My Library

Book Review: The Inner Game of Tennis

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A classic of mental framing, perspective, and performance. Surprisingly human.”

First off, this book has nothing to do with tennis. Well, maybe five percent to do with tennis. The rest is about the mental side of any skill.

It’s mostly about self-doubt, self-criticism, and the urge to micro-manage ourselves into performance. The author talks about “Self 1” and “Self 2.” Self 1 is critical and gives all kinds of orders to Self 2, which tries to execute them. Self 2 is so busy trying to make Self 1 happy, that it never does anything right.

The gist is that to become good at anything, we have to let go. We have to stop desperately trying to get better, and just let ourselves flow naturally.

The big technical is “non-judgmental observation,” which means to observe what we do without passing judgment on whether it’s “good” or “bad.” Just observe it, don’t get rattled, decide how you would rather perform, and let yourself do that. The more you fight to perform, the less you’ll be able to.

Later in the book, the author gets into the reasons we take up a skill, the nature of competition, and … self-love? He talks about how you are not your tennis game, and whether you win or lose, it doesn’t have an effect on who you are.

A lovely book. Quite short – I listened to almost the entire thing on a four-hour drive to Minneapolis. Highly recommended for anyone, doing anything, at any stage of life.

Book Review: Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Exhausting accounts of police and prosecutorial misconduct”

This is an anthology of 10 stories of people who were wrongly convicted of crimes. Some of them eventually got out of jail, while some of them are still there.

The book is a collaboration between famed legal writer John Grisham and another guy who runs a ministry which tries to exonerate people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.

It’s…mentally exhausting. From the first chapter, you’re presented with what appears to be gross, flagrant, and – frankly – criminal police misconduct. The detectives, prosecutors, and judges seem to operate with near impunity and cannot possibly believe in the stories they’re weaving.

The first story kind of blew my mind. A woman was raped and murdered by a single man. The police railroaded a guy into a confession, but DNA excluded him. So the police decided that there were two men, and the second one left the DNA. They got a confession out of someone else, who DNA also excluded, so now the police decided there were three men.

And this went on and on, until – I kid you not – seven men were in jail, and the police were looking for an eighth man who finally matched the DNA. Meanwhile, the guy who actually committed the crime and eventually confessed to it (rather matter-of-factly, with no coercion or manipulation) was out free. When he was finally arrested, he expressed amazement that all those other men confessed and that the police made it all happen.

The book illustrated again and again that the police will grasp at the barest thread of “evidence” and get tunnel vision around it. Additionally, the ability of people to lie and get you thrown in prison is terrifying. Eyewitness testimony goes a long way during an investigation, and if the wrong person doesn’t like you or needs to earn favor from law enforcement, they can destroy your world far more easily than you think.

What was missing for me, however, was some look into why the police, prosecutors, and judges would do this. Has anyone ever gone back and gotten people to say why they did it? Some of the stories were so incredible, that I just wonder what was going through the heads of the people involved. I doubt anyone would admit to anything since there would likely be criminal consequences, but I was desperate for someone to talk about the mental gymnastics they were going through.

I’d also be interested in hearing the other side, when the other side still genuinely believes in someone’s guilt. I wish each chapter had a rebuttal from some detectives explaining why they still think the person is guilty. I worry that I just got an inflammatory view from one side (there is a lot of dramatic writing; adjectives and adverbs galore…).

I finally had to quit the book. I read six of the ten stories, but as I started the seventh, I just got this feeling of impending doom. Like, I couldn’t get immersed in another story like this. The seventh story was about a seemingly loving couple. The wife is murdered while the husband is out of town. It suddenly became obvious that they were going to frame the husband for it, and… I just couldn’t sit through another one. It was too emotionally taxing.

So, it’s an interesting book, but a hard read, and it feels incomplete. Like I said before, I need some understanding of what was going on in the heads of the “other” side to really feel like I understand why this happens. The book doesn’t offer that.

Nigel gave it to me for Christmas 2024.

Book Review: Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting book about holistic understanding”

The idea of this book is that you have to understand a situation or group of people from the ground up to make decisions about them.

