2022 Readings

I read 75 books this year (over 22,000 pages), and a few days still remain. Looking back over the full list, I'm both surprised at how many were only of middling reward. I think the key is to take one's sweet time on the true gems and speed through the should-have-been-a-blog-post dross. Out of the gems, the following stand out:

• Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. We're told so often about how mathematics and physics is beautiful, how it makes sense and that finding those kinds of beauty-centric explanations is what we should be aiming for, so I was surprised and invigorated by a book about how the opposite might well be the case. It's a few years old and I'm sure it's part of a wider argument and debate in the field, but without knowing much more it certainly opened my mind.
• Emmanuel Ameisen's Building Machine Learning Powered Applications: Going from Idea to Product was one of the first things I read as I transitioned into a new field and I often return to it. Lots of hard-won wisdom about the 'whole game' of machine learning in the real world, and a story economically-told.
• I didn't read as much science fiction as I'd planned this year, but of the ones that I did, Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 blew my mind. It's a classic for a reason, but still amazing to think that it was first published in 1966!
• For strong emotions and characters that keep you rooting for them, look no further than Shobha Rao's Girls Burn Brighter. Not a light read by any means, but a strong showing from start to finish.
• I devoured the eight currently-available parts of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries over the course of a few weeks. They're all fast-paced and once you've read the first the general conceit of the series wears off, but the character is so incredibly enjoyable. Come for the smart science fiction, stay for the strong character development. Definitely my favourite find of the year.
• Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence was a recommendation from a friend and it was a sharply sobering read in a discipline where ML boosterism is all too common. Nothing in there was particularly news, per se, but the picture as a whole raised important questions. Moreover, the balance between fine-grained detail and the big-picture worked well in this book.
• I reread Chanel Miller's Know My Name this year. Still as devastating and powerful as when I first read it, and a searing indictment of the criminal process for cases of sexual assault in the United Status. Required reading.
• Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a late entry this year, was my first Dostoevsky and I'm still thinking about quite a few of the scenes, weeks after putting the book down. In particular, the last time Raskolnikov meets with his mother.
• Some books are unexpected gifts, like Sarah Polley's collection of stories-almost-not-told entitled Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory. Each essay is unexpected, brave and deftly constructed. I've watched most of what she's been involved in since The Sweet Hereafter and this book certainly didn't disappoint.
• Finally, I read through the two books written by David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me and Never Finished and something about his take on suffering and the lessons it has to teach resonates a lot with me. I'll be returning to these to sort through his experience at a later date.

New book, new ways to order

“I was around three or four years old when the Communists led the bloodiest coup in Afghanistan. KhAD personnel were arresting the faithful. One day, a few ugly moustached men knocked on our door. My father left with them and then he never came back. We never saw him again.

“After a year, I began to understand that this kind person was no longer with me. Poverty, a cold fireplace, and my old clothes made it evident – I was an orphan. Every man with a moustache looked like my father’s murderer. My uncle took us with him to another village, and we no longer had a home of our own.”

In this way Abdul Hai Mutma’in begins his memoir of time alongside the senior leadership of the Afghan Taliban movement. First published in Afghanistan a couple of years ago, Taliban: A Critical History from Within is now available for pre-order in an English translation.

Mutma’in served as a political advisor to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and as spokesperson. He worked in the media section of Kandahar’s Culture and Information Ministry and from 2013 onwards served as a political and humanitarian affairs advisor to Mullah Akhtar Mansour from 2013. In short: he spent a good deal of time around the senior leadership and was privy to the internal workings and machinations of the Taliban movement at its highest levels.

At First Draft Publishing, the small publishing house I started five years ago together with Felix Kuehn, our explicit agenda is to publish books that will help “give researchers, professionals and the interested public access to primary and secondary sources”. This book falls firmly into this remit. The list of primary sources relating to the Taliban (or primary-source-adjacent) is exceedingly thin, even all these years since the movement first burst onto the national and international stage. From our perspective as researchers, the more such memoirs get written, the more we are able to attempt a critical unpicking of narratives and myths that have driven both conflict and efforts towards integration. Without these raw materials, it is impossible to begin the slow and methodical work of scholarship: triangulation, verification, context, synthesis and so on.

A bit of additional housekeeping: if you want to (pre-)order Mutma’in’s book, we have made some changes to how we’re producing and delivering books. We’re moving away from Amazon as the delivery system for our content and will simply process orders manually. For hardcopy purchases, we’ll be printing copies on demand. For ebooks, we’ll distribute DRM-free copies upon receipt of payment. If you’re interested in purchasing any of our books, please visit our website to learn more about our titles and email us to place an order.

