Hello, friends,
Summer is finally here after a long pandemic winter. Though the global pandemic is far from over, vaccines are in some of our arms and we’re starting to hug our family and friends again. It’s a lovely respite after more than a year of social isolation.
But none of us are willing to give up our favorite pandemic solace: reading. And so, as we did last year, we have put together a list of what we are reading this summer in the hopes that it might inspire you, too.
And, of course, we don’t make any money from these suggestions. Many news outlets use “affiliate links” that allow them to earn a cut when they direct their readers to a sale. We don’t do that because we don’t track you at all.
And so, without further ado, here are some staff recommendations:
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet
by Tim Hwang
“Everyone knows that the online advertising ecosystem is a privacy-eviscerating panopticon of omnipresent surveillance, but the question this book poses is … what if it also doesn’t work? In ‘Subprime Attention Crisis,’ Hwang makes the provocative argument that because the sale of human attention is deceptively hard to accurately price, the internet’s foundational business model is about as solid as the U.S. mortgage market right before the Great Recession. Even so, Hwang doesn’t just play the role of a programmatic Cassandra, he also proposes a set of reforms to gently deflate the bubble before it pops.”
—Aaron Sankin, Investigative Reporter
by Sherry Turkle
“Turkle is a brilliant thinker on technology and society, and this past week I’ve been making my way through her new memoir. It’s a lovely look at how she came to be an MIT professor, and Markup readers will be particularly interested in how her (often pre-internet) experiences informed her philosophy. Turkle’s work focuses on the limits of technology: how screens can divide us, how online life can breed loneliness, and how an engineering mindset can fail to solve some of society’s biggest problems. There’s dozens of bits of quotable wisdom on life, technology, and human empathy.”
—Colin Lecher, Reporter
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
“This eye-opening (and sometimes rage-inducing) book has been crucial to me as I navigate the housing and tech beat. Rothstein reveals the long history of government policies systematically and purposefully segregating American cities—from making zoning decisions and subsidies that supported White-only housing construction to sanctioning outright violence against Black and immigrant families who moved to the wrong side of town. At The Markup we talk a lot about how automated decision-making systems can entrench old biases and exacerbate the effects of historic discriminatory policies. But it’s also important to understand the origins of those inequities in order to break the cycle.”
—Lauren Kirchner, Investigative Reporter
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
by Sasha Costanza-Chock
“Inclusive product design has been in short supply in the tech world, and the resulting damage is easy to see. The Markup has reported on state coronavirus websites with major accessibility issues for blind users, job ad systems that allow employers to exclude transgender users, and search algorithms that associate Black girls with porn. All of these issues are rooted in a failure to design inclusively. Design Justice includes many concrete and sobering examples of product designs that reinforce social inequalities, but it also provides practical strategies for designing a better world for everyone.”
—Ramsey Isler, Director of Product
Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
by Avi Loeb
“At The Markup, we base our inquiries on the scientific method. We come up with a hypothesis, we gather evidence, we analyze our data, and we share our conclusions. I thought a lot about that process while reading ‘Extraterrestrial.’ Avi Loeb is the chair of the department of astronomy at Harvard University and lays out his argument in this book that a mysterious interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017 was synthetic, and likely of alien origin.
“It’s remarkable for such a high-profile scientist to come forth with such a controversial theory. Much of the book examines why that shouldn’t be the case: Loeb laments the way modern research institutions—and the money that funds the research done there—train young, creative scientists to avoid controversial topics, like extraterrestrial intelligence, for the sake of career. By making whole areas of inquiry off limits simply because they evoke a dismissive eye roll, we may be failing to ask some of the most important questions in science.”
—Jon Keegan, Investigative Data Journalist
Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing
by Matt Stroud
“Through the years, police have turned to technology as a solution for problems, and reporting from The Markup and other news organizations shows that often technology makes the issues worse. This book outlines a history of how tech companies persuaded police departments to spend taxpayer money on their products, and why they don’t work as advertised.”
—Alfred Ng, Reporter
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
“It’s rare to read a book about a topic you have lived and breathed for years and still learn something new. But Christian’s description of the challenges of aligning human values with machines that learn from datasets—which I have been investigating for years (full disclosure, my team’s work on bias in criminal risk scores is highlighted in the book)—is a fresh and highly readable take on a complex problem.
“One of my favorite points that he makes is that machines are better at diagnosis than prediction. AI systems often learn our biases and then expose them to us—consider a Google system that “learned” that a female doctor was a nurse. But it’s much harder, he points out, to ask machines to overcome those biases themselves.
—Julia Angwin, Editor-in-Chief
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
by Sven Birkerts
“Birkerts’s reflection on the potential ‘end’ of reading life likely to be ushered in by the digital age is just as delightful in 2021 as it was in 1994. In a time when the global pandemic has forced us all to slow down somewhat, you may find yourself nodding in agreement with his desire for ritual and beautiful design in everything written. In a genuinely Markup connection to very off-line ideas, you cannot track the open rate or engagement of this physical book—just the reminders it leaves behind to find time to reconnect with powerful stories and the people who tell them. And don’t worry, 27 years later, Birkerts does allow himself the occasional online reading session and email, even if he was refusing to use a smartphone as of 2015.”
—Rachael Berkey, Director of Audience
by Tim Maughan
“The internet was meant to be a decentralized ‘network of networks,’ but control over the data centers, domain servers, and other infrastructure that keep it running is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few giant players. In turn, the logistics networks that support our lives depend on the internet.
“What would happen if one day, something took it all down?
“This near-future speculative fiction novel paints a picture of a world beyond the ultimate crash. It’s a gripping read, and a compelling case for supporting the decentralization of internet architecture.”
—Corin Faife, Data Reporter
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
by James Wallace and Jim Erickson
“I picked this book up in an Airbnb and couldn’t put it down. Two investigative reporters chronicle Microsoft’s dominance over the personal computer market, which would eventually lead to the historic antitrust lawsuit United States v. Microsoft Corp.
“Although this book is a biography of Bill Gates, it provides a history of software, hardware, and everything in between from the 1970s to the early 1990s. During those years there is a cast of recurring characters—Apple, Intel, and IBM, which illustrates a sort of codependence among tech companies.”
—Leon Yin, Investigative Data Journalist
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Julia Angwin
Editor-in-Chief
The Markup
P.S. There will be no newsletter next week, but I’ll be back in your inboxes the following week.
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