The author is the CEO of a company that specializes in what they call “sensemaking” – they do workshops and research (an ethnography) to help companies understand their customers or target audience in a holistic sense. Instead of just understanding how they interact with your company, you need to understand how they experience everything related to your product or service.

This is apparently a science called “phenomenology,” which means understanding someone’s phenomenon from their perspective.

There are a lot of examples of how organizations just fundamentally misunderstood their target audience. They assumed they knew, but they didn’t understand the actual pressures and motivations the people where under. The organization behind the book did some deep research and interviews to help them understand why their customers used their product or service, what problem they were trying to solve, and what their motivations where.

Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Wed, 2 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “An entertaning polemic against television”

This book was written in 1985. The author died in 2003, and this is a second edition published posthumously in 2005. I don’t know if anything was changed, but it has an introduction by the author’s son (also an NYU professor, I gather).

The author doesn’t like television, and he argues for about 200 pages about how TV is messing with our brains. It’s superficial, doesn’t lend itself to analysis, and so easy and facile that we watch it without thinking.

It sounds a little elitist – and it is – but he makes a good case for the written word. He talks about epistemology and why we put more faith in the written word.

Later in the book, he goes off on rants about TV news, the usage of TV in education, and how television has affected politics.

I read it 40 years after it was published, and it’s… quaint. The author was alive for the beginnings of the internet, and you can only imagine how he’d feel if he were alive today. TikTok might literally kill him.

Book Review: Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A short polemic against digital advertising”

This is a very short book in which the author claims the fundamental advertising model behind the internet is broken. The basic idea of banner ads is flawed, he says. No one clicks on them, they don’t drive sales, and it’s all a rickety con that’s destined to collapse.

I don’t totally disagree – “mainstream” internet advertising has always been a mess. But he wrote the book four years ago, and the industry still seems to be going strong, so his “brink of collapse” argument might not hold water.

He makes an interesting point about the “commoditization of attention.” He has an analogy about buying and selling chickens. You can evaluate and buy an actual, physical group of chickens, but that takes time. Or a seller can just bundle chickens into a “standard chicken unit,” and you can just buy and sell those. You’re disconnected from the actual chickens. You’re just buying and selling the “idea” of a chicken.

Problems generally result from this. You can’t help but remember the housing crisis of 2007, when mortgages were bundled this way. The value and effectiveness of this depends on who is evaluating the bundles, and in the case of the mortgages, that was flawed.

Same thing here. The author argues that internet advertising is bought in abstract “units of attention.” He details the insane advertising “exchanges” that operated in milliseconds to deliver ads to your browser. No human has evaluated this – attention is being bought and sold in units that may or may not correspond to actual human attention and buying patterns.

He notes in several cases that companies simply eliminated their web advertising budgets, and nothing bad happened. They saw no effect on their profitability and sales.

Again, it’s a short book. He makes a pretty powerful case, but doesn’t belabor it, which I appreciated.

Book Review: Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting, but has little to do with zines”

This book is not about zines. (A “zine” is an amateur, home-published “magazine”). The subtitle is key here: this is about the culture of zines.

It’s not a how-to. It will not teach you how about make or distribute zines. It’s really about the people who make them, and why they do it.

The author is an NYU professor who studies underground, predominately Left-leaning, activist culture. This is the culture, it turns out, that most readily adopts the zine as a means of social or political outlet.

The primary cultural force is anger and ostracism. Zine publishers feel like they’re on the outside of society, and most of them prefer it that way. It’s become a trope in zine culture to make fun of the bourgeoisie. The book goes deep into why this is popular.

The best chapter is towards the end, when the author subversively calls out this culture by saying, “If not ‘normal’ society, then what?” The underground culture is all about tearing down the norms of society, but is very short of answers on what to replace it with. Like most movements, it’s big on revolution, but falls short on the post-revolutionary plan.

Weirdly, he spends very little time discussing the Internet (this is the fourth edition of the book, which was first published in 1997; this edition is from 2025). I wasn’t sure why this was – it would seem that the Internet would merit some discussion, especially since it’s likely taken over the publishing role that zines provided in the first place.

