worth reading: january 6-24, 2025

this January sure has lasted 300 years, huh?

general tech category:

“An Age of Hyperabundance” by Laura Preston
- for the haters.
“Century-Scale Storage” by Maxwell Neely-Cohen
- this is an incredible banger for fellow data storage enthusiasts!!! [blows airhorn into empty room]
“On the Grid” by Zoë Hitzig
“The Contingency Contingent” by Leigh Claire La Berge
these three are particularly interesting read back-to-back as a trio (in any order):
- “The Case for Software Criticism” by Sheon Han
- “Seeing Software” by Tara McMullin
- “So you want to escape the algorithm” by Elan Ullendorff

books:

"best of 2024" things that should've been in the last list but I didn't see them in time:
- "The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2024” by LitHub
- “The Best Book Covers of 2024” by Matt Dorfman
  - (Knife is my personal favorite)
“Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us” by Hua Hsu
- sprinted to Overdrive right after finishing this and put The Overstory and Playground on hold. reminded me very strongly of a Kim Stanley Robinson book event I went to in 2020 that I think about often. Powers: “The world is still here. The world will still exceed my comprehension and astonishment by orders of magnitude. The world will open up to me if I attend to it,’ then let’s see what happens.”
“Laboratories of the Impossible” by Joshua Roebke

rare and fleeting fashion section:

“On the Road: Grail Hunting Across America” by Viv Chen
The photography of Simbarashe Cha at the New York Times
- not really a single link per se, but every single one of his columns is a must-read. to me. :)

"being outside":

mildly deranged (in its miscellany) catch-all section:

“How America lost control of the bird flu and raised the risk of another pandemic” by Amy Maxmen
- sigh.
“How to translate a game with no words” by Nicole Carpenter
- mild spoilers for Chants of Sennaar...? which I haven't finished so I also got spoiled for.
Sold a Story by Emily Hanford and APM Reports
- this is a podcast series that I just started listening to but it's BONKERS. highly recommended. got linked to this by a video of some 20-year-old Twitch streamer struggling to read the word "nationalist" and a bunch of commenters yelling about how this guy can't read. which...he might not be able to???
“She Made Things Better Down Where It’s Wetter” by Franz Linz
- MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM STANS RISE UP. also did you know that apparently it was founded with nepo baby money from one of the Hewlett Packard founders? now you do!
“Lime bikes keep breaking Londoners' legs” by Jim Waterson
- really good headline for the kind of hyperlocal journalism that I like lol. it's paywalled halfway through but you get the gist.

finally, some fun interactive things/websites as palate-cleansers:

DOOM: The Gallery Experience
- don't forget to interact with the art!
Thinking With Moss
- click around! my favorite link was "Ornithological Interiors at the Bronx Zoo."