Books I've read since January 2018
2021
Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education (2020) by Justin Reich
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (2016) by Joichi Ito and Jeff Howe
Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok & China’s ByteDance (2020) by Matthew Brennan
The Extreme Self (2021) by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist
The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West (2020) by David Kilcullen
The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution (2021) by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora
The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World (2021) by Benjamin Bratton
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) by Andreas Malm
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (2019) by Holly Buck
Ready Player One (2011) by Ernest Cline
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (2011) by Mariana Mazzucato
The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (2008) edited by David W. Bernstein
A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1990) by John Kenneth Galbraith
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (2020) by Dean Spade
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) by Elinor Ostrom
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) by James C. Scott
War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable (2016) by David C. Gompert, Astrid Stuth Cevallos, and Cristina L. Garafola
Planet of Slums (2006) by Mike Davis
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017) by Angela Nagle
Glitch Feminism (2020) by Legacy Russell
The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism (2020) by Grace Blakeley
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (2020) by Michael Brooks
Private Government (2017) by Elizabeth Anderson
Building Mobile Apps at Scale (2021) by Gergely Orosz
@heaven: The Online Death of a Cybernetic Futurist (2015) edited by Kim Hastreiter
The Psychology of Money (2020) by Morgan Housel
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (2020) by Xiaowei Wang
Terror and Modernity (2019) by Donatella Di Cesare
Hate Inc. (2019) by Matt Taibbi
The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing (2021) by Matt Taibbi and "Anonymous"
Checkpoint Zipolite (2021) by Belén Fernández
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) by Jenny Odell
American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (2019) by Sarah L. Quinn
Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World (2021) by Dan Davies
Delivering Happiness (2010) by Tony Hsieh
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (2020) by Tim Hwang
UX Strategy (2021) by Jaime Levy
Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts (2015) by Leigh Phillips
The Gig Mafia: How Small Networks and High-Speed Digital Funds Transfers Have Changed the Face of Organized Crime (2021) by David M. Shapiro
Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live (2020) by Nicholas A. Christakis
The Gift of Fear (2000) by Gavin de Becker
Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (2013) by David Kilcullen
Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (2021) by Catherine Liu
Existentialism Is a Humanism (1948) by Jean-Paul Sartre
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy (2016) by Hamilton Helmer
The China Study (2016) by T. Colin Campbell
Animal Liberation (1975) by Peter Singer
The Manager's Path (2017) by Camille Fournier
Getting to Yes (1991) by Roger Fisher and William Ury
I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out (2009) by Rona Edwards and Monika Skerbelis
Governing by Debt (2015) by Maurizio Lazzarato
Overlanders' Handbook (2017) by Chris Scott
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008) by Paul Krugman
Deep Work (2016) by Cal Newport
The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business (2020) by Nelson D. Schwartz
The People’s Republic of Walmart (2019) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
How Democracy Ends (2018) by David Runciman
2020
What the CEO Wants You to Know (2001) by Ram Charan
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts (2018) by Annie Duke
Democracy in Times of Pandemic: Different Futures Imagined (2020) edited by Miguel Poiares Maduro and Paul W. Kahn
Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
Chris Marker (2006) by Nora M. Alter
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (2019) by David Epstein
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (2005) by John Battelle
The State and Revolution (1917) by Vladimir Lenin
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020) by James Nestor
The Terrorist's Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations (2013) by Jacob N. Shapiro
Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost (2020) by Slavoj Žižek
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (2017) by Marty Cagan
The New Geography of Jobs (2012) by Enrico Moretti
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2012) by David Harvey
All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World (2005) by Seth Godin
Where Art Belongs (2011) by Chris Kraus
Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (2008) by Erin Hogan
Severance (2018) by Ling Ma
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019) by Naomi Klein
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020) by Andreas Malm
Decoding Silicon Valley (2016) by Michelle E. Messina and Jonathan C. Baer
Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (2015) by Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein
Decoding Albanian Organized Crime: Culture, Politics, and Globalization (2015) by Jana Arsovska
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) by Roland Barthes
Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997) by Michael Parenti
Global City Futures: Desire and Development in Singapore (2019) by Natalie Oswin
The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena (1993) by Jean Baudrillard
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (2002) by Noam Chomsky
Unrestricted Warfare (1999) by Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009) by Slavoj Žižek
The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) by Jean Baudrillard
Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020) by Kenneth Goldsmith
Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (2009) by Nato Thompson
Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (2020) by Ashley Mears
Archives (2019) by Andrew Lison, Marcel Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Rick Prelinger
Global Crime, Volume 2 (2019) edited by Philip L. Reichel
No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (2015) by Steven Shaviro
Police: A Field Guide (2018) by David Correia
The Right to Useful Unemployment (1978) by Ivan Illich
Jean Renoir (1973) by André Bazin
Extremism (2018) by J.M. Berger
Berries: A Global History (2018) by Heather Arndt Anderson
Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure (2016) by Nadia Eghbal
Economics in the Age of COVID-19 (2020) by Joshua Gans
California Design, 1930–1965: "Living in a Modern Way" (2011) edited by Wendy Kaplan
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018) by James Bridle
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (2006) by David Kilcullen
Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox (2014) by Daniel Varndell
Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (2006) by bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains
Global Crime, Volume 1 (2019) edited by Philip L. Reichel
The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012) by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Remote: Office Not Required (2013) by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried
Possum Living (1978) by Dolly Freed
Militant Modernism (2009) by Owen Hatherley
Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018) by Phillip Neel
A Random Walk Down Wall Street (1973) by Burton G. Malkiel
Girl in a Band (2015) by Kim Gordon
Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (2018) by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann
Declaration (2012) by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020) by Ross Douthat
Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World (2020) by Slavoj Žižek
How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions (2018) by François Cusset
The Plains (1982) by Gerald Murnane
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (2005) by Simon Reynolds
Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj (2014) by Slavoj Žižek and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) by Max Weber
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978) by Michel Foucault
American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2005) by Robert O. Self
Government in the Future (2005) by Noam Chomsky
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) by Karl Marx
Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth (2019) by Ian Brennan
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994) by Christopher Lasch
Betting the Farm on a Drought (2015) by Seamus McGraw
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) by David Wallace-Wells
Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (2010) by Chris Williams
Drawn in Stereo (2015) by Michael Gillette
Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City (2016) by Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen
Good to Great (2001) by Jim Collins
John Baldessari: Pure Beauty (2009) edited by Jessica Morgan
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) by Thomas Piketty
Thinking Architecture (1998) by Peter Zumthor
Conversations with Friends (2017) by Sally Rooney
Serious Python (2018) by Julien Danjou
The Urban Homestead (2008) by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
Hooked (2014) by Nir Eyal
How Music Dies (or Lives) (2016) by Ian Brennan
2019
Minima Moralia (1951) by Theodor Adorno
The Human War (2003) by Noah Cicero
Demanding the Impossible (2013) by Slavoj Žižek
Sand and Blood: America's Stealth War on the Mexico Border (2019) by John Carlos Frey
Clay: Contemporary Ceramic Artisans (2017) by Amber Creswell Bell
Calm Technology (2016) by Amber Case
Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown
Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products. (2013) by Noah Cicero
Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney
On the Clock (2019) by Emily Guendelsberger
Passage & Place (2014) edited by Annah Anti-Palidrome and Lex Non Scripta
The Wretched of the Earth (1961) by Frantz Fanon
Suburban Nation (2001) by Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
The Art of Richard Diebenkorn (1997) by Jane Livingston
Chandelier Does Tokyo (2015) edited by Chelsea Baken
The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (1987) by David Sylvester
Demotivational Training (2013) by Guillaume Paoli
Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years (2014) by Bernadette Corporation
Memphis: Objects, Furniture, and Patterns (1985) by Richard Horn
Sea Ranch: Diary of an Idea (2006) by Lawrence Halprin
Picasso and American Art (2006) by Michael FitzGerald
The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick
The Disappointment Artist (2006) by Jonathan Lethem
Introducing Lacan (1992) by Darian Leader and Judy Groves
Open All Night (1995) by Ken Miller and William T. Vollmann
The Body Artist (2001) by Don DeLillo
True Tales from Another Mexico (2001) by Sam Quinones
Teaching to Transgress (1994) by bell hooks
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (1982) by Stephen Shore
The Inner World of Farm Animals (2009) by Amy Hatkoff
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2010) by Simon Reynolds
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2007) by Slavoj Žižek
Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (2009) by Marc Augé
Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies (2006) edited by Michael Veal and Tammy Kim
Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row (2016) by Forrest Stuart
Great Jones Street (1973) by Don DeLillo
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
This is not a T-shirt (2019) by Bobby Hundreds
Universal Principles of Design (2003) by by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler
Practical Recommender Systems (2019) by Kim Falk
Red Star (1908) by Alexander Bogdanov
Venture Deals (2011) by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Zine Yearbook 9 (2008) edited by Joe Biel
The Debt Resistor's Operations Manual (2014) by Strike Debt
Face to Face: A Collection of Drawings & Political Cartoons (1973) by Fons Van Woerkom
Introduction to Civil War (2010) by Tiqqun
The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2012) by Maurizio Lazzarato
