Why am I passionate about this?
I can’t explain my lifelong fascination with the strange dance between culture, power, and technology. Maybe it’s because I grew up as a math whiz with a deep love of music or because I read too much sci-fi under my blanket by flashlight when I should have been getting my beauty sleep. I was lucky to become friends with Jesse Gilbert at the age of 14 - we goaded each other into spending our lives researching, writing about, and playing with tech in a cultural context. We wrote this book together as a way to bring our decades-long dialogue into the public eye and invite a wider range of people to participate in the conversation.
Aram's book list on books about data that will blow your mind
Why did Aram love this book?
Shortly after college, I was at a house party, and I headed into one of the hosts’ bedrooms to escape the ruckus. This book was sitting on their desk, and the cover looked intriguing, so I picked it up and started reading. I must have been there for an hour or more, reading story after story, while the party raged outside the door.
Reading Borges felt like the discovery of the wellspring from whence everything else I loved had sprung. Here was fiction written in the earliest moments of the data revolution, fearlessly pursuing infinity and somehow capturing it so efficiently that it could be contained within a few pages of printed text.
Of course, “The Library of Babel” had been a touchstone in computer science and information science circles long before I discovered it, and it’s still the best shorthand way to express certain important concepts. It might be…
6 authors picked Labyrinths as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.
This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations…