I'm writing non-fiction, but listening to a music playlist for fantasy writers. Maybe that'll spice it up. :)

"Look in any direction along the political spectrum and sperm are in danger, or endangering someone else." —Rosecrans Baldwin for GQ

https://longreads.com/2025/03/14/are-men-in-a-spermpocalypse/

in filterworld, kyle chayka dives into how algorithms shape culture and their unsettling implications. what works gets replicated. mainstream becomes the only stream. diversity & complexity slip through the cracks.

#books #bookstodon #nonfiction #algorithms #digital #socialmedia #culture #book #bookreview #reading #readingcommunity #booksky #art

full review: https://idealistatheart.com/filterworld-by-kyle-chayka/

Novelists can often put their finger on anxieties that are swirling in society. By projecting into the future, they expose and shed light on the present. #books #writers #nonfiction #privacy

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Author-Q-As/2025/0314/laila-lalami-the-dream-hotel?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into The American Story @the-american-story-csmonitor

"Each season brings its own chance of furthering that dream, rendering devastation, or usually, delivering a dose of both." —Lindsey Liles for Garden & Gun

https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/inside-the-fight-to-save-theworlds-most-endangered-wolf/

Book Review #6 for 2025 is Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point. I have read several of Gladwell's books over the years and have always found them interesting. This is a revisit of the themes of his first book, The Tipping Point, published in 2000. It was interesting but a bit worn in subject. A review. #nonfiction #books #bookreview #malcolmgladwell @books @bookstodonmy

"How Sheridan creates these worlds complements the theme of one brave man — occasionally, a woman — taking on the malignant forces hell-bent on destroying this country." —Stephen Rodrick for Rolling Stone

https://longreads.com/2025/03/11/its-taylor-sheridans-world-were-just-watching-it/

Our #Longreads Top 5:

- Harm and hope in West Virginia (The Delacorte Review)

- The fast-food fight Ali lost (Defector)

- The day doubt took over (Aeon)

- When fear slithers in (The Bitter Southerner)

- Kitzbühel’s wild side (Outside)

https://longreads.com/2025/03/07/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-553/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

The Apothecary’s Wife By Karen Bloom Gevirtz — Review, #book published by @ucpress

#BookReview by @GrrlScientist

#Books #NonFiction #History #Medicine #science #WomenInSTEM #Pharmaceuticals https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2025/02/28/the-apothecarys-wife-by-karen-bloom-gevirtz---review/

"It’s a strange corner of the internet that I inhabited for roughly four years as a teenager, and it is home to many formative memories." —Gary Grimes for The Fence

https://longreads.com/2025/02/26/day-1509-in-the-big-brother-house/

"Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts" by Andrew Robinson

This was interesting enough. I wanted to know a bit about the languages from ancient civilizations and got what I came for. Apparently I am six years old because I thought the plethora of pictures were the most fun part, way more than the text.

The first part of the book is about finding and deciphering old texts in general. The second part describes the journey of some scripts humans can now interpret. The last part is about languages that are still a mystery (mostly because people can't find enough texts, because we destroyed them in the past and/or people can't find enough peoples who could interpret them or offer clues with related languages, because we murdered them all in the past).

Some parts bored me, some parts were very intriguing. There was more drama than I expected: quite some decipherers were extremely petty people who stole ideas, took credit, gatekept tablets, etc.

Somewhere there is a small discussion about why computers don't just crack these old languages for us. For most ancient languages, only a limited amount of texts are found, which is not enough material for a computer to see patterns in, so it doesn't have much helpful information to offer people working in the field. Humans are better at decoding with very few resources, with making connections with other languages, taking right guesses, having rare light bulb moments and such. This book is from 2002, so I don't know if that explanation is still relevant. But it did make me think of the shitty LLM/AI that is being pushed onto us in recent years. These systems have eaten almost all of the texts of the world by now, some are even starting to cannibalize their own nonsense, and still they can't compete with human language use and creativity.

"Hospitals run by lesbian couples during the world wars" is a nonfiction topic I keep coming across, and I am here for it.

Finished #audiobook Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal. Want to hear Elie Mystal rant for like 10 hours while calling out the deep hypocrisy and various broken parts of the foundational code underlying life in the U.S.? Because this is about 10 hours of it. Enjoyable and informative. #bookstodon #nonfiction #law

Kerry Ferrand makes book review videos, mainly covering non-fiction. You can follow at:

@kerry_ferrand

There are already seven videos uploaded, you can browse them all at https://spectra.video/a/kerry_ferrand/videos

The videos have subtitles in English, click CC to see them.

For Authors

The Fussy Librarian has helped my books to reach #1 on over thirty occasions. Promote your book. A special offer from my publisher and the Fussy Librarian. authors.thefussylibrarian.com?ref=goylake

Don’t forget to use the code goylake20 to claim your discount

In this week’s Top 5:

—Chilling Chilean forensic anthropology
—An empathetic park ranger
—Teaching migration to unruly birds
—Fear in America’s schools
—The Victorian vendors of cat meat

https://longreads.com/2025/02/21/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-551/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social