan, an effectively one-party state ruled by an authoritarian strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev which is continually ratcheting up the level of repression to hold onto power. Another about the pecular history of Kazakhstan as a nation, where the Kazak people as an ethnic group came to be a minority. And a third which is a series of related vingettes that attempts to give a sense of what Kazakhstan is like outside of the international, cosmopolitan cities, where hard scrabble locals are trying to hold on to a way of life that doesn't uquite fit in tthe modern world.

My Sister, The Serial Killer

By Oyinkan Braithwaite

Contemporary Nigerian dark-comic fiction that is both a quick and entertaining read as well as a potent commentary on beauty and objectification. Who is worse, Korede or Ayoola? I don't know but thinking about it is an excersize in meta-ethics for sure….