In this same vein, I thought the book was also strong when it compared the initiative of publishing a zine to the “pamphleteers” of hundreds of years ago. Back in the say, the only way to get your message out to a wide group of people would be to publish a pamphlet and distribute it (Common Sense being the most obvious example).

Back before the Internet, that was about it. You codified your ideas on paper, mass produced it, and distributed it. There was significant…power, in this? To me, that’s the neat thing about zines, and the Internet kind of sublimated that. When there’s no effort required to publish an idea, that friction or barrier to entry is removed as a filtering mechanism, and we get pretty much what we have now.

Book Review: Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “An interesting look that I hadn’t considered before”

Despite the subtitle, which sounds vaguely sacrilegious, this is a pro-Christianity book. The author is a seminary professor.

The gist is that modern Christians don’t understand how strange Christianity would have seemed to the Romans back in 100 AD or so. Roman culture was just not used to things like to have a “relationship” with God. They had very strict understanding of the gods, and their lives where spent obsessed with “Pax Deorum” – “peace with the Gods.” They just tried not to piss them all off, really.

Christians were just wildly different than everything Roman culture had taught people about religion, faith, and the supernatural. Christianity wasn’t just a different religion, it was an entirely different paradigm of thinking about faith.

Book Review: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “I just didn’t get it”

I feel guilty saying that I “read” this book, because I abandoned it after about 100 pages. I just didn’t understand why the author was getting at.

The first chapter was a long discussion of his experience with the culture of New Guineans. They are suitably bizarre, and he goes deep into how the have distrust of people “on the other side of the mountain,” and how they randomly kill each other and bring gifts to each other.

What I was struggling with is how this relates to the subtitle: “What can we learn from traditional societies?” I just wasn’t making the connection.

Maybe I didn’t give it enough time? Maybe he brings it around in the end?

I’m not sure, but I feel like he should have made some earlier attempt to explain what we were doing, intellectually.

I feel like I failed on this one.

Book Review: The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (Gifts for Book Lovers, Gifts for Librarians, Book Club Gift)

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A nice pictorial restrospective”

This is a small coffee table book, really. It’s mostly pictures, with a slight narrative running through it.

It’s published by the Library of Congress directly, and has a foreword from Carla Hayden, the current director.

There are a few chapters which talk about the history of trying to organize books. Each chapter finishes with pictures of various cards from library card catalogs.

When the Library of Congress finally retired their physical card catalog, they did something neat: they sent the physical cards to some notable authors and invited them to sign them and/or write a message and return them. A bunch of them are pictured.

The entire last half off the book are just pictures of library cards and other outdated ephemera from libraries. The book itself even has a cute detail: there’s an old school checkout card glued into the cover, like the kind you’ll fill out at school when you checked out a book.

It’s a fun book.

Book Review: F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationships

Sun, 9 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Shallow and obvious; a classic vanity book”

This is a vanity title, written by the founder of a company that offers a tool to do what the book proposes. I worry about these books quite a bit. Some are good, but many are likely ghostwritten.

The key pieces seem to be:

A provocative title
Some framework or mental model the reader that wrap their head around
Lots of praise quotes from other people in the industry who probably haven’t even read the book (I am guilty of agreeing to write these, occasionally)

All are present here. The author is pushing the “content experience framework,” or, more generally, “content experience.” He positions this in opposition to “content marketing” (hence the title).

Near as I can gather, “content experience” is the concept of introducing the customer or prospect to more than just a single content item, but rather a “personalized content experience,” which means content put together specifically for them and their stage in the buying journey. (And, of course, this is what the author’s company does…)

He has five steps in the framework:

Centralize
Organize
Personalize
Distribute
Generate Results

I do like #1 and #2 – too many organizations have content all over the place and have no idea where it all is or how it all relates. But, from there, it gets a little silly. #5 is hilarious: “Generate Results.” Wow, if it were only so easy…

It’s a very shallow book overall. Will anyone be any better off for having read it? I doubt it, but you never know. If this was literally the very first book someone new to content marketing reads, maybe there’s some actionable lessons there?

