White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Obviously as a White Dude (TM), I'm set up for failure when criticizing a book about how white people can't handle honest discussion about race and racism. About 80% of the book is entirely unobjectionable (to me), but there are bits that rankle.

First up, I'm not sure what use ( Read more... )

Subtitled "How We Read, Why So Many Can't, And What Can Be Done About It" this fascinating book provides some great insight into the science of reading. Not linguistics or language, really, but reading.

There's some great observational science about how people actually read, and this goes towards exploding many common myths. Both of the 98% scams of ( Read more... )

She didn't win, but I got to vote for Dr. Tepring Piquado for State Assembly. Not only is she a neuroscientist and former science/math teacher, but her parents named her after T'Pring, Spock's coldly calculating Vulcan fiancee. Not a particularly auspicious choice, but still awesome. Latter article has a nice rundown of other scientists running in ( Read more... )

Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

This is an updated (2014) version of the 2004 original by Lakoff, a cognitive scientist at Berkeley.

Basic idea: conservative leaders have been better at framing issues than liberal counterparts ( Read more... )

I found Revelation Space tough going. It's a pretty big book, but even so, I found attention wandering, and it's taken me quite a while to get through. The prose is perfectly functional, but it plods rather than sparkles(*). Lots of big space opera-y action, and some interesting ideas, but the motivations of the characters grow increasingly ( Read more... )

Subtitle: A History of Proper EnglishThe book was not really what I expected, although I'm not sure what I expected. I guess I hoped for more war -- placing authorities against each other on the nitpicky rules of grammar we all love and/or hate. Instead, it was more of a history of how people have formalized the English language, from early ( Read more... )

"I am taking a vacation tomorrow."

"I am vacating the premises tomorrow."

The Search for the Origins of Language

Like my search for a book about the origins of music, it seems my search for one about the origin of language may be long and difficult. Because this one was not fully satisfying. It started well, but the last half was tedious and uninformative. But you will, no doubt, be delighted to know that I took ( Read more... )

On the Map offers a number of amusing diversions cartographic. I already mentioned a few of the interesting maps that are discussed, and there's a surprising amount of variety, with chapters on map thieves, and globes, and pirates, and the Tube map, and the cholera map, and star maps, and an unexpected but totally fitting chapter on maps in games ( Read more... )

Some weeks back, I think therrin started a thread about SF/noir detective fiction, and I recalled George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails and its sequels. The Wiki page mentioned a detail of which I was unaware: "Effinger started work on a fourth Audran novel, Word of Night, but died before that work was completed. The existing chapters of Word of ( Read more... )