As Scott Shapiro points out in the opening pages of his history of hackers and hacking, “there are at least 15 billion computers for only 8 billion people.” And most of us eight billion seem to live in constant fear that some malicious 15-year-old kid in Belarus is going to wipe out...
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Michael Lewis has been getting a beating lately by just about everyone who mentions his name in the news. His latest book, Going Infinite, presents a balanced picture of the failed cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman-Fried. Some imply the book is essentially a whitewash. But just about everyone else...
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Genentech launched in 1976 to commercialize recombinant DNA technology. Ever since then, biotech has played an increasingly prominent role in the US healthcare industry. A flood of startups has explored every nook and cranny of the possibilities. Venture capitalists and medical researchers...
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In the four seasons of the award-winning HBO drama, Succession, the sons and daughter of billionaire media mogul Logan Roy fight like children in a sandbox for their father’s favor—and the nod to succeed him in controlling the family business. Now, in a brilliant new book by two...
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Words, words, words. How else might we perceive the reality we live in, much less convey what we see, think, or feel to another? Unfortunately, as the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke once wrote, “So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of...
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Everybody in the world of technology talks about the Metaverse. But no two people among them seem to agree on what it is, how it will be built, who if anyone will control it, and when it will become a reality. Tech investor Matthew Ball sets out to address this problem in The Metaverse: And How It...
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With a population of 1.38 billion and the fifth largest economy in the world, India is a giant among nations. Yet a single family has played an outsize role in building the economic engine that makes India what it is today. In no other large nation has any family loomed so large in modern history...
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As tech companies go, PayPal is a piker compared to the bold-faced names of the industry. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, not to mention Tencent and Alibaba in China, all dwarf PayPal on all the metrics used to measure success in Silicon Valley. What’s truly remarkable about PayPal,...
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In the prologue to his new book, Peter S. Goodman explains that “the term Davos Man was coined in 2004 by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. He used it to describe those so enriched by globalization, so native to its workings, that they were effectively stateless, their interests and...
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Following Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail and arriving on bookshelves the same month as Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward faced an uphill slog with the publication of The Devil’s Casino. Thousands of readers no doubt assumed the book was one more of...
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Until recently, when Amazon emerged as such a deserving target of opprobrium, ExxonMobil was, without doubt, our country’s most-hated corporation. The two companies may compete for that distinction today. Private Empire is Steve Coll’s admirable attempt to explain the truth about...
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How does a company get to be as big as Amazon in just twenty-seven years? And how does a man become as rich as Jeff Bezos? After all, as of this writing Amazon employs nearly 1.3 million people and is valued by the stock market at $1.7 trillion. That’s trillion, with a T. And Jeff Bezos,...
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Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World should be required reading for every foundation board member and program officer, every major donor—in fact, philanthropists of any description. In this tiny volume, Michael Edwards lays bare the fatal flaws in the philanthropic world in America...
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If you sometimes wonder, as I do, what good civilization has done for us, consider food. For most of the 300,000 years during which homo sapiens has walked on Earth, we devoted nearly all our waking hours to finding and securing food. That began to change about 10,000 years ago with the advent of...
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One of the best ways I’ve found to explore the factors that influence the grand sweep of modern history is to examine the stories of individual companies, industries, and commodities. And among the books I’ve found that have helped the most are The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand...
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At first, before Henry Ford, before the twentieth century, the automobile was not a sure thing. In fact, it was a downright nuisance. For starters, they couldn’t agree on what to call it. A “road machine?” “Automotor horse?” “Buggyaut?” “Horseless...
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His father was arrested for failure to disperse from a Ku Klux Klan rally. He was also investigated for profiteering by the U. S. Senate and the State of New York and sued by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations. His son-in-law’s father spent fourteen months in Federal...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes It’s difficult not to be alive and aware anywhere in the world today without recognizing the impact of Silicon Valley on the way we live our lives. Half a century ago the Santa Clara Valley that is the heart of what we know today as Silicon Valley was purely...
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The first computer programmer was a woman. Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, wrote code in 1842-43 for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a computer that was never built. And a century later, when the first digital computers finally came into existence, the programmers were mostly...
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If you’re looking for an expert to confirm your fears about killer robots, the grey goo problem, or robots taking all our jobs, you’re in the wrong place. Amy Webb began her career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She has become a widely respected futurist, author, and...
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Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.