The Books I Read in 2019

At the end of each year, I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. Below you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2019. Every year I also include an overview of my other media consumption habits (magazines, RSS feeds and podcasts).

This was a slow reading year for me: I only managed to read 39 books for a total of 10.350 pages (last year I managed 52 books and 12.417 pages). It was a busy year, where I was trying to close out and hand over my work at Bits of Freedom, while also preparing for a year of travel and organising a huge real life game.

Only about 24% of the authors that I read were women. That is a bad result and reflects the fact that I didn’t put a lot of intentionality in my reading: I mostly just read in a very instrumental way, picking up books as I felt that I needed them.

I’ve ordered the list of books into categories that make sense to me (and that are in many ways overlapping and arbitrary). These are the books that I’ve read and what I thought of some of them:

Digital rights and technology

None of the books that I read in this category gave me huge new insights nor a new framework of looking at technology. Kaye’s short book is a good introduction for people who haven’t thought much about the topic. Brunton was less on the ball than in his previous books. And Van Dijck and Poell give a useful definition of platforms in the context of an argument for public values. The book with the most staying power (at least for me) is probably Odell’s.

David Kaye — Speech Police (link)
Finn Brunton — Digital Cash (link)
Jenny Odell — How To Do Nothing (link)
José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waal — The Platform Society (link)
Marjolein Lanzing — The Transparent Self: A normative investigation of changing selves and relationships in the age of the quantified self (link)
Jan Kuitenbrouwer — Datadictatuur (link)
Alexander Belgraver and Silvia Belgraver — Eerlijk nieuws zonder censuur (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

We only read six books with the book club this year. The most monumental and thought provoking is certainly Zuboff’s book, which gave us a whole new vocabulary with which to critique what we now call ‘surveillance capitalists’. I enjoyed finally hearing how Snowden managed to get those files out of the NSA, and thought that Modderkolk did some amazing pieces of journalism in his book about ‘cyber security’. Stross proved once more that I am not the type for science fiction (I’ll keep trying though). Both Van Essen and Pomerantsev had some memorable scenes in their books, but both didn’t manage to fully convince me in other ways.

Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (link)
Edward Snowden — Permanent Record (link)
Huib Modderkolk — Het is oorlog maar niemand die het ziet (link)
Peter Pomerantsev — This is Not Propaganda (link)
Rob van Essen — De goede zoon (link)
Charles Stross — Accelerando (link)

Self improvement and how-to

The book that has had (by far) the most practical impact on my life is Pastoor’s book about how to get a grip on your work. Although I wasn’t bad to start with, it really helped me to easily accomplish some of the things that I would find difficult in the past. I would truly recommend the book to anybody who wants to accomplish anything. I was ready to hate De Becker’s book, but found that it had some profound insights on how to deal with difficult people (e.g. stalkers). Den Dekker has written a beautiful book about Chi Kung, and if you ever want to go and hitchhike across the ocean on a sailing boat, then I think that Van der Vreeken’s book is required reading.

Rick Pastoor — Grip (link)
Gavin De Becker — The Gift of Fear (link)
Chris Guillebeau — The $100 Startup (link)
Matt Kepnes — How to Travel the World on $50 a Day (link)
Peter den Dekker — The dynamics of standing still (link)
Royal Yachting Association — RYA Competent Crew Skills (link)
Suzanne van der Veeken — Ocean Nomad (link)
Jelmer de Boer — Thuisblijven is duurder (link)
Tom Hodgkinson — Business for Bohemians (link)

Fiction

Once again, I didn’t read a lot of fiction, but the things that I did read were all very good. My mind was completely blown by Marlon James, I absolutely loved his book. Murdoch and Baldwin are both skillful interpreters of the human condition. The graphic novel by Altaribba was completely haunting (and beautiful). If you have young children, get them Tori.

