Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

I’ve had Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari’s later book, sitting in a box waiting to be read for a couple of years now (because that’s how I roll). My bestie Amanda recently purchased Sapiens on the strength of several recommendations, with someone even suggesting she could use it as a university course textbook. However, she is neck-deep in writing a PhD thesis right now, so I’m subbing in! I do loves me some world…

So one day I was looking for some advertisements I could use with my English classes to discuss graphic texts and advertising strategies. I stumbled across Vintage Ad Browser's repository of Coca-Cola advertisements, and I was just captivated. It had never occurred to me before that Coca-Cola provides a perfect opportunity to chart the evolution of advertising over the course of more than a century. I pulled many ads through the decades to use with…

Sometimes it seems like smug people like to point smugly to science to justify their smug opinions about their superiority. Alas, many of these people turn out to be men declaiming the natural inferiority of women. As much as some men would like you to believe it, however, “science” doesn’t prove that women are naturally inferior to men. As Angela Saini explains in her book of the same name, “science” backs up what many of…

Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, and that’s just the way it is, right? Girls like nurturing toys and boys like toys that involve motion or action, and don’t even bother trying to change those habits—they’re ingrained at birth, yeah? Doubtless you’ve heard these and other stereotypes and claims about the biological origins of sex differences. In some cases, such as the pink/blue divide, you might already be aware of the history…

Self-driving cars, or more broadly, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are really cool. I’m excited to see them become a reality. Nevertheless, there is a lot of hype around this topic. It seems like most of what I read about the subject comes from someone connected to the tech industry or the auto industry (or both), and that always makes me suspicious. No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future is a…

The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality is a history book masquerading as a physics book, and I like that. I’m just as interested in the history of science as I am in science itself. As the title implies, Paul Halpern focuses on the lives of Feynman and Wheeler, protégés who individually and collectively had their fingers on the pulse of physics for much of the twentieth century. Halpern…

One year ago I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, in which she remembers the seven Indigenous youths who died far from home while attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School here in Thunder Bay. In that heartbreaking and essential work, she links these deaths to a structure of colonialism and white supremacy and an ongoing form of cultural genocide in which the government and the rest of us remain complicit. Now Talaga is back…

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This…

While I was not a fan of the last collection of Massey Lectures that I read, the brilliant thing about this series is that every year is very different. Each year brings a new speaker, a new topic, and an entirely new way of approaching the topic and the format. (I am very excited for this year’s lectures delivered by Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers). Last year’s lectures by Payam Akhavan work…

This was a birthday gift, along with A Criminal Magic, from my friend Amanda, and I’m just now getting to it—which, especially when it comes to my non-fiction backlog, isn’t actually that bad of a delay! Amanda was just getting to know me at the time, so she picked two books off my to-read list. I’m not sure why I had Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety…

After finishing Lost in Math, I decided it was time to dive into a pop physics book I’ve had sitting on my shelf for a while now. It’s pure coincidence that The Universe in the Rearview Mirror also happens to be about the predominance of symmetry in theoretical physics. In Dave Goldberg’s case, however, he isn’t arguing about the philosophy behind this approach. He’s totally on board, and he’s here to explain to laypeople…

Is truth beauty and beauty, truth? It can be hard to tell.

In Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Sabine Hossenfelder argues that these two concepts are not equivalent. As the subtitle implies, Hossenfelder feels that theoretical physicists are too obsessed with creating “beautiful” theories, in the sense that the mathematics that underpins the theories (because these days, theories are basically math, even though, as Hossenfelder stresses, physics isn’t math) must be…

It took me a while, but I figured out why it took me so long to read this book: the typeface.

That might seem picky, or petty, but it's true. This small, heavyweight, sans serif typeface just did not appeal to me. I trucked on—because this book is definitely reading—but I did not, alas, enjoy the actual experience of reading it. Your mileage will probably vary, but typography is something I’m sensitive to.

Anyway,…

The profile of the term “Big Data” has risen recently. Yet, like so many buzzwords, people often don’t fully grasp the significance of the term. “Big Data” is more than the nebulous connotation of corporations collecting our information, and perhaps packaging and selling it—although it is that. It is, in fact, about how corporations quantify everything we do, even the information we don’t realize we’re leaking out into the world, and then use that data…

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”

This powerful statement, first deployed and used in this essay by Flavia Dzodan, is often on my mind. And I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with it, because that is how I want to position myself. As a white man who tries his best to be feminist, I recognize I have a hell of a lot of privilege in…

Kara is still split on this one, folks. Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through the Strange (And Impossibly Small) World of Particle Physics tries to teach us about … well, particle physics. Specifically, Jon Butterworth takes us on a tour of the different particles in the Standard Model of physics, explains the three fundamental forces that interact with them, and then expands our horizons by briefly touching on the frontiers of physics research. The subject…

Our science teachers do a remarkable job with what limited resources, time, and support they have in school today. However, one of the many areas in which public science education could be improved is the way in which we examine the hidden systems that power science itself, and the way these systems intersect with our society. Cell lines are a great example of this. We learn about biomedical research in school, about cells, about vaccines—but…

Although I’ve been familiar with the concept for a while, I think I first came across the term Female Chauvinist Pig in Holly Bourne’s excellent How Hard Can Love Be?. In her novel, Bourne presents us with Melody, a stereotypical busty blonde who struts her stuff and embraces her sexuality and “hotness” because she believes that this is what makes her empowered in today’s society. It’s such an intriguing concept, something that interests me…

So you read So You Want to Talk About Race and now you have more questions. Specifically, you’re wondering how privilege affects your life online. Surely the Internet is the libertarian cyber-utopia we were all promised, right? It’s totally free of bias and discrimina—sorry, I can’t even write that with a straight face.

Of course the Internet is a flaming cesspool of racism and misogyny. We can’t have good things.

What Safiya Umoja Noble sets…

So let’s say you acknowledge white privilege exists. (If you don’t, you should back up and maybe read something like So You Want to Talk about Race.) But maybe now you’re wondering how much white privilege actually affects people, particularly when it comes to issues of education and the workplace. That’s what White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society tackles. Kalwant Bhopal carefully and in great detail pieces together a picture of how…