Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Favourite photo of the year: The Nintendo World train in Osaka through cherry blossoms. Taken during April’s Micro.Blog photo challenge What a year. 😫 Closed down a company. Pulled all roots out of Japan and moved to a new city in Canada. Began settling down. Kids in a new school. Started a consultancy. Engaged with local community. Reconnected with old friends and family. Deepened my intellectual development. Found new paths to explore.Sunday, October 27, 2024
The CITED podcast is back! It has been a few years. I’ve previously enjoyed their work on the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing and many of their critical episodes on their original run in the 2015-2018 era. Gordon Katic and the CITED team have an engaging narrative technique for introducing listeners to complex topics, so I know this new series is going to be good. This time they are taking on the issue of expertise in economics and how it is abused.Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short) by Ruha Benjamin 📚 In order to flourish as individuals and a society we must free ourselves from the strictures of standardized testing, industrialized education, “accelerated learning”, technocratic utopianism, solutionism, longtermism, white supremacy and eugenic thinking, the carceral state, credit scoring and the “ordinal society” (See Fourcade and Healy), and more! It is hard to be imaginative when we are oppressed… but we have to be imaginative to overthrow the oppressors.Wednesday, May 15, 2024
📚 Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is an ethical framework advocating for limiting excess wealth and redistributing to the benefit of wider society. The book builds its case by historically analyzing the rise of inequality over the past 50 years through global neoliberal policy; the social problems that inequality cause or exacerbate; how taking a Limitarian stance could improve things for everyone including the wealthy; and what needs to be done to get there.Monday, April 22, 2024
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport 📚 Cal Newport’s latest advice book tackles the question of productivity in knowledge work. Factory work can much more easily be measured and systematized. Newport points out that office workers, writers, artists, and scholars are often assigned tasks and must come up with their own individual system to be productive. These systems are opaque to managers, who end up relying on “visible activity” (which many busy office workers are familiar with) as the proxy for productivity.Finished Northern Ireland: The Fragile Peace by Feargal Cochrane 📚
A very readable, yet comprehensive, history of Northern Island over the past 100 years. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
In The Hundred Years' War on Palestine Rashid Khalidi takes us through six turning points of modern Palestinian history woven with family and personal history, including his frontline experience escaping Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. Khalidi has a long history as an advocate and an academic and writes a highly detailed account with an insider view. He covers the early Zionist movement, the Nakba of 1948, the Six Day War of 1967, the Lebanon War, the Intifadas and the rise of Hamas, giving context throughout as to who the geostrategic players are and how they change.Started reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi 📚
Only one chapter in and it’s more complex than I thought. Got new perspective on the “triple bind” of metropole (London) enabler (League of Nations) and settlers that don’t answer to the metropole. So much detail in this book.
Started listening to the full-cast audio of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett 👼😈 📚
Finished How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚
Enjoyed it a lot. Full of wonder! See my chapter notes here: www.goodreads.com/review/sh…
Nice intro to an incisive book. End of the year is a time for reflection, but it is ALWAYS a good time to re-examine your inner work camp. #burnout
My review from 2017 here: chadkohalyk.com/2017/07/3…