My new book: The Taliban Reader

My new book is out (finally). The Taliban Reader is somehow the culmination of years of work to drive studies of the Taliban back to primary sources. Some of this work was accidental; more recently it was more purposeful. The book I produced (together with Felix Kuehn) is long and detailed.

Comments and feedback prior to publication were extremely positive. It'll presumably take readers a while to start getting some real independent reviews in, but I look forward to feedback and whatever conversation is generated off the back of it all.

You can pick up a copy at any good bookshop or from Amazon here.

The book you need to read on bin Laden's life post-2001

There is no shortage of books on the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Some stand back to analyse it in terms of trends and networks, seeking to explain the 'why' through abstractions. Others have written participant accounts or their histories from the sidelines. The Exile offers a fulsome corrective to this trend towards abstraction. Curious what life was like for bin Laden, his commanders and their families? Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy deliver in spades.

The beating heart of this book are the stories of bin Laden's wives, their children and their life in 'exile'. The authors seem to have managed to achieve as yet unparalleled access to the wives and some other family members of Osama bin Laden, and their tale is both gripping and believable. The second important contribution that the book makes is to reveal Iran's role in hosting the bin Laden families (and commanders) post-2001. The rich detail goes a long way to giving the reader a sense of the day-to-day frustrations of their lives in Tehran (and other places) as well as their interactions with Iranian military and government officials. The book would be worth its price just for these sections alone.

Chapter Eleven tells the story of the night bin Laden died, to a large extent from the perspective of his wives and family members. They also weave in accounts from US soldiers participating in the raid, but this is a perspective we have been denied till now and I think it is an important one. Indeed, the trauma faced by the children on that night (and throughout the years prior, for the most part unable to leave their home) is one of the understated but crucial themes that stand out from 'The Exile'.

Every account of bin Laden's time post-2001 has to grapple with the question of Pakistan's role. The authors take a smart position throughout the book, which is to abstain from abstraction and a strong analytic voice. There are some claims of Pakistani ISI involvement and meetings here and there, but they step back a little before charging the government or senior officials with a state-level conspiracy. Whatever happened, this account holds, was much more an affair of bit players.

The book had the feeling of being rushed to press. It must have cost a lot to research the book, so perhaps the authors simply ran out of funds, but it seemed like there were so many other lines of enquiry that could have been started. The hardcover copy I read still had a fairly large number of typos, and it's a shame that the authors use the word "Afghanis" to refer to Afghans.

The book is extremely readable -- it kept me up until two in the morning as I finished it -- and this is in large part because of the use of dialogue and building up narrative tension through conversations. Unfortunately, the handling of some of these conversations -- reported through interviews with participants -- strains credulity. Study of memory and oral history has shown how these kinds of memories degrade or get reshaped with each telling, and I wish there were more caveats throughout the book that what we're reading is an approximation of what happened in order to better imaginatively enter the situation.

All in all, though, The Exile is an important book, an engrossing read and hopefully the beginning of more enquiries as others follow up on leads and side-stories raised in the telling. I took copious notes and will be digesting its various contents for a while, I think. It seems that scholars of September 11 and its aftermath are doomed to eternally reading and retelling the same events in slightly different contortions as new facts and witnesses emerge. If all the books were as good as this one, I wouldn't mind so so much.

Robert Caro's Big Long Book

One million words. More.

The Power Broker is the kind of book you see in a bookshop, pick it up, put it back down again because its weight is a physical assault on your wrist.

It isn't available as a digital edition for Kindle, so you're stuck with lugging the physical copy around with you. I started this book in February, setting up a Beeminder goal to keep me on track. The pages are large and the type small, so even a goal of reading twenty pages a day took 30-45 minutes.

I persevered, despite some weeks where I was travelling and therefore separated from the 1.3 kilogramme tome.

It was worth it. At over a million words, Caro obviously has the space to include a good deal of detail.

Robert Moses, if you're still reading by this point, is the subject of this biography. Moses worked in city planning, transportation and huge building projects in the New York state area (and some other big ones elsewhere in the United States). Caro's book details his life story, showing how Moses' drive 'got things done' in and around the city. Whether it was building roads or huge buildings, Moses was a force to be reckoned with in political as well as administrative terms.