Will a seasoned marker suddenly have an epiphany after reading this book and look at their role and responsibilities in a new way? …no.

I know this all sounds dismissive, so I want you, the reader, to know that I gave the book every chance. I took it with me on a business trip, specifically to read it. But it just never clicked with me.

Chuck Gahun sent this to me.

Book Review: Can you imagine?

Sat, 8 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Interesting and funny to browse”

Soren Iverson became known for designing user interfaces that were just a little bit odd. The incorporating something very funny that hinted at some direction technology might go:

Examples:

You can have a discount on your Uber if you let the driver yell ads at you
You can pay extra for a concert ticket if everyone is forced to wait for you to leave before they get up
If someone texts that they have to cancel because they’re sick, Apple Health can inform you that they actually feel fine
You can see how many people at a company use the “Vice President” title on LinkedIn, to see if it means anything
You can see what percentage of a company’s employees on LinkedIn are quietly looking for new jobs

And on and on. This book is a collection of 365 of these inventions – he did one per day for an entire year. There’s a picture of each, the title which explains it, and then a couple of paragraphs of discussion. I eventually stopped reading the paragraphs. I would just look at the picture and read the title.

A continuing theme is that there’s a lot of data out there that would very much mess up our lives if it was connected to other data. There are “islands” of data out there that only stay harmless because we can’t see it in context. If all the data about us was swimming in the same pool and could be combined and mined, the results would likely not be good.

Example: excited about a new romance? What if you could see how they saved you in their contacts? Did they use your actual name, or are you saved as “so-so blonde chick that dave says is good in bed.” What if you’re not saved at all?

Another theme is pay-to-play. Many entires are situations where you can pay extra to remove some inconvenience.

Example: view a profile of the person sitting next to you on a plane, and pay to move them if you don’t like what you see.

It’s a fun book to browse. It’s not a “coffee table book,” because it’s quite small (the pages are hard to turn; heavy, glossy color), but I could see this in a waiting room somewhere.

Book Review: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Fri, 7 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Incredible history. So, so hard to put down.”

This is an absolutely compelling history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It’s fairly comprehensive, but it uses a single murder as a narrative hook. Jean McConville, a widow with 10 children, was taken from her house one evening and “disappeared” – she was just never seen or heard from again.

In the process of describing and investigating this crime, this author covers the entire history of the conflict between the U.K. and the Irish Republicans. It’s a long, sordid tale where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and normal people did some horrible things in the name of what they felt was justifiable liberation.

He concentrates on a few people in particular: Delours Price, Brendan Hughs, and Gerry Adams. They all played a role in both the larger struggle, and the smaller story of Jean McConville. All throughout the story sits an oral history project conducted in the name of truth and reconciliation, the recordings of which are stored in the United States and might hold the evidence to find who killed Jean.

I had a very hard time putting the book down. It’s written in a straightforward, fast-paced style, and the author perfectly blends the acute story of a single murder into the larger framework of the historical conflict.

Absolutely fantastic book.

Book Review: The Narrative Age: How leaders can inspire change in a polarized world

Sun, 2 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Fascinating look at what comes ‘after’ stories”

My boss wrote this – well, one of the founders of the company I work at. They had a stack of these books at the New York office, so I took one.

I fully expected a vanity title, but it was quite good. To the point where I bought it on Kindle so I could read it again on a road trip, and highlight it.

For years, everyone has been obsessed with “stories.” For a while, “storyteller” was the trendy job description. But what purpose do stories serve?

They create narratives. These are larger frameworks or ways of looking at the world, which are created and maintain by all the stories. We tell stories to influence narratives, but we often do this without realizing what the narratives are. To what end are we telling stories?

This is book about storytelling strategy really. What are the larger perceptions or frameworks people use to interpret the world, and how are we working in service of – or in opposition to – them?

Book Review: Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

Sun, 2 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Entertaining read, with a larger philosophic point”

This is a “meditation book.” It takes a subject – cars, in this case – and offers a series of essay about them.

There’s not much rhyme, reason, or thematic flow to it. It’s just a collection of writings. I felt like it meandered quite a bit – I couldn’t figure out what the author was getting at.

