Some of these short, short stories felt shocking and absurd, either because of Kawabatan intention or because of the brutal reduction of the narrative–or both: Kawabata was an avant-garde writer back in the day, influenced […]
Tag: book
My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft
Bonnie Nardi uses Dewey’s activity theory (never heard of this before the ethnography) to analyze World of Warcraft. Dewey’s theory allows us to conceive of online games (if I am to understand correctly) as an […]
The Use and Abuse of History by Nietzsche
I was a little bit worried about this edition. In the Editor’s Introduction, the editor criticizes Nietzsche’s “gospel of the will to power” as something that has “unleashed bestiality in the name of the sanctity […]
The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz
A great practitioner’s manual to foresight through scenarios. Scenarios are stories that foresight practitioners construct to provide a context for decisions in the future. These are not mere extrapolations, but serve also as a vision […]
A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway
Haraway is in conversation with a lot of feminist theory and proposes the figure of the cyborg to consider a new politics. Writing in the 1980s, the cyborg was merely an incipient fantasy, but Haraway’s […]
Straightjacket Society: An Insider’s Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan by Masao Miyamoto (1994)
Masao Miyamoto is a psychiatrist who grew up in Japan and was trained in the US. He returned to Japan after 11 years of living, teaching, and working in America to enter the Japanese bureaucracy, […]
Keigo Higashino: Miracles of the Namiya General Store
Keigo Higashino is one of the most prolific Japanese authors who is known for his crime and thriller fictions. Born in a middle to low income family, he studied engineering at Osaka Prefecture University; however, […]
My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft
Another ethnography of online spaces; read this a couple of months ago. Bonnie Nardi uses Dewey’s activity theory (never heard of this before the ethnography) to analyze World of Warcraft. Dewey’s theory allows us to […]
The Internet of Money part I by Andreas Antonopoulos
The first book for amateurs on Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, the educator of Bitcoin. (I have read the second volume and have the book review up already.) The second volume is much more interesting, and […]
Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada
Three stories, Yoko Tawada wrote these stories in her native Japanese; apparently she is not as experimental in Japanese as in German (according to some article I read somewhere). All of the stories deal with […]