Caro approaches his subject from a number of different perspectives. He appears to have read a huge amount of the raw primary source material in the public domain as well as interviewed 522 individuals close to or involved in Moses' work. That he managed to keep the book so readable is almost a miracle in and of itself. Every page draws you in, details and stories and glimpses that make Moses and the times in which he live come to life.

There are so many amazing details and sections to this book that picking any one would detract from the whole. If you have the time (and the stamina), give this book a read, even if you have no prior interest in urban planning. Highly recommended.

How We Forget

“How naive he’d been, thought the optician, how naive. Because there would always be greater sorrow, deeper and more unfathomable than any of us could ever imagine.” (p. 83)

Bad things happen all the time. Suffering is a feature of life for many people. When this suffering happens on our doorstep, an initial flurry of interest is followed by a long steady wane as what was the extraordinary becomes routine. So it is with the boatloads of people making their way towards Europe. For a brief moment, Europe seemed to care. The passage of time saw even these tragic stories become absorbed into the fabric of ‘normal life’.

Emma Jane Kirby’s book, The Optician of Lampedusa hits the pause button on our collective forgetting. This is an Italian optician’s story, a short tale of his coming into contact with the raw human tragedy occurring with regularity on Europe’s southern shores. The optician is sailing with friends when he comes across hundreds of drowning Eritreans (among others). The book chronicles the moments before, during and after their rescue.

Kirby’s strength is to stick to detailed observations, relaying what was going through the Italian optician’s mind, what he was seeing and hearing. It (re)connects the reader with the unvarnished reality of those being smuggled into Europe. It’s a unique account in its directness, and was a sober reminder of something that I had started to forget.

If I have one criticism of the book, it is the perspective. I would far rather have read a book by one of the survivors, or at least to hear the story in their words. I understand that European publishers feel like they need a white face to relay the stories of ‘the other’, I just wish it wasn’t the case. Nevertheless, this was a sensitively written account and one I will be recommending to friends and family.

'Master Arabic' is Out Today!

I'm very pleased to announce that 'Master Arabic' is (finally) released and available for direct download. I've been busy finalising various small details relating to the text throughout January and it's great to have it finally out and in the world.

If you haven't already had a chance to check it out, visit this link to learn more about what the book contains and what extra materials come alongside the book as part of the premium edition.

I'm particularly pleased with how the online resource guide turned out (with over 300 resources listed). I continue to add to it each day, too, so this is a ever-growing resource in and of itself.

As always, if you have any questions about learning Arabic or about the book, please do get in touch on twitter or via email.

Pre-Order Now: 'Master Arabic'

We're getting closer to finalising the materials for our new book and resource guide, 'Master Arabic'. The full description of the book reads as follows:

This will be my thirteenth year studying the Arabic language. I've tried everything: university programmes, intensive courses, self-study and more.

My Arabic level remained at the intermediate level for years, a learning plateau, and I felt like I wasn't progressing. I spent the last three years getting to the advanced level and I'm now (finally) able to communicate comfortably in a dialect and tackling contemporary fiction.

I've decided to write up some of the techniques, attitudes and resources that are available to the intermediate student of Arabic. This is the condensed product of years of experimentation. This book contains advice on how to improve your reading, writing, speaking and listening skills and also offers suggestions for resources you can use to tackle each particular skill.

The premium package includes over a dozen interviews with leading educators, Arabists and students who impart their secrets on how to pass through to advanced materials. It also includes life-time access to an online resource database of materials to study Arabic.

As a way of saying thank you to all those who subscribed to the mailing list and to ring in the new year, 'Master Arabic' is now available for pre-order. A discount code is provided below that will allow you to purchase the book for 10% off.

There are two editions:

- Basic Edition -- You'll get a copy of the e-book in PDF format. You will also receive access to an exclusive curated guide to materials, content and study aids for students of Arabic.

- Premium Edition -- You'll get everything in the basic edition, plus multiple formats of the ebook to suit various e-readers. You will also get access to over a dozen interviews with students, teachers and experts from Egypt, Jordan and the United States who have unique insights into learning Arabic.

Feel free to email if you have any questions about the book, the materials or have a topic that you really feel we should cover in the book.

USE DISCOUNT CODE 'preorderthankyou' for 10% off. This one-off discount will no longer be offered once the book is released at the end of January.

Syria’s Revolution: The First Draft

I haven’t been following events in Syria that closely. ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’ (by Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami) is only one among several books that have been written in the midst of the ongoing conflict, but I’d heard consistently good things about it since its release at the beginning of 2016. It doesn’t disappoint. I started it yesterday, lulled by the conclusion of a large project and a thousand pictures of Christmas dinner preparations on twitter. I woke up this morning and finished the rest.

