Reading Roundup: October 2024

The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet by Nadina Galle. This book is a breezier read than the title might imply; in each chapter, the author flies through several different examples of technology put to use in helping cities around the world prepare and adapt to change. Many of these examples were greatly of interest to me; I’m familiar with technology such as tree inventories and stormwater infrastructure from my volunteer work, but I loved seeing how different cities in different nations approached similar urban challenges. (For some examples: a park in the Netherlands installed tree sensors to alert stewards when the trees need water; Chicago collected information about which stormwater solutions work best in which contexts, since permeable pavement gets destroyed on roads that use snowblowers and bioswales work best in areas prone to flash floods; Melbourne assigned email addresses to city trees so citizens could alert the city to issues, and instead they sent love letters to their trees.) I also learned quite a bit about mitigating disasters I don’t have much personal experience with, like wildfires. I have my nitpicks–for example, the author tends to refer to all machine learning models as AI, which feels loaded in this era when AI everything is being shoved down our throats; I imagine that it seemed simplest when the book was written, but today we need to differentiate between the kind of machine learning that powers Merlin’s birdsong recognition software and the kind of water-guzzling generative software like ChatGPT. But I plan to recommend this book to my fellow volunteer reading group.

The Water Museum: Stories by Luis Alberto Urrea. Short, readable stories. The worlds created in each feel comfortable and lived in, although the stories themselves are often tragic… lost loves, deported friends. A few of the stories play with speculative modes of storytelling–in particular, the title story, in which teenagers who do not remember rain visit a museum that makes them dizzy by showing them waterfalls, swamps, and other bountiful water. That was my favorite story in the collection, but I also appreciated the realistic fiction, particularly those that quietly folded in the landscape into the storytelling. The dangerous cliff face overlooking a dying town. The vast emptiness of middle America. The poisoned urban wetlands that two teens discover in a stolen kayak.

I finished The Book of Love by Kelly Link in one heady weekend–a surprising choice, since it’s 600+ pages long and I only intended to alternate it with Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead. It took me a few minutes to warm up to The Book of Love‘s rambling, unhurried prose and its primarily teenaged POV characters, but before long I was rooting for those kids and maybe also a little bit for their adversaries, the beautiful and usually (but not always!) stylish supernatural beings whose centuries-old conflict shakes up a seaside town.
I did finish Making Love with the Land too, and it continued to be both emotionally painful and intellectually intriguing. I really like the way he thinks through the form of nonfiction, memoiristic essay writing, and what it means for him to explicate himself for an unknown reader and the whole publishing apparatus.

I started reading Slow Horses by Mick Herron because I’ve enjoyed the TV series so much, but I gave the novel back to the library after a few chapters. The writing style is not quite to my taste and didn’t grab me, even though I could see how closely the TV show hews to the characterization of Slough House and its denizens. (I still recommend the show!)

Some short poems and prose that I loved:
Ghazal for My Gay Ass by Max Pasakorn
The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart by Jack Gilbert
The Long Way Up by Alix E. Harrow

Elsewhere

Social Media Is Helping Bring Indigenous Languages Back from the Brink

Most of Scientific American is paywalled–more’s the pity–but this page will give you a snapshot of How the 2024 Presidential Election Will Shape Science, Health and the Environment.

Every now and then a new study or research paper is released to confirm that, yes, the best way to help people experiencing poverty or income insecurity is simply to give them money. Just give them money! Giving people the means and agency to make their own financial decisions: it works every time! But if you need more evidence, here’s a beautiful, in-depth story in Time about how that plays out in real life.

I always enjoy The Maris Review, but this guest post by Ilana Masad on Holocaust Beach Reads offered a critical, thoughtful look at a genre that has always made me feel uneasy.

Know Your Deeps! made me laugh. Of these three 90s movies with “Deep” in the title, I saw two on the big screen! We had so few options then. If we want to watch a movie, we simply had to go see what was playing.

RIP Kaos, a playful modern retelling of Greek mythology that coasted me through a day of recovery from my simultaneous flu shot and Covid booster. I would have liked to have seen more of it. Meanwhile, here’s a flashback to some of the show’s good fashion moments.

A New York Times article (gift link) about Susanna Clarke’s journey from cookbook editor to bestselling author to chronic fatigue syndrome patient to bestselling author again.

Oh, I simply love to see it: Naomi Shihab Nye has won the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement.

AI in the news:
Cosmos Magazine publishes AI-generated articles, drawing criticism from journalists, co-founders (ABC News, August 7, 2024)
Not new, but new to me: Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart (Washington Post, April 19 2023)
The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes (404 Media, October 9, 2024)
Can You Turn Off Big Tech’s A.I. Tools? Sometimes, and Here’s How. (New York Times [gift link], October 9, 2024)
Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities (Ars Technica, October 14, 2024)
As AI takes the helm of decision making, signs of perpetuating historic biases emerge (Utah News, October 13 2024)
OpenDream Claims to be an AI Art Platform. But Its Users Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material (bellingcat, October 14, 2024)
Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said (AP News, October 26, 2024)
Penguin Adds a Do-Not-Scrape-for-AI Page to Its Books (Gizmodo, October 18, 2024)

Minutiae

I have no particular theme to hold October together. I went to an all-day water conference to learn about nature-based solutions for climate impacts. I scheduled some quality time with friends, from standing on a West Philly roof to watch for the comet (we didn’t see it) to a low-key watch party for The Fall (2006), which was beautiful but made us all cry and have to play a round of the Moby Dick card game to cheer up. My mom came to town for a long weekend and we had a whirlwind visit that involved hitting three museums in one afternoon and taking an overnight trip to New Jersey to see my college BFF in The Music Man–a production that made this musical way more fun and interesting than I remember it being. I got a sinus infection. I clumsily designed a final project proposal for the class I am taking, and had the first session for the 8-week class I am teach-assisting. I didn’t feel like it, given the sinus infection, but I donned a half-finished Annatar Lord of Gifts costume and went to a Halloween festival at a nearby nature preserve with my gentleman. We walked along the wetlands and looked for turtles and watched the water reflect the bright coral and glowing pink sky as the sun set.