Marlon James — A Brief History of Seven Killings (link)
Iris Murdoch — A Fairly Honourable Defeat (link)
James Baldwin — If Beale Street Could Talk (link)
Antonio Altaribba and Kim — The Art of Flying (link)
Barry Smit — Bloedwonder (link)
Brian Elstak and Karin Amatmoekrim — Tori (link)
Joke van Leeuwen — Toen ik (link)

Non-fiction

Judah wrote a harrowing and brilliant portrait of London. Tolentino is an incredibly talented writer and I thoroughly enjoyed reading her essays. Walker’s book made me change my sleeping habits but also made me understand much better how sleep actually works (so listing it under self-improvement wouldn’t do it justice). Bythell managed to make me laugh out loud on many occasions with his wry diary entries from the frontier of a second hand bookshop. Abdurraqib shares my love for A Tribe Called Quest, which made his book a pleasure to read.

Ben Judah — This is London (link)
Jia Tolentino — Trick Mirror (link)
Matthew Walker — Why We Sleep (link)
Daan Dekker — De betonnen droom (link)
Hanif Abdurraqib — Go Ahead in the Rain (link)
Harry G. Frankfurt — On Inequality (link)
Peter Wohlleben — The Hidden Life of Trees (link)
Shaun Bythell — The Diary of a Bookseller (link)
adrienne maree brown — Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (link)
Mark Traa — De Russen komen! (link)

My consumption of other media

2019 was dedicated to saving as much money as possible (in order to travel for all of 2020). I therefore cancelled all my regular subscriptions to magazines. As The Correspondent’s subscription continued well into 2020, I continued to read their pieces on the basis of their daily newsletter. At the end of the year I took out a subscription to The Economist, mainly for their excellent daily Espresso news app, but also as I way to stay in touch with what is happening with the rest of the world while I am traveling. I continued to read Stephen Downes and Audrey Watters (luckily they continued to write!) and am still subscribed to the Dipsaus newsletter.

The rest of my reading comes via my RSS reader (which I consider to be my personal inoculation against misinformation). I used the reader to read Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, Maxim Februari and Marcel van Roosmalen at the NRC, and Karin Spaink, Caroline Haskins, Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Ben Thompson (Stratechery) Linda Duits, Kashmir Hill (until she went to the New York Times), Evgeny Morozov, Ian Bogost, XKCD, Zeynep Tufekci, danah boyd, James Bridle, Matthew Green, and a whole bunch of digital rights organisations. I also read Tweakers and Guardian Tech via their RSS feeds.

Not much has changed for me in podcasting land. I listened to all new episodes of This American Life, Een Podcast over Media, This Week in Tech, Dipsaus, Ear Hustle, 99% Invisible (although I am behind), and Reply-all. Next to that I listened to three interesting series: Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales and two podcasts created by AudioCollectief Schik, namely Laura H. en El Tarangu. When I see an interesting episode I will listen to podcasts by The Correspondent, RadioLab, Glitch, Philsophical Disquisitions, Philosophy Bites, Freakonomics, Philosophy 24/7, New Books in Philosophy, Planet Money, Radio Rechtsstaat, The Tim Ferris Show, Triangulation and Your Undivided Attention.

What will I be reading in 2020?

As I will be traveling for all of 2020, I will likely mostly read books that relate in some way to the country where I am at or to the activity that I am doing. I already know that this will mean reading books about a few places in South America and a few books that are about (long distance) sailing and the sea.

The Books I Read in 2018

At the end of each year, I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. Below you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2018. Every year I also include an overview of my other media consumption habits (magazines, RSS feeds and podcasts).

I managed to read one book a week last year, exactly 52 books. The majority of those were read in the latter half of year, when I finished the thesis for my masters in philosophy. There was an increase in the number of books by women that I read (from close to 25% in 2017 to close to 35%), but it still isn’t what I’d like it to be. More than half of the books were written by people who were born in the either the US or UK. However quite a few of those writers do come from a bicultural background.

I’ve ordered the list of books into categories that make sense to me (and that are in many ways overlapping and arbitrary). These are the books that I’ve read and what I thought of some of them:

Digital rights and technology

After reading Gerard I sold most my of meagre Bitcoin holdings, he wrote a thorough debunking of the blockchain concept in general and Bitcoin in particular. Bartlett and Lanier have both made quite radical arguments in two very clearly argued books. Jeong’s concept of ‘garbage’ is a useful way of looking at the shit on some parts of the web. Stephens-Davidowitz makes you realize that Google has more psychological data about people in the world than any other organization ever before. Don’t bother reading Taplin.