But it came together in the end. Cars, to American culture, represent freedom. We want to drive because we want to be alone, and we want to control where we go, and we want to conquer nature – to see mile and mile roll under our feet, effortlessly.

To that end, the book gets a little unruly at the end, as the author express some sadness at how technological everything is becoming, and how Google is trying to monetize the concept of moving around and tracking us everywhere we go.

I enjoyed this quote:

Moving around freely is one of the most basic liberties we have as embodied creatures. That liberty is enhanced by machines that amplify our mobility, from skateboards and bicycles to motorcycles and automobiles – but only because they are not subject to remote control. Further, to be out roaming, giving nobody an account of your movements or whereabouts, is one of those subtle respites from the grid of accountability that tightens in the course of adult life.

And referring back to the title this is, I suppose, “why we drive.”

Book Review: I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Interesting but repetitive”

This is not a self-help book. It doesn’t really give you any strategies for getting over depression, it just points out that there’s a problem.

It identifies “covert depression,” which is often masked in men – it comes out as anger, infidelity, or addiction. Men don’t want to admit that they’re depressed, so they exhibit all sorts of other toxic behaviors. The author claims that this has to become overt depression, because we can’t treat it until we admit to it.

He goes into depth about some of his patients (all composites, he says in the foreword). These narratives are…thrilling. They’re written in a very fiction-like style, and he brings us into actual conversations that happened. Some of them are hard to read.

His theory is that the male is wounded by his past. There’s a lot of “inner child” stuff. We get hurt by our parents or people in our past, and his reverberates through our entire lives.

I don’t know that this would appeal to everyone. It’s very much a “kinder, gentler” type of therapy. At several points, the author talks about his own journey, which was a bit of a mess – his father was quite a piece of work.

So, mixed bag here. I would have enjoyed reading it more, I think, if the chapters were shorter. They were just immense, and I was trying to read a chapter at a time, which meant every time I picked it up, it was something of a commitment.

I found the author from his NY Times article: How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me

Book Review: The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Meandering but interesting look at the absurdities of the average organization”

This is a re-read for me. I first read this back in 2013 when it came out. I was on vacation in Turks and Caicos. I remember reading this in a hammock at one point.

This is not a focused book. I’m not going to call it a “meditation,” because it has good information, it’s just not self-help or business advice. It’s just an interesting book about how organizations have evolved.

We talk a lot about how organizations are dysfunctional. But, really, they’re as functional as we want them to be. Humans are not perfectly efficient, so organizations aren’t either.

Really, the book is about the economics of working in an organization. It’s about what happens when you commit to exchanging time for money, rather than being an independent contractor and getting paid for every task.

I enjoyed it back in 2013, and I enjoyed it again now. It’s a pleasant read, and both times I’ve read it, I’ve come away thinking that maybe – just maybe – we’re all doing the best we can.

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Fri, 7 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

Book Review: The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America

Mon, 3 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Short and interesting, but not ground-breaking”

I don’t really feel like this book is that groundbreaking. It was a little controversial at the time because is evaluated and analyzed ethnic groups, which is never popular.

The authors (a married couple, both law professors at Yale), say that the “success” of a community or group depends on three things:

A sense of superiority (“we are destined for great things”)
A sense of insecurity (“others are out to get us”)
The ability to control impulses in service of greater things (“work comes now, fun comes later”)

They call this “the Triple Package” (an awkward name, which they just hammer on, over and over…).

#1 and #2 are interesting, while #3 is pretty obvious.

The authors relate this to several successful ethnic and religious groups. Jews are an obvious one, but there are also Mormons, East Asians, and – something that surprised me – Nigerian immigrants.

Regarding the latter, the authors made an interesting point: the mindset of African-Americans (Black people born and raised in the U.S.) is very different than that of new African immigrants. Nigerians moving to the U.S. are disproportionately successful, in part because they aren’t weighed down by the history of race relations in this country. They come from a land where they are (literally) kings, and they missed slavery, Jim Crow, and all the rest.

(A immigrant friend from Africa – from Cameroon, I think? – told me once that she doesn’t relate to African-Americans at all. When considering her dating prospects, everyone assumed she would date a Black man, but she said that Black men born and raised the U.S. are actually further away from her culturally than white men. I thought that was fascinating.)

The authors explain that the culture of the U.S. – particularly around child-rearing – is anathema to the Triple Package. In the the U.S. we’re very concerned about self-esteem, and is that compatible with success?

Or… “success.” How do you even define that?

And this cuts to the core of the book: how you define success very much dictates whether someone is “successful,” and this directly proves or disproves if the Triple Package is a good thing or not.

One of the authors is Amy Chua, who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which detailed how she raised her daughters. She pushed them extremely hard, to the point where some people called on her to be arrested for child abuse. So, clearly, she believes that …happiness (?) is secondary to “success” (as she defines it, I guess?).

Is being successful according to the Triple Package worth it? Do we want to be conventionally happy, or “successful”? Can we be both?

(Some more trivia: Amy Chua was Vice-President JD Vance’s law professor at Yale. She encouraged him to publish Hillbilly Elegy. I believe she was present at the 2025 inauguration.)

Book Review: Big Ideas, Little Pictures: Explaining the world one sketch at a time

Sat, 1 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Fun to browse, not very sticky”

This a fun little book. It’s the physical version of Jono Hey’s popular website Sketchplanations.

Each spread has a sketch on the right (I assume they were all previously published), and a couple paragraphs of explanation or additional information on the left page.

None of them are related to each other. Some will resonate, and others are just trivia.

It’s a browseable book. Would be a great for a waiting room. I enjoyed it, and there are a few that I should go back and spend some more time with. But 90% of them were just fun.

Book Review: Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

Sat, 1 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Fascinating, well-researched – hard to put down”

This is an excellent, detailed history of the first 10 years of Saturday Night Live. I was surprised it only covered the first 10 years, but then I further surprised to find that it was written in 1986.

(Apparently this book was a tell-all scandal back then. I was reading the Wikipedia page for Gilda Radner, and it mentioned the book as “highly-publicized” and how it had revealed her eating disorder to the world.)

The book is fundamentally about people – the group that started the show, and how they changed and related over those first five years, especially. Some random notes:

Chevy Chase was the breakout star, and he left halfway into the second season. He was apparently a total jerk, and when he came back to host in season three, he got into a fight will Bill Murray just before he went out to do the monologue.
Bill Murray joined halfway through the second season.
Surprisingly to some, Steve Martin was never in the cast. He was just quite popular in the mid-70s, was friends with a lot of the cast members, and spent a lot of time on the show. He hosted three times in season three alone.
John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd stayed for four years.
Lorne Michaels left after the fifth year, and the entire cast turned over
After Lorne left, Jean Doumanion took over producing, and it was a disaster. She didn’t last one season.
Charles Rocket was the big, breakout star of the (short) Jean Era, but he was fired shortly after she left. He “accidentally” said the F-word on air, and it was a very big deal at the time. (He would go on to play Bruce Willis’s brother in Moonlighting. He killed himself in 2005.)
Dick Ebersol took over after Jean left. He signed a 19-year-old unknown named Eddie Murphy. Murphy became bigger than the show itself, and stayed for three years. For his last season, Eddie didn’t want to come back, but he agreed to pre-tape half his sketches, unbeknownst to the audience, so he only had to be there for half the shows. He hosted the next year, and didn’t host again until 2019.
Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy were friends, but rivals. Joe was a little bitter than Eddie got so famous so quickly. Nick Nolte bailed out as the host three days before air one week, so they asked Eddie to act as the host (a cast member being the host had never been done before or since). Joe was apparently very hurt over this – he wanted to host as “Frank,” using his impression of Frank Sinatra.
Eddie and Joe are largely credited with keeping the show going through a very rough patch. They were the central continuity of the cast during the non-Lorne years. At one point, they were the only two cast members kept on.
John’s brother Jim Belushi joined for seasons 9 and 10. He was not beloved and was fired halfway through the season, then was given his job back a month later.
The 1985 season was Dick’s last, and the cast turned over yet again. They got some huge names for that one season: Billy Crystal (who had already hosted twice) and Martin Short were in the cast. Christopher Guest joined after This is Spinal Tap had been a hit, and Harry Shearer joined (briefly) after having already been in the cast in a prior season.
Lorne came back for season 11, after a five-year absence, and he’s still there.

