PositiveThe New YorkerWhite-collar workplaces are not inherently high-drama. As an employee, this is ideal. For a nonfiction writer, it’s a challenge ... The office memoir can sometimes be a Künstlerroman of sorts—a portrait of the artist coming into her craft. But, just as often, it is the story of a writer trying to have a job that isn’t writing, and trying to be normal about it. The literary identity is all over these books ... Office memoirs gesture at a larger American story about what it takes to have a financially stable creative life in the twenty-first century, without compromising one’s class position. Holding down a white-collar job is far from the only way to sustain an art practice, but the structure of a creative life supported by a corporate salary attracts a certain type of person ... Just as Sun’s self-abnegation becomes unsustainable, her writing breaks loose. The maneuver is unusually stylish for a memoir. It would work beautifully in a novel.
Claire L. Evans
PositiveThe New RepublicWriting a feminist history of technology is in some ways an impossible task ... The trouble with this plan is that people are, and have been, doing all of this work for many, many decades—but it is complicated, and seemingly endless. Overall, Broad Band suffers from exactly this absence of historical consciousness. While it’s tempting, for instance, to think of the stories Evans is telling as part of a lost and now-recovered history, historians and scholars have been working with the same material for decades, and the characters in Broad Band were also known in their time ...It was encouraging and affirming to be in a space dominated by women, a relief. There was so much excitement, so much potential; an element of freedom. I wished that more people could be there to see it.
PositiveThe New Republic\"O’Connell is less interested in evaluating technology than in the people who make it and its philosophical implications. As he places the quest for immortality under the microscope, he follows the individuals—tech visionaries, billionaires, and futurists—who are trying to eradicate, or dramatically postpone, death ... If the average human life were to span 100 healthy years, then society, the economy, and the environment would be drastically transformed. How long would childhood last? What would the political landscape look like if baby boomers were able to vote for another 50 years? O’Connell’s foray into transhumanism comes at a moment when our democratic institutions look weaker than ever ... O’Connell finds it odd, too, that \'billionaire entrepreneurs\' are more interested in developing AI than in eradicating “grotesque income inequality in their own country.” Of course, experimentation is essential to progress, and researchers claim their work will benefit all of humanity in the future. But it raises the question: What future and for whom?\
Virginia Heffernan
PanThe New RepublicHeffernan aims to do for online life what Susan Sontag, Marshall McLuhan, Lester Bangs, and Pauline Kael did for the fields of photography, media, music, and film...This romantic futurism—an aggressive lightheartedness—regularly comes up against more ontological questions and unsavory case studies that I wish Heffernan would tackle, but which wouldn’t quite complement her argument. 'I’ll go on treating message boards like novels until I am persuaded otherwise,' she writes in defense of casual online discourse. This is a lovely approach, and Yahoo! Answers may well be the great satirical novel of our time. But this approach is also very detached from the emotional states that lead people in crisis to solicit the company of strangers on, say, medical message boards. This type of oversight is endemic to Magic and Loss, which relies on a division between the offline self and the online presentation of the self...Magic and Loss is actually a bit difficult to critique because it does not commit to its own thesis; the boundaries of the argument and subject are undefined, which makes it difficult to know when the book strays and when it succeeds.
PositiveThe New RepublicIn most forms of entertainment, friendships—and conversations—between women are all too often portrayed as backstabbing, competitive, or simply perfunctory...About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter is an antidote, if an imperfect one, to this cultural weakness.
Justin Peters
PositiveThe New RepublicWhat [The Idealist] does—and does very well—is put Swartz’s work in context. The book gives an engaging, if knowingly incomplete, account of the history of intellectual property and copyright law, the archaic roots (and current implications) of cyberlaw, and some key players in the ongoing fight between open-data philosophy and the federal government.
Luc Sante
MixedThe New RepublicThe Other Paris implicitly criticizes the sanitization of history, and in many ways the book is also an argument against cultural imperialism, gentrification, and the forces of global capitalism. Yet a central dilemma to The Other Paris is just how far to take this argument: while Sante doesn’t glamorize poverty, mourning the loss of Paris’s microeconomies and societal tumult for the color they contribute seems to undercut the experiences of those on the ground.