David Gerard — Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts (link)
Jamie Bartlett — The People Vs Tech (link)
Jaron Lanier — Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (link)
Sarah Jeong — The Internet Of Garbage (link)
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz — Everybody Lies (link)
Yuval Noah Harari — 21 lessen voor de 21ste eeuw (link)
Jonathan Taplin — Move Fast and Break Things (link)
Safiya Umoja Noble — Algorithms of Oppression (link)

Justice, ethics and identity

I had the privilege of being able to invest a whole week into reading Rawls’s masterpiece. To me he is the model of how one should do philosophy. Pettit’s ideas are more appealing to me though, and this book is a great summary of his thoughts on civic republicanism. Appiah has written a definitive guide to identity in the current moment. Macfarquhar’s book is a wonderful introduction to age-old ethical dilemmas through stories of lived experiences. Qureshi should be read by anyone who wants to understand more about the current plight of Muslims in the UK.

John Rawls — A Theory of Justice (link)
Philip Pettit — Just Freedom (link)
Kwame Anthony Appiah — The Lies That Bind (link)
Larissa Macfarquhar — Strangers Drowning (link)
Asim Qureshi — A Virtue Of Disobedience (link)
Reni Eddo-Lodge — Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

The book club was back in full effect last year. Unfortunately with plenty of middle of the road books. Bridle was the exception and brought the mindset of an artist to our technological predicament. I now also understand why Harari is such a bestseller: the man can write. The corporate take-over in Magnason’s near fiction novel will stay with me for a while longer. Nagle wrote the most intelligent thing I’ve read all year about the ‘culture wars’. Schneier’s book is a good overview of where we are at when it come to securing the internet of things.

James Bridle — New Dark Age (link)
Yuval Noah Harari — Homo Deus (link)
Andri Magnason — Lovestar (link)
Angela Nagle — Kill All Normies (link)
Bruce Schneier — Click Here to Kill Everybody (link)
Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith — The Dictator’s Handbook (link)
Fred Kaplan — Dark Territory (link)
Jean M. Twenge — iGen (link)
Ryan Holiday — Conspiracy (link)

Self improvement and how-to

Books that teach you new skills can have an incredible influence on your daily or professional life. Parker’s book on how to run gatherings (a place where people come together to do something) might have been my favorite book of the year. She really nailed it. Carroll has managed to change my productivity-practice: I used to have all my todos online, now I’ve switched back to paper.

Priya Parker — The Art of Gathering (link)
Ryder Carroll — The Bullet Journal Method (link)
Eva Rovers — Practivisme (link)
Juana Clark Craig — Project Management Lite (link)
Michelle McGagh — The No Spend Year (link)
Caroline van der Velde — Oudergids autisme (link)
Rolf Potts — Vagabonding (link)

Fiction

Wow, I’ve read some wonderful fiction this year. All of the below come recommended. Neale Hurston was incredible and Ross was weirdly hilarious. Didion writes beautiful prose and I couldn’t stop reading Isik and his coming of age in the Bijlmer.

Zora Neale Hurston — Their Eyes Were Watching God (link)
Fran Ross — Oreo (link)
Joan Didion — The Year of Magical Thinking (link)
Murat Isik — Wees onzichtbaar (link)
Chibundu Onuzo — Welcome to Lagos (link)
Barry Smit — Ondijk/Punt (link)
Vamba Sherif and Ebissé Rouw — Zwart (link)

While traveling in Mexico, I read these three pieces of excellent writing by current Mexican writers. Luiselli was my favourite.

Valeria Luiselli — The Story of My Teeth (link)
Yuri Herrera — Transmigration of Bodies (link)
Juan Pablo Villalobos — Quesadillas (link)

Graphic novels and art

I loved Elstak en Duysker’s children’s book, mainly because of its bold graphics. The novel by Drnaso was haunting and made me feel empty inside afterward. Dalí is ever the prankster, and I look forward to reading the following chapters in Sattouf’s life.

