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It’s a series of essays, lectures, and dialogues between or by sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen and Barbara Fields It’s an opportunity you shouldn’t miss, one that fits at least a few of Lanier’s definitions of VR. It offhandedly includes stories that could be a book in themselves - like the time Lanier trip-sat a dying Richard Feynman as he tried LSD for the first time.Ībove all, the book is an opportunity to be inside Lanier’s mind for 300-some pages. It is designed to expand your view of what VR could and should be, to see it as less of a gaming system and more as a way to experience radically different forms of existence, movement, communication, and creation. It offers a new definition of “virtual reality” every few pages, and every single one of them is interesting. The book is structured partly as a memoir, partly as a series of essays, and partly as a series of imagined dialogues. Lanier coined the term “virtual reality,” founded one of the first companies in the space, and had a hand in many of the key research and product innovations in the field.
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This was the strangest, most thrilling book I read this year. That’s a highlight or note every three pages or so. Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters W ith Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron LanierĪccording to my Kindle, I have 115 highlights and seven notes in this book. I don’t really know what more I need to say to recommend this. Neil Gaiman rewrote a bunch of Norse myths. What’s more, it tracks the era in which Korea is sliced into halves, in which Koreans lose control of their own destiny, in which they are treated as pawns by the Americans and as subhuman by the Japanese, and is thus powerful context for today’s geopolitics. Even as I read that last sentence, I recognize that it’s the sort of recommendation that would make me think a book is Good and Important but probably a slog. The book tracks multiple generations of a Korean family living in Japan as they’re buffeted by war, bigotry, and the daily struggles of life. I don’t read as much fiction as I should, and the pleasure I got from reading Pachinko only deepened that shame. “History has failed us, but no matter,” writes Min Jin Lee. The first sentence of this National Book Award finalist takes no prisoners. I had Newport on my podcast, and learned a lot from that conversation too.
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Newport persuaded me I was wrong, that the experiment we’re running on our own brains and on our own attention spans is changing us for the worse, and that a big chunk of the future will belong to those who can train themselves to resist. Newport’s core claim is that in an age when almost everyone is becoming more and more distracted, the returns to being able to wall yourself off from interruption - digital or otherwise - and concentrate on hard problems is becoming correspondingly more valuable.īefore reading Deep Work, I counted myself firmly on the side of informational overload I found the arguments for boredom, for quiet, for calm, a bit nostalgic. It’s an argument for focus in an age of distraction, but more than that, it’s a convincing argument for focus in an age of distraction. Deep Work by Cal Newportĭeep Work may be the only book I both read and reread this year. And some were to widen my own perspective, to remind me that there’s more going on right now than this administration, this moment in politics, this day of anger and outrage. Some of them were to better resist the pressures of this moment, to change the way I was absorbing information, to fight the clamor of distractions. Some of them, as you’ll see here, were to better understand this moment by better understanding other moments. And yet we all want to understand it, we’re all desperate to understand it, and amid that emotional intensity, the number of notifications and alerts and articles and posts promising to tell us what’s going on has reached crazy-making levels.Īnd so I retreated to books. I’m not confident that anyone - least of all me - truly understands what’s happening in American or global politics right now. This was a year when the volume of instant information was at its highest, but the quality of that information was, I think, unusually low. I needed to escape from the news cycle, from the social streams, from the shouting. I shifted my reading heavily toward books this year. Here, at the end of 2017, I thought I’d answer my own question, or at least a variant of it. On my podcast, I close each conversation by asking my guest to recommend three books.