Notebook

Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature, Understanding, sensibility, and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid, and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface. Apprehending and testing likewise consist in seeing whether everybody's impression of the matter coincides with what is asserted about these fixed points, whether it seems that way to him or not.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §31

Log Off

Behold the superfluous! They are always sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On The New Idol

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business - Neil Postman

Hate Inc. : Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another - Matt Taibbi

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America - Daniel J. Boorstin

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

The News: A User's Manual - Alain de Botton

Public Opinion - Walter Lippman

Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

The Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord, translated by Ken Knabb.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man - Marshall McLuhan

History, Memoir

The Big Machine - Robert Jungk

Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism - Edward E. Baptist

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India - Shashi Tharoor

Business, Economics

Capital, Volume 1 and Gundrisse - Karl Marx. I found it fulfulling to read these in coordination with David Harvey's lectures, linked here for Capital and Gundrisse. I enjoyed the Ben Fowkes translation of Capital and the Martin Nicolaus translation of Gundrisse.

The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins

The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI - Jonathan Beaty & S.C. Gwynne