Brian Elstak and Esther Duysker — Trobi (link)
Nick Drnaso — Sabrina (link)
Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman — Dali’s Mustache (link)
Riad Sattouf — The Arab of the Future (link)
Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam — Explosiegevaar! (link)

Non-fiction

I was mesmerized by Godfrey-Smith’s book about octopuses, which turned out to be insightful look at consciousness and at our own minds. Beerthuizen’s book had some good examples of how organizations managed to find business sponsors for their activities. The two museum catalogues were both worth the read. Hislop and Hockenbull’s book was actually better than the exhibit at the British Museum, which can’t be said about the book about the National Museum of Anthropology (even though it was excellent). Taleb both infuriated me (more so than with his earlier books), but also made me think. Wallman should have just done a TED-talk, his premise is interesting but too thin for a book.

Peter Godfrey-Smith — Other Minds (link)
Marcel Beerthuizen — Show me the money (link)
Ian Hislop and Tom Hockenhull — I object (link)
Mónica del Villar — 100 Selected Works: National Museum of Anthropology (link)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Skin in the game (link)
Catherine Ingram and Andrew Rae — This is Dalí (link)
James Wallman — Stuffocation (link)

My consumption of other media

My media consumption looks very similar to last year’s. I am subscribed to De Correspondent, Het Parool, Wired Magazine and the New York Review of Books. I get three newsletters: the OLDaily by Stephen Downes, the weekly newsletter by Audrey Watters, and whenever Dipsaus sends out one. Outside of these I get most of my news through my self-hosted RSS reader. I read a few people diligently: Kashmir Hill, Evgeny Morozov, Cory Doctorow, Cathy O’Neil, Karin Spaink, Jaap-Henk Hoepman, and Linda Duits. I wish there was a way for me to receive the columns of Maxim Februari and Sheila Sitalsing in my inbox. The only web-comic I read is XKCD. For other news, I read The Intercept (which is getting better again), Wired Security, Guardian Tech and Tweakers. For work I follow most digital rights organizations, Pricacy Nieuws and Privacy Barometer.

I still listen to a lot of podcasts: Every episode of Reply All, This American Life, Dipsaus, Ear Hustle, This Week in Tech, Een Podcast over Media, and Strangers (which is on a very long hiatus). New is Goed Nieuws with Joris Luyendijk. If I have time, or if the show looks particularly appealing, I listen to Radio Rechtsstaat, 99% Invisible, The Most Perfect Album, RadioLab, Pakhuis de Zwijger, Freakonomics Radio, Intercepted, The Guardian Long Read, Triangulation, and sometimes even the Tim Ferris Show.

What will I be reading in 2019?

Outside of the books that I will have to read for my job as the director of Bits of Freedom and the books that I will read with the book club, I will try and read the books that I have already bought and haven’t read yet. So that would be this list. Next to an attempt to read more fiction, I will also read some foundational texts in ethics (probably through anthologies).

Freedom and Justice in our Technological Predicament

This is the thesis I wrote for my Master of Arts in philosophy.
It can also be dowloaded as a PDF.

Introduction

As the director of an NGO advocating for digital rights I am acutely aware of the digital trail we leave behind in our daily lives. But I too am occasionally surprised when I am confronted with concrete examples of this trail. Like when I logged into my Vodafone account (my mobile telephony provider) and—buried deep down in the privacy settings—found a selected option that said: “Ik stel mijn geanonimiseerde netwerkgegevens beschikbaar voor analyse.”¹ I turned the option off and contacted Vodafone to ask them what was meant by anonymized network data analysis. They cordially hosted me at their Amsterdam offices and showed me how my movement behaviour was turned into a product by one of their joint ventures, Mezuro:

Smartphones communicate continuously with broadcasting masts in the vicinity. The billions of items of data provided by these interactions are anonymized and aggregated by the mobile network operator in its own IT environment and made available to Mezuro for processing and analysis. The result is information about mobility patterns of people, as a snapshot or trend analysis, in the form of a report or in an information system.²

TNO had certified this process and confirmed that privacy was assured: Mezuro has no access into the mobility information of individual people. From their website: “While of mobility patterns is of great social value, as far as we’re concerned it is certainly not more valuable than protecting the privacy of the individual.”³

Intuitively something about Vodafone’s behavior felt wrong to me, but I found it hard to articulate why what Vodafone was doing was problematic. This thesis is an attempt to find reasons and arguments that explain my growing sense of discomfort. It will show that Vodafone’s behavior is symptomatic for our current relationship with technology: it operates at a tremendous scale, it reuses data to turn it into new products and it feels empowered to do this without checking with their customers first.

