Books

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshanna Zuboff: a long read, but an engaging, diverse, and necessary polemic for the current moment.
• The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis: I’ve always heard this hailed as a classic of popular history writing, and it lives up to it. For some reason this really got me thinking about echoes of stories about impersonation and identity for soldiers across time and media: not just Guerre, but the Odyssey, Mad Men, Sommersby, The Bridge on the River Kwai…
• The Last Wish, Andrzej Sapkowski: ah, The Witcher, maybe you’ve heard of it? Despite having started each of the games and abandoning them after getting through the basic mechanics intros, I never really engaged with any other Witcher material, but the Netflix adaptation was enough to finally push me over the edge. I’ve got breaking news for you: this was a great read that has a whole lot of fun with subverting various fantasy tropes.
• Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom: touches on a wide range of topics with humor and skill.
• Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener: an enjoyable memoir about the current (passing?) “tech moment”.
• Lysias I and Plato’s Crito: Greek Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary, Geoffrey D. Steadman: also freely available here, this was part of my Steadman Reading Group reading, which aims to work through all the Steadman readers in Greek at a pace of one per month (Crito was December, Lysias I was January). Lysias I is a surprisingly engaging and easy read, so I can see why it’s commonly used as a first text after “intro Greek”. On to Xenophon’s Anabasis I for February!

Articles

• The Deceptively Simple Number Sparking Coronavirus Fears, Ed Yong
• Decay In Pedantic Snobbery, Sententiae Antiquae / Cyril Connolly
• Recovering STEM’s Latin Roots, Marco Romani
• Arthur Verocai: The Brazilian Experimentalist Who Became An Unlikely Hip Hop Icon, WhoSampled
• Death On Mars, Caleb A. Scharf
• Who’s-Dead McCarthy, Kevin Barry
• Charles Van Doren, a Quiz Show Whiz Who Wasn’t, Dies at 93, Robert D. McFadden
• The Perennial Problem With the Excavation of Ancient Sites, Michael D. Press
• It’s never too late for ‘Lodge 49,’ the canceled show you can still love, Alison Foreman