The following is a message I sent to US Senator Pat Toomey this afternoon after trying to call his district office in Philadelphia and getting a busy signal… again. I am extremely disappointed with your statement on Trump’s immigration order. Donald Trump’s decision to immediately prohibit travelers from 7 countries from entering the United States, […]
Archive
Contacting my Senators to support the Affordable Care Act (and urge for a suitable replacement if it’s repealed)
Well this is new (for me). I just contacted Pennsylvania’s two Senators to let them know my thoughts on the Affordable Care Act and the Republican effort to repeal it, which is moving forward in the Senate. Healthcare.gov At this point it seems highly unlikely that the move to repeal the law that’s widely known as […]
Shada: the Douglas Adams script for Doctor Who finally feels complete
Before writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams was a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. But he’s only credited with having written a few episodes — one of them was never broadcast. That’s because production of Shada was interrupted by a BBC strike and parts of the episode were never filmed. […]
The Casual Vacancy review: JK Rowling’s follow-up to Harry Potter isn’t magical, but it’s a page-turner
J. K. Rowling has a way of creating fictional worlds that feel reel and filling them with characters that seem to take on a life of their own. The plot is almost beside the point… but by the time The Casual Vacancy comes to a close, it’s hard not to feel something for the cast […]
Book review: The Day The World Discovered the Sun
The Day the World Discovered the Sun: An Extraordinary Story of Scientific Adventure and the Race to Track the Transit of Venus by Mark Anderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars In the early 18th century astronomer Edmond Halley determined that the Transit of Venus represented the best opportunity to calculate the distance from the […]
Pandora’s Seed Book review: It all started going horribly wrong about 10,000 years ago
Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by T. Spencer Wells My rating: 3 of 5 stars Back in the dark ages I studied communication in college, but I also minored in anthropology. I was fascinated by the one class in archaeology I took, and even subscribed to Archaeology Magazine briefly before I realized that I never get around […]
2030 book review: The future looks a lot like today, but older
2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America by Albert Brooks My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the fourth book I’ve read recently which depicts a world which seems entirely plausible when you look at today’s trends in society and technology. That means you don’t get flying cars, jetpacks, or colonization of […]
Embassytown book review
Embassytown by China Miéville My rating: 4 of 5 stars Embassytown is told as a sort of memoir of a woman who grew up in a small colony on the edge of nowhere. She lives in a small human-populated area of a city formed by aliens she (and most humans) know little about. Like many […]
The Long Earth
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars The basic conceit behind The Long Earth is simple: There are parallel universes and one day human beings discover they can “step” from one to the next quite easily. But while most parallel universe stories would use this as a stepping stone to […]
Garbology
America is full of junk. Like, a lot of junk. Like we generate more trash per capita than any other nation in the world… an average of 102 tons per person over the course of a lifetime. When Edward Humes started out to write a book about America’s trash legacy he thought the number was […]
Book review: Visit Sunny Chernobyl
It sounds like a silly idea at first: visiting seven of the most polluted places on the planet and treating them as vacation spots. But from the moment he hits the ground in Chernobyl and as we follow him to Canada, Texas, the Pacific Garbage Patch, Brazil, China, and India, Blackwell is an engaging story […]
The Hunger Games Trilogy
Note: I’m still experimenting with how best to write about books without reading spoilers. I think I’ve largely managed to do that here, but if you don’t want to know anything about the series other than whether it’s worth reading, the answer is yes. I just spent the last week reading The Hunger Games Trilogy by […]
Review: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
As a tech blogger and journalist I’ve been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I’ve focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a […]
Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)
There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn’t ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it’s tough to make a profit (but it’s tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn’t pay its employees […]