VoidPhil

This book by Karl Ove Knausgård is a rumination on the life and art of Edvard Munch, Norway's most famous painter. Not a work of biography, the author engages Munch as both a viewer of art and as a professional artist of sorts himself. Knausgård obviously has great respect for Munch, and it's inspiring to see how devoted he is to understanding Munch's life and work. The book is divided into three uneven sections, each with a selection of Munch paintings.

Emily Chang's debut book is an excellent discussion of the barriers women face to careers in technology in particular, and the workforce in general. I was impressed by the depth and breadth of her research for the subject and particularly by the massive number of personal interviews she conducted for the book. These interviews included often poignant, often disturbing anecdotes about the outsized role men play in Silicon Valley. The book begins with some historical context, explaining the key role of women in the early days of computer science and the rise of our increasingly technocentric society.

This book, written by Michael Inwood, is my first interaction with the “A Very Short Introduction” series of books. My initial reaction is impressed, as this is exactly the sort of book I was looking for in an introduction. The book manages to give a very serious, very in depth overview of Heidegger's thought. I appreciated that the book mainly ignored Heidegger's biography, a problem I've had with other introductory books, and tended to err on the side of being overly academic and overly in depth on issues, rather than skipping over them.

This book provides a really excellent introduction to the history and current state of US antitrust law. The author, Tim Wu, is a Columbia professor with former jobs in the Obama administration, SCOTUS, and other policy positions. The book manages to say a lot in a relatively small volume. I finished it in 4-5 hours of reading, but I feel I've learned a great deal. The book begins with an overview of the Gilded Age and the age of antitrust action, with particular attention to Louis Brandeis and President Theodore Roosevelt.

This book is an anthology of writings by 25 different authors about artificial intelligence, its future, and its impact on society. The editor prefaced the work by asking each of the authors to read a book by the cyberneticist Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings. I haven't read that book yet, although it's been on my list for a while. Some time ago I read Weiner's more famous book Cybernetics, although I must admit I largely failed to understand some of the more technical topics.