The main research question of this thesis is how the most salient aspects of our technological predicament affect both justice as fairness and freedom as non-domination.

The research consists of three parts. In the first part I will look at the current situation to understand what is going on. By taking a closer look at the emerging logic of our digitizing society I will show how mediation, accumulation and centralization shape our technological predicament. This predicament turns out to be one where technology companies have a domineering scale, where they employ a form of data-driven appropriation and where our relationship with the technology is asymmetrical and puts us at the receiving end of arbitrary control. A set of four case studies based on Google’s products and services deepens and concretizes this understanding of our technological predicament.

In the second part of the thesis I will use the normative frameworks of John Rawls’s justice as fairness and Philip Pettit’s freedom as non-domination to problematize this technological predicament. I will show how data-driven appropriation leads to injustice through a lack of equality, the abuse of the commons, and a mistaken utilitarian ethics. And I will show how the domineering scale and our asymmetrical relationship to the technology sector leads to unfreedom through our increased vulnerability to manipulation, through our dependence on philanthropy, and through the arbitrary control that technology companies exert on us.

In the third and final part I will take a short and speculative look at what should be done to get us out of this technological predicament. Is it possible to reduce the scale at which technology operates? Can we reinvigorate the commons? And how should we build equality into our technology relationships?

Continue reading “Freedom and Justice in our Technological Predicament” →

Turnitin User Agreement: I disagree

For the past one and a half year or so I’ve been studying Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Today I wanted to hand in my very first and very tentative ideas about my Master’s thesis. Using the archaic, mindnumbing, and Repetitive Strain Injury-inducing Blackboard digital learning environment I was confronted with the following screen:

I have better things to do than read the whole text (~ 5.100 words) but I did read enough to know that I couldn’t agree with this User Agreement. Instead I decided to write this blog post explaining what I find so disagreeable.

But first, what is Turnitin? It is the market leader (although monopolist is probably the better term) in plagiarism detection services. They have a few hundred million student submissions in their database. So when a new submission comes in they check it against the web (Wikipedia is plagiarism source number one) and against the submissions they already have and presumably give out a plagiarism score or percentage (I am not privy to that part of the interface).

The User Agreement

The terms of service of many companies can often be best summarised as: “We can do whatever we want, you can’t expect anything from us and, even though this agreement already gives you zero rights into perpetuity, we still reserve the right to change this agreement at our will without telling you.”

Turnitin’s terms closely follow that general pattern. Let me quote you some relevant passages. All emphasis is mine.

Let’s start with the good: They acknowledge that you keep ownership over your work:

You or the person who has authorized You to submit a paper for review as part of the Services will, subject to the license granted hereunder to Turnitin and its affiliates, vendors, service providers and licensors, retain Your ownership of the submitted paper. This User Agreement grants Turnitin and its affiliates, vendors, service providers and licensors only a non-exclusive right to Your paper solely for the purposes of plagiarism prevention and the other Services provided as part of Turnitin.

What does retaining ownership actually mean? Not much, because by agreeing with Agreement you completely lose control of your work. This is because you give Turnitin a license:

If You submit a paper or other content in connection with the Services, You hereby grant to Turnitin, its affiliates, vendors, service providers, and licensors a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers, as well as feedback and results, for the limited purposes of a) providing the Services, and b) for improving the quality of the Services generally.

