A great primer on the dangers of big data for those of us who aren’t scientists or mathematicians. The book is accessible, the examples are straightforward, and the writing is light enough for a non-technical audience–as well as highly relevant to our modern data-driven age. Cathy O’Neil offers a frightening look at how algorithms are increasingly regulating people. WMDs not only increase the divide between the privileged and everyone else, but also contribute to a system that is opaque and incontestable. This book raises questions about the costs and benefits of the big-data world in which we live.

Each chapter provides a thoughtful exploration of an area where big data is supposed to be helping, such as college rankings, recidivism of convicts, applying for jobs, and getting loans. Algorithms define which are the best colleges, which convicts are most likely to reoffend, what personality types are best suited for a job, and who should get the best interest rates. That sounds useful, right? But unfortunately, ideal data is not always available, so bad or irrelevant data is often used instead. And the resulting predictions are treated as gospel, increasing efficiency of the system, but harming those caught on the wrong side. It hurts a segment of the population while providing the rest of us with the false belief that fairness and justice has being done. In many cases, the algorithms’ predictions create a negative feedback loop, directly influencing the outcome they were objectively trying to determine.

Tova Sullivan is a 70-year-old widow, and her son mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. She began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope with loss. Tova forms a remarkable friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Octopus are known to be highly intelligent creatures, but Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine. He can read, solve puzzles, unlock contraptions, and scheme excursions around the aquarium. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick he can muster to unearth the truth for Tova before it’s too late.

Marcellus is just as you would expect: intelligent, ornery, and the enchanting hero of the story. His snobbery is the best part of the book. And perhaps finding humanity in a curmudgeon invertebrate is what makes this book endearing. Though the plot is somewhat predictable, the story is very well told and nowhere in the narrative do you lose interest or experience boredom. Marcellus is a reminder of how precious our animal friends are to us especially in moments of loneliness, sorrow, and grief. The story also makes you ponder over the plight of animals in captivity. Though none of the animals in this story were harmed or ill-treated, you cannot help but feel sympathy for Marcellus when he feels imprisoned within the glass walls of the aquarium and misses his natural habitat.

“To the overachievers, success addicts, and tired strivers who are fairly confident you can’t keep it up forever but will try anyway—this book is for you. Arthur Brooks shows you it’s possible to build a life that really does get better with age.” —Simon Sinek, optimist and author of Start with Why and The Infinite Game

Professional Decline is inevitable and coming (much) sooner than you think. Using various statistics, Brooks argues that many knowledge workers / scientists / artistic professions reach their peak around the age of 40-45. At this point, a second intelligence curve emerges. There are two types of intelligence: Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve abstract problems, and crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning. When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. His advice is to actively jump from one curve to the the other, transitioning into a more senior role where you can mentor and coach a team of younger professionals. He outlines three things you can do to start to make the second curve better than the first: develop your relationships, start your spiritual journey, and embrace your weaknesses.

While I love the hopeful optimism he offers to older generations, not all of his ideas resonated, and I felt many of them were problematic. He gives seven predictors to being happy such as not smoking and drinking. These habits were a far cry from groundbreaking. Brooks also draws on religious ideas in Catholicism and Buddhism. He uses scripture and spiritual proverbs to breakdown pride, which is the source of anguish and loneliness.

Consider this equation, Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want. Gratitude is the first half of the equation. The second half is solved by lowering your expectations about monetary compensation; and worrying less about whether it will look to someone else like a step down in prestige or not using your past experience and skills in the most obvious way. The work you do must be the reward. Don’t work as a means to obtain something else which you believe will make you happy; just do what makes you happy. While I don’t disagree, this book did not offer the poignant message that I had hoped for.

In The Memory Librarian, Janelle Monae brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of her critically acclaimed albums exploring how different threads of liberation – queerness, race, gender, and sexuality – become tangled in the future possibilities of memory and time. This book is a collaboration with five other authors, each of whom penned one of the five novelettes with her. Despite having many authors, this is a collection that feels cohesive in its themes and world. Unfortunately, only one of the novelettes is excellent, whereas the other four introduce cool concepts and characters but ultimately fail to hit home on either.

The first is the titular story, “The Memory Librarian.” It is the one that kicks off the collection, as well as the longest, so it feels like it received the most attention from a world building, thematic and character standpoint. Seshet has worked her way to the top and now manage the memories of Little Delta’s citizens; keeping order by wiping deviants, storing their memories and erasing them when she needs to. What does it mean for her, to be lonely and wanting love, while also having the power to access the secrets of every person around her, to even be able to manipulate them—and her own? How does she feel when the system she is a part of turns against people like her? How will she reconcile herself to the huge discrepancies between who she is, who and what she wants and the regime she answers to? Because under the surface of all that control, there is ‘a blooming …part rebellion and riot, part expression repressed.’

