Sylvia Chi

The short answer is: carbs. Chances are, you can learn what you want to know by just reading the highest-rated Amazon.com reviews. Most of this book is just setting up straw men about an oversimplified calories-in-calories-out model and then destroying them. It also spends way too much time making the argument for eating meat, and is a little ridiculously skeptical about the health (as opposed to fat-losing) benefits of exercise. OTOH, it's a pretty engaging thing to listen to on a 10-hour road trip.

Pretty uneven; some stories are pretty great, others are pretty bad. Generally pretty imaginative too, and all but one story (the last and eponymous) were compelling enough that I wanted to see how they ended. The one that sticks with me the most is the first, a Hugo-award-winner called “The Erdmann Nexus”.

A little over-simplistic and narrowly focused for me, with far too much personal editorializing about the author's goats, etc., but still provides some interesting observations on outdoor medical marijuana growing in Mendocino. Might be more persuasive for folks who are more ambivalent/less informed about medical marijuana, cannabis legalization, and ending the drug war.

Actually surprisingly full of good ideas, especially with techniques (e.g., cryo-blanching; pre-hydrating pasta before cooking) and some interesting ingredient/flavor combinations (popcorn-white chocolate gelato). I only skimmed through the last section for professionals, because as a home cook, I'm definitely too lazy to go out and find transglutaminase or measure out ratios of kappa carrageenan to locust bean gum.

I appreciated the scientific explanations of what's going on at a cellular/molecular level when you're cooking.

The writing is distractingly bad, unfortunately.

An interesting, fast read, although it left a couple of major areas un-addressed. In particular, I think there's a lot more to discuss about why the Internet does not generate so much revenue. Cowen basically states this as an inevitability due to the nature of the Internet, but I don't see why it's not a matter of the market hasn't rationalized it yet. Cowen also has kind of a cartoonish view of bureaucracy, with no consideration for the many good reasons the administrative state exists. I think the basic analytic framework is pretty interesting (we've plucked all the “low-hanging fruit,” ranging from the Industrial Revolution to communications technology, and gotten accustomed to a rate of economic growth associated with those innovations), though I'd be interested in reading how historians of science have responded.

This is another book that's billed as a thriller but isn't really a thriller. It's a fine family drama and explores some really important and interesting issues, but not what I was expecting. To the extent that trigger warnings are useful, it should maybe come with a trigger warning for child abuse.

I no longer need to write the great Chinese-American-millennial novel because Jenny Zhang would probably do it better than me. There's a lot in here that makes me suspicious that she has some kind of secret access to my mind/memory. But I knew this collection was perfectly true to me by page 13, when she writes: “I was born itchy as all hell and I would die itchy as all hell unless a crafty genius somewhere decided to invent a miracle drug that would save me from this long and itchy life.”

As a collection of essays, it's somewhat uneven, but mostly worthwhile. There are some interesting ideas in here I hadn't previously been exposed to, particularly in providing details about how the Anti-Apartheid Movement played out, and perspectives on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) against Israel and the Gulf Labor efforts targeting the Guggenheim. There was one supremely bad take on free speech and “censorship” that is an embarrassment to the rest of the volume. If you're interested in boycott and divestment as tactics, or if you're a “cultural producer” interested in the artist's role in politics, it's worth checking out.

A good look at various factors affected by the growth of utility scale solar energy, particularly in the context of biodiversity/ecosystem effects and lifecycle assessment, especially as applied to thin film vs. crystalline silicon technologies. Also provides a good synopsis of ARRA investments in solar and a more macro view of the global PV market in the past decade or so. Overall, very interesting and informative. I do wish there was more about distributed and rooftop solar and grid/transmission/distribution. (And at least in the edition I read, there was an unacceptable number of copy and other editing errors.)