The book spends a lot of time on the cast politics. SNL back on those years seemed like a hotbed of intrigue and drama. There was a lot of sexism – the women didn’t feel like they were heard and couldn’t get their sketches on air. John and Dan were known as the “Bully Boys” because they always seemed to get their way.

And Lorne was always fighting with the network. He would go over budget, would argue with the censors, would actively make fun of the head of NBC (whomever it was at the time). He went out of his way to make trouble, it seemed like. A cast member’s relationship with Lorne often went up and down, and it vastly affected how they worked on the show. Everyone was obsessed with what Lorne was doing, who he liked, and who he didn’t. It was like a wildly dysfunctional parental relationship.

The entire show was always broiling over with intrigue and hurt feelings. No one seemed to be having a good time, other than all the drugs they were doing (drugs that would kill John Belushi in 1982). Even when this book was written in 1985, several of the original cast members were described as having some level of PTSD-type symptoms from their time on the show.

Great book, all-around. Fascinating, well-researched. Comprehensive.

I loved it.

Book Review: Etiquette & Espionage

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Simplistic, probably just exposition for a longer series”

I bought this because it was recommended in a list of “steampunk novels,” and I’ve always been a little interested in that genre.

It’s… okay. First of all, an unbeknownst to me, it’s a young adult novel. Additionally, it seems to be targeted to teenage girls.

Sophronia is a girl from a wealthy family in 1851. The world she lives in is mechanized, with robot servants and such, and also – weirdly – vampires and werewolves. She is selected for “Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality” – the “etiquette” of the title – which turns out to be some secret place to develop spies to combat evil forces.

It’s all very Harry Potter-ish. The finishing school is clearly set up as Hogwarts. It’s a flying contraption, held aloft by balloons and powered by a big steam engine.

The actual plot is thin. There’s a McGuffin in “the prototype,” which was some part of a communications device. They have to find and recover this, with the help of the corresponding boy’s school, before the bad guys get it.

I didn’t love, but I’m not the target audience. The whole thing is designed as Book #1 in a series, so it’s a lot of scene-setting, and I imagine some of it becomes important later on.

Also, it’s got me thinking that steampunk is a very visual genre. I haven’t read any other steampunk novels, but I’m wondering how well it translates to words. As they were explaining things, I had some idea in my head of what it should look like, but the magic just wasn’t there. I feel like you have to see it to really get in the mood.

The author also has an adult series so maybe I should try that. (But, honestly, I wasn’t prepared for the paranormal aspects of it – the vampires and werewolves kind of threw me.)

Book Review: Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Detailed, but fascinating, nuts and bolts description of the industry”

This book explains the book publishing industry, from the inside out. It starts with the authors, explains why they need agents, explains how the agents work with the publishers, and publishers with the distributors, the distributors with the retailers, etc.

It does a masterful job of explaining the entire… chain of players that get an idea out of a writer’s head and into a reader’s hands.

All throughout, it gives you the actual scoop, in the form of anonymous quotes from people in the industry. And they reveal what’s really going on – how the business can be very… loose. A lot of the publishing industry is based on gut feeling and trying to time the market.

Also, the industry is built around “Big Books.” Every year, publishing houses lose money on a dozen titles, then make a fortune on two or three.

The biggest thing I came away with was the feeling that the industry sucks. Being in book publishing is a sad business. If you love books, you will have to set that aside and play the numbers just to survive. You’ll pass on books that you think are great, and publish books you might not want to read, because that’s what sells and that’s what keeps you in business.

Seriously, I cannot stress this enough: this book taught me to never go into book publishing. It’s like owning a restaurant – if you love cooking, then don’t do it, because you’ll come away hating it. The publishing industry will strip away everything you love about books, and leave you with just the numbers behind them, and those numbers often suck.

To be clear, the book wasn’t trying to be cynical. It was just honest. And the honest truth of publishing is rough.

