PhilChu

From online reviews, it seems many readers of Stanley Fish’s Winning Arguments were disappointed that the book doesn’t actually tell you how to win arguments. It’s actually rather fatalistic in describing futile arguments: those that are full of emotion and recrimination

I suspect when Richard Preston started writing The Demon in the Freezer, he intended the book to be entirely about smallpox — it’s eradication and potential resurrection, either by accident, warfare or terrorism. But after the anthrax-laced postal mailings that occurred shortly after the

As a career programmer, and on whimsical occasion an aspiring author, I’ve always thought that programming is more like writing. Aside from the obvious parallels in entering text and following syntax and grammar rules, good code is expressive, succinct and has style. And

I’ve been to the Armand Hammer museum and SF MOMA a few times, but for the most part, modern art leaves me cold. So when I found the first fifty pages of Brad Stone’s Gearheads: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports devoted

I wrote this before the movie, obviously. I read the The Hunger Games almost accidentally — it happened to be at the top of the list of Kindle books I could borrow while trying out Amazon Prime, and I remember seeing an entertainment news personality

Like his previous work, The Nudist on the Late Shift, Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question has an irresistible title. I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t had

Aside from the first week at my junior high school, where they apparently assumed I was a poor immigrant kid who would be a low performing student and thus assigned me to classes with other low performing students, I was generally considered a “gifted”

Written after my Epinions phase but still quite a while ago. Last week, I checked out the local Dave and Buster’s (it’s a happening place on Friday night, like Chuck E Cheese with a bar), and I was reminded of the Epinions

I wrote this before reading this book. During a childhood camping trip in Catalina, while all the other kids ran off to the beach, I sat at a picnic table, went into library mode, and settled into a good book (can’t remember which