Burning Country is compellingly written, not only on a structural level but also on account of its interspersed interview and other oral history-type testimony. This is the book’s primary strength, I felt. It’s hard enough to write accurate and compelling history after the fact. Doing so while events are still unfolding makes the job even harder. Thankfully, Burning Country delivers the goods.

After introducing Syria and Syrians as if to set the stage, Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami launch into an account of the Syrian uprising’s early days, told through a diversity of sources from a variety of backgrounds. They make a strong case for the initial moments of the revolution as being less co-opted by one group or another, even as later chapters show how a variety of forces pushed and pulled that initial impulse in unintended directions. I learnt a lot from the accounts of initial organisational strategies, the way different groups responded to similar kinds of threats from the state and how the logic of violent escalation started to take on more prominence. The chapter on cultural shifts (or expressions) brought about by the revolution (chapter eight) was also excellent. The end of the book falls a little short, if only because the conflict is ongoing and you had the sense that it is an unfinished project.

As a one-stop shop introduction and opening-out to some important parts of Syrian society, history and current affairs, Burning Country is well worth your time. The book ends with a note on thinking about and understanding Syria:

“In order to truly think globally – rather than to hide from thought behind clumsy globalising paradigms – it is necessary to act locally. We ask the reader, rather than applying the usual grand narratives, to attend to voices from the ground.”

I hope we get to read other histories of Syria (and other countries) that employ the same logic.

The Best Books I Read in 2016

Compared to 2015, this year was a relatively slow year. I decided to reduce the number of books that I wanted to read after it became clear to me just how much work I’d have to put in to finish my PhD dissertation.

Last year I wrote that I wanted half of the books I read in 2016 to be fiction. I also said that I didn’t want to buy any new books. I failed firmly and thoroughly on both goals. I only read nine works of fiction this year, and I bought many books. Part of the reason for less fiction was due to a realignment of my broader goals (less writing of fiction in my daily life and more writing of computer/programming code). Nevertheless, I want to be reading more fiction as a regular habit. I’ll probably set a Beeminder goal for 2017 to facilitate this.

Two works of fiction did stand out among the 76 (as of today) books I did manage to read. Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’ was an unrelentingly miserable book. At 734 pages, it was also very long. It was a significant time investment, but the craft of the writing kept me reading. I avoided reading reviews when this came out, but was aware that many people were saying positive things. The events that take place in this book are traumatic, to say the least, and the author has been criticised for writing ‘torture porn’ by a number of readers. So take this or leave it. It’s incredibly powerful and beautifully written.

2016 was also my year to jump on the Elena Ferrante bandwagon. I read the first two volumes in a series of four. I enjoyed the first, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, more than the second, though that was perhaps on account of the pleasure on discovering a new writer (to me) who told engaging and emotionally satisfying stories. This book didn’t send me on a nostalgia-infused journey as it seems to have done with others, but it was certainly one of the books I savoured reading most this year. “Deliciously compelling,” I wrote immediately after finishing.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work was what spurred me to finish my PhD in an intense three-month period at the beginning of the year. I think anyone doing some kind of freelance work, or remote work, or work where you aren’t immediately / directly under the supervision of someone else would benefit from reading this book. Newport is occasionally a bit preachy, but don’t let that distract you from his important thoughts on quality of work and production. (Some related thoughts in an old blogpost here.)

Austin Kleon’s ‘Show Your Work’ (original blog here) is responsible for the uptick in posts on this blog. (I even have a Beeminder goal to keep me honest.) This was a quick but rich overview of ways in which sharing ideas, work and other moments where you learn something can be useful for both the author and his audience. Lots of practical ideas, most of which could be boiled down to what happens when you keep a blog regularly updated. Highly recommended to anyone who thinks for a living.

‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ by W. Timothy Gallwey is my final pick, if only because I really need to absorb some of its lessons. Gallwey makes the point that conflict between competing ‘voices’ in our minds is often the source of self-sabotage. I wrote a longer summary here in case you want to learn more.

The year is 97% finished, and arbitrary as the passing of time is, I remain mindful of the fact that there aren’t that many days. I also have been trying to hold the paradox of things mattering (but at the same time not mattering) in my head.

So 2017: more fiction, (probably) more blogging, (certainly) more coding and maybe a return to Afghanistan-related topics.