(For more on this – and to boil this book down to the most basic points – read this article: No One Buys Books)

Book Review: Firewood Happens: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Minnesota’s Northwoods

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Lovely collection of essays on cabin life. Peaceful read.”

This is a lovely, contemplative book of essays about cabin life in the Detroit Lake area of Minnesota. I bought up there at a gift store. The author is apparently a local, and this is his first collection of essays.

The author owns a one-room cabin with no plumbing. He spends a lot of time up there. He hunts and fishes and… reflects, then he writes about it.

I couldn’t really relate to the outdoors aspect of it (I’m not much of an outdoorsman), but I bought it after spending a weekend in the area, and I totally get the vibe. There’s a peacefulness to it that’s hard to beat.

This book isn’t going to change your life. But I read one essay a day (they’re 2-3 pages), and I always enjoyed picking it up.

Bought it at a gift shop in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where the author is a local.

Book Review: Me, Myself, and IC: A Guide to Building Internal Communication as a Team of One

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Practical, full of good information”

Book Review: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “A little breathless, nothing too practical”

Bill Gates recommended this book. It’s not terrible, but not at all actionable, either.

It’s a breathless prediction of what the future of AI, computing power, and gene editing will enable. The author paints a picture of amazing breakthoughs and things-we-cannot-image, etc.

I don’t know what to do about books like this. It reminds me of:

It’s just all amazing predictions, and little else.

Maybe if I was an investor, or a hedge fund manager, or something? This might make me look at the long-term market differently? Maybe I’d move some money around.

But outside of that, it was just a lot of bluster and hype.

Book Review: Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Great look at the idea that we do the best we can, and that’s often just to remain aware and adaptable”

Book Review: Behind the Screens: Illustrated Floor Plans and Scenes from the Best TV Shows of All Time

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Fun little coffee table-ish book”

I’ve always been interested in how we relate to fictional spaces, mentally. There’s a whole sub-genre of art that creates floorplans for fictional spaces, and I’ve always been amazed at how interesting I find it. We identify so much with these spaces, and it’s fascinating for me to see them laid out.

Years ago, I did a couple LEGO sets from the show Friends. It was very…contemplative. It forced me to consider the spaces in ways that I hadn’t. I was absorbed in it.

Same with this book. You look at these floor plans, and your mind is taken back to the adventures “you” had there. It’s just kind of a weird intimacy.

The book covers a bunch of shows that you would know: sitcoms, dramas, family shows, etc. For each, it has some narrative, then the plans, then other diagrams of props from the set.

It’s a great book to page through. Hardcover, would make a lovely coffee table book or a book for an office waiting room – everyone can relate to it, and it’s very low-overhead and high-happiness (?) from a mental standpoint.

(There’s a larger issue of how we relate to spaces from an information architecture standpoint. I wrote about this a bit on LinkedIn.)

Book Review: Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Pretty ridiculous. Very abstract and doesn’t even remotely deliver on the title”

I’ll be honest: I have no idea what this woman was talking about. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this book.

It was promoted as a book to frame technology. That was an attractive idea to me, I guess. But what I read was a mess.

Here are the chapter names:

Systems
Scale
Legacy
Matter
Deviance
Breakage

I mean, that right there tells you the level of abstraction we’re talking about here. Do those six categories explain technology at any level?

…I don’t know?

Every chapter had a central analogy about some real-world system, but in now way could I figure out how this related to the central topic of the chapter.

The book made me feel dumb, and I don’t know if it was just poorly written, or so smart it went way over my head. That can’t be a good sign, either way.

Book Review: Bullying Scars: The Impact on Adult Life and Relationships

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Nothing new; it’s a scholarly book, really meant for educators”

Book Review: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fine point, but could have been a blog post”

This is a polemic to interoperability. Doctorow explains why manufacturers made their products resistant to repair, resistant to integration, and complicated to change. He explains the business rationale behind it all, and some of the really dirty tricks that companies have used to make it a crime to modify any of their products.

He’s trying to persuade us to demand interoperability, which is a fine goal, but I just don’t think he’s going to corral enough support among readers for this.