Book Reviews
The Persistence of Printed Books
I guess not everybody shares in my enjoyment of the Kindle and the movement towards digital books. The New York Times reported that the sales of e-books has actually slipped in 2015 from the year prior, and that readers…
Review: The Three Body Problem
Science fiction is not a particularly huge genre in China as far as I can tell. Chinese stories – film, books, and television – set in the dynastic periods are common, but fiction about scientific advancements into the future don’t capture…
Review: Creativity, Inc.
Pixar has the reputation of being a pretty amazing company. Even back in 2002-2003 – when there were “only” a handful of blockbusters to the Pixar name – they were already a legendary firm on the Berkeley campus, one that my…
Review: Evo Moment 37
Fighting games are a pretty old-school genre. As far as I can tell, they became massively popular back in the dimly-lit arcades of the 90s, the ultimate culmination of one-on-one battles between players. It took a…
Kindle’s Chosen Specialization Against the Generalist Smartphone
The Kindle Paperwhite has no business releasing new hardware in 2015. It’s a stubbornly single-purpose device, one of the remaining few pieces of consumer electronics that hasn’t been completely consumed by the smartphone/tablet wave. I impulsively…
Review: Career Superpowers
Self-improvement books – at least the ones I read – fall into two categories. There are those who claim to unmask universal truths via research and corroboration across many different sources, and the rest draw from personal anecdotes to provide lessons.…