‘‘Never­mind’’ is about a group of women and a nonbinary person living in a safehaven called Pynk. Each is deal­ing with their own trauma, feelings, beliefs, and prejudices. Scouts from New Dawn have tracked them down and the only way to survive is to stand their ground.

In Timebox, we meet a pair of young women who move into an apartment with a room that is set out of time—literally. The room allows you to spend a much time in it as you need, yet when you emerge, you will find the world to be exactly where you left it. The possibilities of having an endless pocket of time outside of reality speaks to the idea of time poverty. How much more could you achieve, if you weren’t always racing against the clock?

‘‘Save Changes’’ is about two sisters dealing with the aftermath of their dirty computer mother being cleaned (think reeduca­tion but worse). Amber and Larry carry the burden of their parents’ rebellions. Their father is dead, their mother behaves like a glitchy computer, and they are outcasts from society. Amber has a piece of larimar stone, which she can use to rewind time in case of an emergency. However, the stone can only be used once.

Timebox Alter(ed) is a lovely, hopeful finale to the collection, a story in which a group of children discover just how much power lies in their artistic imaginations, when they are told ‘you can’t build a future if you don’t dream it.’ Bug is a 7-year old child living near Freewheel, a ghost town where New Dawn’s control is weak. While playing in the abandoned town, Bug and their friends make art from the trash, creating a sculpture that Bug calls an ark. They meet an old woman named Mx. Tangee. She calls their creation an altar. When each child sits in the ark’s altar, they are transported to a possible future, where they learn more about themselves before returning to the present. New Dawn drones arrive to arrest Mx. Tangee, but she disappears into the ark.

Erasure of history, identity and culture via patriarchy, colonialism and its off shoots has always been a part of known human history, and continues to be, the world around. Monae makes it clear that any one who has ever been othered—be it for their race, sexuality, gender—needs to remain deeply connected to their personal, racial, social histories in order to remain authentic and retain agency in every way possible. But this has always been the real trouble with science fiction; It stems from and exists in worlds that are white and western—how can young people of color imagine themselves in the future if there are no representations of them in fiction that describes the future? If art is to imitate life, why does mainstream art only depict a future life without people who are not white and/or heteronormative? Where does everyone else go?

The other challenge with science fiction has historically been mocked for investing more brainpower into explaining elaborate systems than fleshing out the people who live within them, but “The Memory Librarian” fumbles both pursuits. There’s so little explanation of the basic mechanisms of New Dawn’s rule that the downtrodden main characters are deprived of agency and nuance. Their domestic and internal struggles, though rendered with meticulous attention to queer experiences and concerns, have no meaningful connection to their material circumstances.

Daisy Jones & The Six is about the rise of an iconic 1970s rock band and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up. Written in an oral history format, this fictional band documentary interviews former band members, their manager, and their friends, to recount the history of the band’s rise and fall.

When designing Daisy Jones and the Six, Reid says she was inspired by Fleetwood Mac, a band in which real-life romances between bandmates made it into the music. “I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey [Buckingham] watched Stevie [Nicks] sing ‘Landslide.’ How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh,” Reid wrote in a guest post for Hello Sunshine.

While Daisy and Billy carried the storyline, the commentary from the bandmates were wildly entertaining. “Just One More” was written and recorded in one day when somebody sent over a batch of grass baked cookies. Warren says, “I took three of the cookies myself and I hid one of ’em for later and as Billy is writing this song about wanting one more, I thought, Shit! He knows I have one more!” I admit that the scene is juvenile and that the book as a whole lacks literary merit, but I love its silliness, never taking itself too seriously. Overall, it’s as simple as finding someone who loves the same songs you love and creating music together. If you like that, you’ll like this book.

Agent Sonya was a German Communist who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. Her real name was Ursula Kuczynski, but she was also known as Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton and Ursula Hamburger. She was most famously known for being the handler of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, the physicist who supplied information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union shortly after WWII. Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army ran the largest network of spies in Britain. When Fuchs was unmasked, she moved to East Germany, and was granted retirement from her spy career. Over the next three decades, she published a series of books related to her espionage activities, including her bestselling autobiography Sonya’s Report.

On the day before Fuchs was put on trial for giving away the west’s atom secrets, Werner was allowed to leave Britain. As she wrote in her autobiography, Sonja’s Report, “Either it was complete stupidity on the part of MI5 never to have connected me with Klaus, or they may have let me get away with it, since every further discovery would have increased their disgrace.” Hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI, she evaded all of them, and survived as well the brutal Soviet purges that left many of her friends and colleagues dead. Her sex, motherhood, pregnancy, and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school, and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. Ursula ruthlessly exploited the natural advantage of her gender.

