Links + Notes
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Dec 22, 2023 - Unlikely Stories, Mostly by Alisdair Gray
Gray was a modern Scottish author who I somehow hadn’t heard of. I appreciated his very short stories in this collection even more than the longer ones, in particular for their combination of whimsy and unstable allegory. His writing draws on folks like Swift or even Aesop, but at the last minute there is always unsettling lack of a simple moral or political message to the story. Except to indict power.
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Dec 16, 2023 - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré
A fun read, but. It’s interesting to read about Le Carré’s reception as the deliverer of a more “realistic” spy than James Bond at the time of publication. His anti-hero in this book is edgier but basically just reads like a nihilistic, alcoholic misogynist in largely the same mold through today’s eyes. This novel kind of calls out masculinity, the zero-sum destructiveness of the Cold War, and so on.. but really it’s glorying in them, unsurprisingly. Beware fiction that trades on its own verity.
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Nov 19, 2023 - Reading notes - Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved is every bit as heart-rending, beautiful, and erudite as I expected. It’s incredibly brilliant from a technical, writerly standpoint. I also appreciated its weaponization of the gothic novel genre for racial justice and black feminist purposes. In the gothic novel of the 18th/19th centuries, we often see captured women whose only power is the power of refusal - to say “no,” to flee - running around mossy castles pursued by evil Dukes, predatory priests, vampires and all that. Here, Morrison gives that trope meaning that is so much more complex and demanding of the reader. Beloved reorders the genre and its descendents around itself. Incredible.
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Nov 6, 2023 - Reading notes - Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Haraway is someone I turn to to remind me what reality is like. In this book she continues her journey from feminist cyborg to Significant Otherness to compost-human ecologies, and it does not disappoint!
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Nov 5, 2023 - Reading notes - A History of Bangladesh
I appreciated the thoughtful and de-colonizing approach the author took to Bangladesh’s complex cultural and geopolitical histories.
Talk: Electoral integrity under attack! Innovative strategies for shared defense
Last week I had the honor of being in Lusaka to support the government of Zambia’s portion of the global second Summit for Democracy. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the Electoral Commission of Zambia co-hosted a day zero event on threats to electoral integrity and I talked about digital threats and how traditional electoral integrity frameworks aren’t serving us well.
My argument: the elections community needs to take a page from the cybersecurity community and think about the “attack surface” of elections - including not only voting systems and the like but the information environment and all the civil society and corporate components that combined make or break elections and whether they are trusted.
The talk was streamed and is up on YouTube.
watch it hereSynthesia disinfo + unrealistic truthiness
Recently, several disinformation campaigns have been spotted using deepfake avatars. In February a pro-CCP campaign attributed to “Wolf Media” was reported by Graphika (pdf). In January similar, albeit somewhat more rudimentary, videos were circulating in support of the junta in Burkina Faso. And most recently a YouTube ‘news’...
read more >>Democracy! The Podcast: Ukraine Under Fire
A few months ago I traveled to Kyiv to better understand the situation re: cybersecurity and the elections that will need to happen after the conflict ends. I recently spoke on Democracy! The Podcast to share a bit about what I learned, and why it matters for all of us.
listen hereReview - Ada & Zangemann
I was lucky to get my hands on a physical copy of Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream, by Matthias Kirshner (President of Free Software Foundation Europe) and illustrator Sandra Brandstätter. It’s a lovely children’s book about the joy of tinkering, open and...
read more >>♩ Music - Soft Landing
This is a dirge and a cut-up about aging, mortality, beauty.. the usual stuff. I wrote this using Sonic Pi and made the accompanying graphic with Processing.
read more >>