More books read, and written about:
Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, read by Ezra Klein.
This was, like, a very long podcast episode.
I think that’s a compliment? I enjoyed Klein’s conversational style, the way he’d chuckle at his own pre-written jokes, the pervasive sense that he is genuinely energized by the topics the book covers.
I was somewhat energized by those topics too. Or, maybe I was calmed; either way I came away from the book with a more confident sense of the forces at play in American political culture, and now feel a bit more prepared to understand (if not to accept) what the next year might look like.
The other thing I’ve been ruminating on while consuming Ezra Klein (both in this book and on his actual podcast, which I listen to infrequently) is the remarkably small distance between my life and his. I believe Klein lives about a mile from me; we also went to the same university at about the same time; it wouldn’t be crazy to think that we have a second-degree connection between us. I suppose this isn’t all that surprising, and to the extent that I’m writing this for other people to read, I feel a bit strange bringing it up at all. But I find it confusing and weird.
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation by Nick Seaver.
I would not have read this book without the nudging from SOW’s Reading Group, but I enjoyed and found it thought provoking. It was less technical and significantly more academic than I was expecting, and referenced an impressively broad range of sources, from Derrida to Marc Andreessen.
In our Reading Group’s chat with author Nick Seaver, I mentioned that the book surprised me, which strikes me now as something that might be worth explaining. I think I was expecting the book to critique or at least explain the ways in which recommendation systems affect our taste, consumption habits, and the economic conditions under which music is made. It certainly touched on these topics, but the more prominent theme was the way in which the people who build recommendation systems conceive of their own work. Which was an interesting theme, and in retrospect an unsurprising one considering the book’s title — but somehow I was still surprised by it.
Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces by Ian Frazier, read by Ian Frazier.
Ah, I really enjoyed listening to this. I find Ian Frazier to be a delight — both to read and to listen to. His writing can be incredibly touching, funny, informative, and exciting. The topics he writes about are sometimes mundane, sometimes grand, sometimes expected and almost always thought-provoking.
What else can I say about this book? Well, I had read at least a few of the pieces in it previously. Frazier seems to respect every single person he comes into contact with, though to be fair he chooses which people he describes to us. Frazier’s humor often feels like an inside joke, like he’s whispering to you alone while all along the action plays out in front of him. His delivery on the audiobook is deadpan, but it feels somehow like he’s grinning — and doing so in such a way that everyone present would grin back at him and even nod along with what he’s saying. Frazier comes across as completely honest, but his honesty is always paralleled and matched by tenderness towards both his subjects and his audience. He is gracious, and observant, and incredibly entertaining, and I can’t wait to find something else of his to read.