Never Let Me Go is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005. It is an unforgettable mystery that is both heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are three best friends that attend Hailsham a special English boarding school. This novel takes place in an alternate reality of England during the 1990s. During the time, human cloning was authorized and performed. Although genetically identical to us, these students (clones) are alienated from society and the truth about their horrifying fate looms over their aspirations. Ishiguro is the master of subtle, telling without telling, foreshadowing, and emphasizing the gravity of the unsaid. What is more heartbreaking than human lives wasted? Witnessing lives taken away from people who do not even realize what is being taken away from them. Never Let Me Go is a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society.

This novel is also about the power of memory. Kathy copes with the losses in her life by turning to memories of the past. She preserves the memory of Hailsham long after it has closed, just as she preserves her memories of Tommy and Ruth long after their deaths. The novel’s title epitomizes this desire to hold on. The phrase “never let me go” is somewhere between a plea and a demand, reflecting a deeply human need to hold onto, and be held by, loved ones. Kathy’s memories are her way of holding onto everyone and everything she has lost. However, Kathy’s memory is also fragmented and somewhat incomplete. She admits to forgetting and misremembering details, showing that memory is just as fragile as it is powerful. Amidst the despair, it is possible to detect a spiritual dimension to Kathy’s silent acceptance as she poignantly reclaims the meaning of her life through her memories.

Oleg Gordievsky was a former colonel of the KGB who became a rezident and the bureau chief in London, and he was a double agent for the British Secret Intelligence (MI6) from 1974 to 1985. The son of two KGB agents and the product of Soviet institutional pedigree, the savvy and sophisticated Gordievsky came to see his country as criminal. He helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots. Giving a glimpse into the deep paranoia in the Kremlin, he help pull the world back from the precipice of nuclear war. His direct access to sensitive, top-secret information quickly made him one of the most influential spies in history.

Desperate to protect their source, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA. The CIA became increasingly obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source, which ultimately doomed Gordievsky. The CIA officer assigned to identify the British KGB spy was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, Ben Macintyre starts and ends this gripping clandestine tale with Gordievsky being recalled to Moscow under suspicion of sedition and his exfiltration from the Soviet Union – Operation PIMLICO. Deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, this remarkable true story of one man’s love for democracy and his courage ultimately had the power to change the world.

American Wolf is a multi-generational saga of wolves reintroduced back to the Rockies. Featured is O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth and the most famous Yellowstone wolf to date. Uncommonly powerful, O-Six is a kind and merciful leader, a fiercely intelligent fighter, and a doting mother. She is beloved by wolf watchers, particularly renowned naturalist Rick McIntyre, and becomes something of a social media star, with followers around the world.

The book details the far more complicated and ever-dynamic human elements affecting the wolves. The politics of ranchers, antigovernment zealots, hunting outfitters, Congress, courts and judges, and tourism operators all exert a sculpting pressure on where and how and if the wolf can live. Yellowstone National Park is the one place where a person has a good chance of seeing a wild wolf. Beyond its boundaries, they can be hunted.

Growing up in Hawaii, the importance of environmental protection was ingrained at a very early age. The problem is the environmental activists are weird. In their desire to do good and save the planet, they preach in an obnoxious way that is often illogical and unproductive. At the start of the book, I retorted that anthropomorphizing a creature to breed affinity won’t work on me but when the Mollies started to descend on LaMar, I found myself anxiously holding my breath hoping that O-six would survive. American Wolf is an enchanting and informative book and its main character will remind you why wolves are the iconic beasts of the West.

Where are we?

Walking through the cityscapes of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai provokes the same question. Built to look as if they were not where they are – in Russia, China, India, and the Arab world, respectively – each metropolis conjures the same captivating yet discomfiting sense of disorientation. These four unlikely sister cities are unified by the sense of disorientation they impart. Orient is both a noun and a verb – the noun means east; the verb means to place oneself in space – but its two meanings are intertwined. An individual lost in the wilderness can place herself in space because she knows that the sun rises in the east (the Orient). The disorientation imparted by these cities results from being located in the East but purposefully built to look as if they are in the West. For three hundred years, instant cities modeled on the West have been built in the developing world in audacious attempts to wrench a lagging region into the modern world. Impersonation is a way to catch up without sorting out precisely why, how, or to what degree one is behind – or even precisely determining what “behind” means. Contemporary historians acknowledge that these gateway cities were designed to make foreigners feel at home, and that any transfer of technological superiority served as a justification for colonizing the world. Regardless of the intention, the externalities of these international market hubs brought together people to form new ideas which resulted in an evolved global metropolis. To truly orient ourselves and understand “Where are we?”, we need to answer the question, “Who are we?” and the answer may lie in the histories of these modern cities.