People love to share their favorite things. They write gift guides. They sing songs about them. They form committees to publish lists. They will bore you endlessly at parties. However, most of that is just talk. To really know what someone’s favorite things are, they need to put their money where their mouth is: what […]
Category: reading
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My Life on a News Diet
Like many liberals, the last presidential election really forced me to think about my own role as an American citizen. In the month or two afterwards, I ended up writing a list of over 50 things that I could do to make this a better country. Of that, I ended up actually doing somewhere around […]
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My Magazine Reading Paradox
Under my desk right now, I have a stack of about 52 unread magazines, and when I say “about”, I mean I just crawled under my desk, did a shoddy job of counting, and am not confident enough to give an exact number. But there are 52 of them. I finished the September 2014 edition […]
I recently have been engrossed by storytelling. Finding stories everywhere has been awesome. My fascination started with joining a book club about 2 years ago. Before book club, I hadn’t read fiction since high school, and most of that was mandatory. In between, I read various nonfiction and enjoyed the epiphanies and moments of wonder. […]
I have had a painful move out of psychology. Since I did research while I was still in school, I considered myself reasonably critical of experiments, basically fluent in psychological phenomenon, and quite up-to-date on recent findings. After I left school, I tried to keep in touch primarily through science writing, which I have actually […]
For November, my book club* read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. In it, Turkle, a professor at MIT, investigates how our relationship with technology has developed. In part 1, she writes about robots, from tamagotchis and furbies to robots for elderly care, and how we interact with and feel about them. In part 2, she writes about […]
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Not All Book Collections Are Made Equal
(If you think this entry might be boring, you can instead check out my review of the new Ike’s Place on Stanford campus at TUSB) You might find many reasons to be in Portland, Oregon, but all friends, family, websites, travel books, and random strangers will recommend you go to Powell’s Books. Add blogs to […]
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A Day in Google Reader
There’s a lot of great content on the internet. Unfortunately, it might take a long time to seek out and trudge through, except for the invention of feed readers. I started on Bloglines a couple years ago, but when they started having severe problems, I switched over to Google Reader. It seems important enough that […]
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Third Times a Charm
(Brownie points if you know what I’m going to write about already, though it only gets second billing) First, thanks tons to everyone who came to the surprise birthday party for me, but Willie in particular. While not mind-blowingly surprising, it was still more than just the moobie I was expecting, and a lot of […]
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Harry Potter… again?
I guess I just kind of go with the flow. No, I haven’t read it yet, so you don’t have to worry about spoilers in here. Surprisingly, people seem to be incredible respectful about this last Harry Potter book. Perhaps my memory has inflated my memory of flagrant spoilers for previous ones and “Revenge of […]