Reading and the American Revolution

‘A Powerful Mind: The Self-Education of George Washington’ tells the story of Washington’s reading habits (and how they benefited him). You can read only the introduction and get the main message: he read a lot and the things he read allowed him to grow as a military and political leader. The rest of the book is a detailed exploration of this thesis alongside some of the supporting evidence.

Extensive and deep reading alike were important throughout his career. In one of the most fascinating sub-sections, Harrison shows how Washington’s military campaign benefited from some of the latest military theories of the day, both in terms of tactics and strategy.

I benefited from the way the book proceeded chronologically through Washington’s life, not being familiar (at all) with the events of the American Revolution and the time period being examined. One of my first questions to other readers (over on Goodreads) was the extent to which someone not immersed in this American history could read this book without trouble, and I’m pleased to report that relative newbies like myself shouldn’t find much issue.

This book is repurposed from a PhD thesis, and it tells. The narrative is sometimes diverted to a discussion of sources or the evidence on which certain claims rest. This is all fine and proper, though it disrupts the flow. I wonder whether those discussions might not have been relegated to an appendix. That said, I also occasionally felt that too much was made out of the baseline evidence on which the book seems to rest, i.e. the records of which books were owned, annotated and/or read by Washington. Harrison writes a lot about the various ways we can deduce what Washington might have been reading at period X or Y, but as a reader myself I felt disappointed that somehow we hardly ever seemed to actually catch Washington directly in the act.

One of the points that I found most interesting was how Washington seemed to go about selecting his books. There were fewer titles at the time, so he seemed to have more opportunity or necessity for deep reading (annotating copies line-by-line, for example) than in the present day where it’s probably easier to develop habits of wide/extensive reading that are ultimately shallow. A fascinating section in this respect was where Washington decides he needs to overhaul his farm and agricultural practices, and Harrison shows how he used what he read to take a risky but ultimately profitable decision to reform and overhaul how he managed his land.

Knot 3: Encryption, Race and Tunnels

More focus this week on finishing a big project, so less time for books or outside reading, but nevertheless some articles to recommend.

Articles

• Ursula Lindsey - “Funds Cut for Prominent Arabic Language Program” (Al-Fanar Media)

An extremely short-sighted decision. The CASA programme has been a really important source of support over its forty-nine years. This is a decision that affects American students of Arabic, but we shouldn’t forget that it’s symptomatic of how language studies are treated elsewhere.

• Rosalind Adams - “Intake: Locked On The Psych Ward” (Buzzfeed)

Anyone who still says Buzzfeed doesn’t do important reporting just isn’t reading. This piece looks at the way a for-profit system works to the disadvantage of patients’ welfare and the healthcare system in general. A must-read for an American audience, and for Europeans / Brits as a portent of what probably is headed our way.

• Bron Gondwana - “Why we don't offer PGP” (Fastmail Blog)

PGP has been much discussed (more than usual, at any rate) this past week. This post offers a useful overview of some of the things that PGP can help protect against, versus some of the places where trust in what it can do are misplaced. Pair this article with Bjarni Rúnar’s “Too Cool for PGP” to cover your bases.

• Annalee Newitz - “Evernote apologizes for its new privacy policy” (Ars Technica)

A useful corrective from Ars Technica (one of the best places to go for informed reporting on science and technology) about Evernote’s recent policy changes relating to privacy. The important point to take away from all this is that Evernote probably isn’t where you want to be storing your notes if you care about your privacy. Try DevonThink instead for a far saner approach to encryption and storage.

• Amal el-Mohtar - “'Iraq + 100' Is Painful, But Don't Look Away” (NPR)

This review of a new collection of stories seems (from the review, at any rate) like it is worth reading. Imaginative and creative responses to events on this scale are, I think, the kinds of things that will ultimately survive far longer than the political analysis and commentary that so far has dominated the discussion of what happened in Iraq. I look forward to reading this book.

• Ryan Holliday - “Want to Really Make America Great Again? Stop Reading the News.” (Observer)

You can ignore the focus on US politics and still take away the broader argument, that following the day-to-day news cycle is (for the broad majority of us) unnecessary and probably actually detrimental to our health and ability to do work that really matters (to us or others). A useful reminder.

• Laura Reiley - “Farm to Table: At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction” (Tampa Bay Times)

A great piece of investigative work, Reiley shows how a lot of the promises of the farm-to-table movement in California are false claims. This piece is the first in a series that is worth reading in its entirety.