And the license is very broad: it will last forever, counts everywhere and is not just for Turnitin but also for anybody they have dealings with. The text does say that the license is limited for the purposes of providing the services. The problem is that these services are in themselves not limited. The services are defined as follows:

The Site offers certain services, together with other content, data, images, information and other materials which allow authorized educational institutions (“Educational Institutions”), and teachers, instructors, professors or other faculty members who are currently teaching a registered class (together, “Instructors”) to use software tools hosted by Turnitin to check enrolled students’ work for possible textual matches against Internet-available resources and Turnitin’s own proprietary database.

But it then also says:

You acknowledge and agree that the form and nature of the Services and the Site which Turnitin provides may change from time to time without prior notice to You.

So there we have it: If you agree to the User Agreement you have just given Turnitin (and its partners) permission to use your paper for any service and at any point in the time in the future.

And even though you have not limited them in any way, they still want to make sure that you agree with them changing the rules whenever they want:

Turnitin, LLC reserves the right to change the terms, conditions, and notices under which the Site is offered.

What needs to change before I will agree

Whether or not it make sense for a university to use a plagiarism detection service is outside of the scope of this blog post. And so is a discussion about what constitutes plagiarism. So assuming the University of Amsterdam will continue to want to check whether I have plagiarized, I will list my conditions before I can agree to the User Agreement. These are as follows:

My work can only be used by Turnitin to check for plagiarism.
As I see no reason for it being my responsibility to help Turnitin get better at doing their job (by giving them the ability to recognise when somebody plagiarizes my work), I want Turnitin to delete my work as soon as the check has been done.
If Turnitin relies on third parties to do the plagiarism check, then I would need a limitative list of these parties and the assurance that the above two conditions will also count for them.

Until my conditions are satisfied I will not be using Turnitin to hand in any of my work at the university. And I am pretty confident that in this case my principles will be stronger than my pragmatism. Let’s see what happens next…

Update on January 16th, 2018: Folia, the university’s magazine, published an article about this issue. In it, the university says they will look into it and Turnitin has given a ludicrous reaction. My teachers for this course have said that I can hand in all my assignments via email. I’ve asked the university to keep me posted.

The Books I Read in 2017

At the end of each year I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. Below you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2017. Every year I also include an overview of my other media consumption habits (magazines, RSS feeds and podcasts).

Last year I wrote that I would be happy if I would manage to read one book every two weeks. I did manage to read a little bit more: 36 books for the year. Unfortunately the percentage of female writers is still stuck at just under 25%. However, I did manage to read less from the US and the UK than usual (about 40% this year).

I’ve ordered the list of books into categories that make sense to me. These are the books that I’ve read and what I thought of some of them:

Philosophy

I spent a lot of time studying the republican ideal of freedom (see my bachelor thesis) and I am convinced that the world would be a better place if more people would read Philip Pettit’s books. Matthew Crawford wrote a must-read cultural critique of our current attention economy and Svendsen helped me articulate why I believe that the current focus on anti-terrorism is creating its own victims.

Matthew Crawford — World Beyond Your Head (link)
Robert Kane — A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (link)
Lars Svendsen — A Philosophy of Fear (link)
Quentin Skinner — Hobbes and Republican Liberty (link)
Quentin Skinner — Liberty Before Liberalism (link)
Daan Roovers — Mensen maken (link)
Philip Pettit — Republicanism (link)
Paul Scheffer — De vrijheid van de grens (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

The book club is slowing down. In the past year we always managed to read seven books, this year we got stuck at five. The Dutch are privileged to have such a sharp novelist writing about our technological predicament as Maxim Februari. Cixin Liu’s science fiction was very entertaining and Nir Eyal was mostly irritating with his disingenuous concern for the ethics of his dopamine based approach.

Maxim Februari — Klont (link)
Adam Greenfield — Radical Technologies (link)
David Golumbia — The Politics of Bitcoin (link)
Cixin Liu — The Three-Body Problem (link)
Nir Eyal — Hooked (link)

The black struggle and black experience

This is of course a slightly uncomfortable category (the books are way too diverse to all be put on the same pile), but I wanted to get a better understanding of black experience in the last year and these are the books which helped me do that. Most of the books on this list are incredible. Yaa Gyasi’s novel was the best piece of fiction I read this year and it were the words of James Baldwin who hit the hardest. Chinua Achebe is the favourite writer of one of my favourite writers (Ngozi Adichie) and I now understand why. Tommie Shelby’s radical black liberalism is a convincing philosophical argument for the abolishment of the American dark ghetto and Gloria Wekker has managed to put the finger on why I often feel so uncomfortable with how we deal with race here in the Netherlands.

