I have not been good at keeping up with writing about books as I finish them here. To clear the slate at the beginning of the year, I'm going to do a short round-up.

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is the master at sci-fi as a polemic. His stories are pointed but also dense with allegory . . .

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Last year I did a simple scrape of LastFM to build a mathematical list of my top albums. This year, I spent a fair amount of the summer making mixes for my bike rides, which skewed things a bit toward more aggressive or energetic stuff. So I spent the last month or so revisiting everything I picked up in 2019, and found I needed to expand the . . .

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Curating your own interests is essential. There are so many think pieces devoted to curating your media diet or trimming down on the time that you spend on social media. The concept reads to me that too many people are passively letting crap come to them. Of course, the algorithm is shit, the algorithm only exists to . . .

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The collective unconscious unleashed by giving most of the world a megaphone is an angry adolescent. We are seeped in the kind of angst usually reserved for punk kids smoking cigarettes waiting outside the all-ages venue. Our culture is so perpetually pissed off that furious displays of righteous anger don't feel . . .

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Annalee Newitz's second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, finds her in good fighting form. If I wanted to give you a one-sentence synopsis of this book, it would be riot girls fight incels across time. If punk rock girls fighting neckbeards to guarantee universal suffrage and reproductive rights don't intrigue you, this book is . . .

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Art and aesthetics are, indeed, subjective. You might have the dumbest taste in the world and haven't met a pandering piece of garbage you won't buy, but you will still enjoy it. It's hard to argue that enjoyment is wrong. On the other hand, I feel like we can even need to have some way to signify art made to . . .

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