• Roger Cohen - “Broken Men in Paradise” (New York Times)

This is an important reminder of the realities of life for those refugees refused entry to Australia following harrowing journeys across the seas. Authorities in the places they are sent to operate with seemingly little restraint or care for their wellbeing.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates — “My President Was Black: A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next” (The Atlantic)

This piece seems to capture a moment. Based on several interviews with Obama as well as his usual command of the context that explains this moment, this is a (long) must-read.

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus - “The Great A.I. Awakening” (New York Times)

Important from perhaps a different angle, this is a long overview of the ways so-called artificial intelligence is poised to change our world. It views the transformation through the lens of developments in Google’s online translation service. It offers context and explanation to two different approaches to machine intelligence and the different algorithmic decisions being made. If you’re interested in technology and the ways that computers will continue to be embedded in our daily lives, you won’t want to miss this one.

Books

This week I read Lynne Kelly’s “The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments” in preparation for an upcoming podcast episode interview. Dr Kelly makes a convincing case for how old archeological sites (like Stonehenge) were probably used as forms of memory aids to recall information important for local communities. The book is best accompanied by a glance at a truly fascinating series of memory experiments that she’s been working on. I also read Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me”, a very useful and sobering reminder of the ways that society works against women, whether directly through violence or other perhaps less visible means.

Films / TV

I wrote yesterday about “Into Eternity” (trailer here), one of my favourite documentaries of the past year. It’s filmed with an idiosyncratic approach to detail and atmosphere. I am ignorant about where Finnish director Michael Madsen gets his influences from, but I certainly look forward to seeing more. Just today I saw another documentary, “13th”, which focuses on the ways that racial inequality has manifested itself in the United States, specifically in the prison system. This is a powerful statement, particularly for American viewers, I imagine, and it made me think about the ways that similar trends are to be found back in Europe.

Knot 1: Solitary Confinement & Digital Security

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature on this blog. Knot will link to recent things that I’ve been reading. It will include short articles as well as books and other things on the internet.

Articles

• Martin Garbus — “America’s Invisible Inferno” (NYRB)

This NYRB review of ‘Hell Is A Very Small Place’ covers the use of solitary confinement in the American prison system. It ends with unearned optimism, but nevertheless is a useful reminder of the importance of the issue.

• Mary Catherine O’Connor — “The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence” (The Guardian)

Interesting short piece on the use of machine learning combined with data science competition site, Kaggle, to try to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fishing inspections. Hardly a day passes when a new initiative like this is launched, merging data science and crowdsourced solutions. I look forward to being able to contribute (one day in the hopefully-not-so-distant future).

• Meeri Kim — “How a researcher used big data to beat her own ovarian cancer” (Washington Post)

More data science, though this is more at the N=1 edge of things than the previous fishery data story. The more data we are able to access and generate, the more there will be need for ways of analysing and processing these complex interactions. A lot of money is being invested in finding ways to automate this for non-technical users, though I imagine we’re still a little way away from that utopia.

• Check Point — “More Than 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan” (CheckPoint Blog)

I’m not quite sure why this isn’t a bigger story. I’ve long believed that anything stored by Google (in particular, emails) will at some point be leaked in a hack or by some disgruntled employee. This latest hack is pretty close to that scenario, with the caveat that we don’t know what was taken. Takeaway: move away from the Google ecosystem where possible.

• Scott Gilbertson — “HTTPS is not a magic bullet for Web security” (Ars Technica)

This is a few months old but offers a useful overview on HTTPS technology, what it can help with (and what it is less useful for). The headline is actually a bit deceptive since the article seems to make a strong case for the use of HTTPS.

• Shane Parrish — "The Simple Plan To Read More” (Farnham Street / Personal Growth)

I’ve long ago taken this advice on board, but it’s a useful reminder. I enjoy reading, and I enjoy the diversity that comes from reading widely and broadly, so keeping up the pace and seeing it more as a habit to be done most days is, to my mind, the right way of looking at it.

Books

I read three books this past week. Jim Klopman’s Balance Is Power was my easy introduction to some of the science behind why it is useful to train balance in a focused way as a skill.

I finished the second volume in Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy, The Story of a New Name, though I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first. I suspect I’ll have to return to it in a few weeks after the dust has settled.

Finally, I devoured Paul Kalanathi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a beautifully written exploration of death, medicine, how we go through all these things as people, how illness affects not only the body but the mind and the spirit as well. It reminded me of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which covered similar themes albeit with less of an intimately tragic outcome. I highly recommend giving When Breath Becomes Air a read.