Tommie Shelby — Dark Ghettos (link)
Yaa Gyasi — Homegoing (link)
James Baldwin and Raoul Peck — I Am Not Your Negro (link)
Chinua Achebe — The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart/No Longer at Ease/Arrow of God (link)
James Baldwin — The Fire Next Time (link)
Angie Thomas — The Hate U Give (link)
Gloria Wekker — White Innocence (link)
Anousha Nzume — Hallo witte mensen (link)
Robert Vuijsje — Kaaskoppen (link)
Colson Whitehead — The Underground Railroad (link)

The war in Vietnam

While spending a few weeks in Vietnam I wanted to dive deeper into the war. Bao Ninh’s book will continue to haunt me for a while, while Dang Thuy Tram gives a glimpse into the Vietnamese psyche. Swain writes beautifully about both the horrors and the pleasures of Indochina during the late 60s and early 70s.

Bao Ninh — The Sorrow Of War (link)
Dang Thuy Tram — Last Night I Dreamed of Peace (link)
Jon Swain — River Of Time (link)

Fiction

It isn’t the only fiction that I read over the last year (there is some in the other categories), but it is fitting that Atwood’s book stands by itself. What a formidable writer and what an incredible book.

Margaret Atwood — The Handmaid’s Tale (link)

Non-fiction

Goodwin and Bach made a great comic about how the economy works and Ould Slahi’s account of his rendition and his time in Guantánamo is shameful for the US. Ecott’s book is a joy for any diver and Puett has inspired me to try and read some of the Chinese classics in the coming year. Fumio Sasaki has convinced me (once more) that a minimalist mindset is a wonderful thing, but I think that my physical books will continue to be part of my minimalism.

Michael Goodwin and David Bach — Economix (link)
Mohamedou Ould Slahi — Guantánamo Diary (link)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (link)
Fumio Sasaki — Goodbye, Things (link)
Tim Ecott — Neutral Buoyancy (link)
Frans Osinga — Science, Strategy and War (link)
Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh — The Path (link)
Edgar H. Schein — Humble Inquiry (link)
Henk van Houtum and Leo Lucassen — Voorbij Fort Europa (link)

My consumption of other media

Not much has changed on this front. I am still a member of De Correspondent and subscribe to Wired Magazine and the New York Review of Books. New is a subscription to the Amsterdam-based (and focused) newspaper Het Parool.

Cory Doctorow, Stephen Downes and Audrey Watters have been with me for years and they are still my favourite curators. My RSS feed has barely changed: I read the news from other digital rights organisations, read Coates and Bogost in the Atlantic and Morozov in the Guardian, follow the Facebook newsroom and Google’s research and won’t miss anything that Kashmir Hill or Maciej Cegłowski writes. A new find is Ben Thompson who writes very insightfully about the tech industry on his on blog, Stratechery. My other tech news comes from the Guardian, Nu.nl Tech, Tweakers and Wired’s security blog. The Intercept is still on my list of feeds, but is becoming nearly formulaic in its approach.

In podcasting I continue to listed to every episode of This American Life, Dipsaus, 99% Invisible, Een Podcast over Media, Radiolab (and their More Perfect series), Reply All and This Week in Tech. New and not to be skipped is Ear Hustle, a podcast from inside a US jail. I’ve listened to quite a few of Lex Bohlmeijer’s interviews on De Correspondent and can usually get to the Rudi and Freddie Show from the same outlet. If I can find the time I listen to some of the Guardian’s long reads, Note to Self, Planet Money, Strangers, Team Human, The Tim Ferris Show, Freakonomics Radio and Security Now.

What will I be reading in 2018?

2018 will be another year where I will have to spend a lot of time studying and writing and so will have less time for reading. I will read some books about fundraising, expect to be reading about the philosophy of justice and hope to get to some more fiction than I usually manage.