Mickey Muenning: Dreams and Realizations for A Living Architecture (2014) by Alan Hess and Mickey Muennig
Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City (2019) by Amanda Kolson Hurley
Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (1979) by Fernand Braudel
What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902) by Vladimir Lenin
Now (2017) by The Invisible Committee
Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (2001) by Tiqqun
Ogilvy on Advertising (1963) by David Ogilvy
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (2018) by Kat Holmes
Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) by Ted Chiang
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) by Pierre Bourdieu
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2015) by Paul Mason
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (2002) by Noam Chomsky
To Our Friends (2015) by The Invisible Committee
The Brand Gap (2005) by Marty Neumeier
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) by bell hooks
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1964) by Mao Tse-tung
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (2018) by Shane Bauer
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) by Christopher Lasch
The Mirror of Production (1973) by Jean Baudrillard
Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary (2007) by Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison
Reengineering Retail: The Future of Selling in a Post-Digital World (2017) by Doug Stephens
High Growth Handbook (2018) by Elad Gil
Platform Capitalism (2016) by Nick Srnicek
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) by David Graeber
The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (2010) by Richard Florida
Retail Disruptors: The Spectacular Rise and Impact of the Hard Discounters (2018) by Jan-Benedict Steenkamp
The Coming Insurrection (2009) by The Invisible Committee
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (2017) by Adam Greenfield
Tadao Ando: Complete Works (1997) edited by Francesco Dal Co
The Conquest of Bread (1892) by Peter Kropotkin
The Coffee Roaster's Companion (2014) by Scott Rao
Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (2013) by Jennifer M. Silva
Learning SQL (2005) by Alan Beaulieu
REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (2010) by Savas Parastatidis, Jim Webber, and Ian Robinson
literally show me a healthy person (2017) by Darcie Wilder
Muji (2010) by Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, and Naoto Fukasawa
K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2018) by Mark Fisher
Designing Design (2003) by Kenya Hara
Practical Monitoring (2017) by Mike Julian
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems (2016) by Betsy Beyer et al.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014) by Marie Kondō
Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley (2018) by Cary McClelland
Concrete (2012) edited by William Hall
Convenience Store Woman (2016) by Sayaka Murata
The Japanese Garden (2017) by Sophie Walker
Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America (2018) by James Fallows and Deborah Fallows
2018
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh
Belonging: A Culture of Place (1990) by bell hooks
Non-Stop Inertia (2011) by Ivor Southwood
The Lean Startup (2011) by Eric Ries
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul (2017) by Jeremiah Moss
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (2002) by Slavoj Žižek
Carrie (1974) by Stephen King
Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (2016) by Grafton Tanner
Specters of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) by Mark Fisher
The Fall (1956) by Albert Camus
Ansel Adams: Classic Image Essays (1986) by Ansel Adams and John Szarkowski
The Weird and the Eerie (2016) by Mark Fisher
Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) by Michael Lesy
Naked City (1953) by Weegee
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) by Frederick Douglass
On Photography (1977) by Susan Sontag
Measure What Matters (2017) by John Doerr
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976) by Dean MacCannell
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) by Paulo Freire
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (2004) by Paul Graham
White (2009) by Kenya Hara
The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America (1997) by Warren Buffett
Street-Fighting Mathematics (2010) by Sanjoy Mahajan
Agglomeration Economics (2010) edited by Edward Glaeser
Understanding Tree Law (2014) by Barri Kaplan Bonapart
Oakland, Hub of the West (1981) by David Ollier Weber
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018) by Elizabeth Catte
The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy (1996) by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
The Dog's Mind: Understanding Your Dog's Behavior (1990) by Ben Fogle
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005) by David Foster Wallace
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) by Richard Sennett
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by Jane Jacobs
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) by Jean Baudrillard
The Poetics of Space (1958) by Gaston Bachelard
Zero Bugs and Program Faster (2016) by Kate Thompson
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) by Mark Fisher
Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays (2002) by Richard Stallman
The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (2017) by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Be Here Now (1971) by Ram Dass
Dark Entries: Bauhaus and Beyond (1995) by Ian Shirley
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987) by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister
How Not to Die (2015) by Michael Greger
Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (1994) by Leonard Koren
Tokyo Totem (2015) edited by Edwin Gardner
Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) by John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (2007) by Joe Bageant
In Praise of Shadows (1933) by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism (2009) by Melanie Joy
The Anarchist's Guide to Travel (2017) by Matthew Derrick
Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007) by Bob Torres
For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976) by Ntozake Shange
Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (2003) edited by Hart Seely