New on the Bookshelf – April 2025

A number of titles have come in, from the usual used and remaindered sources. Let’s have a look, and capture the theme and reasons why I got them.

24/7, Jonathan Crary (2013)

We’ve mentioned this a few times before, most notably in the “Cult of No-Sleep” in Issue 7 of the Implausibility Newsletter back in February, but I didn’t have a hardcopy in hand. So when this showed up as a deal, I had to grab a copy. It’s an insightful book; we’ll do a few review here soon.


The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson, (2003)

A historical non-fiction look at the Chicago World’s Fair, intertwined with the account of a serial killer during the Gilded Age. I grabbed this due to a recent mention of it somewhere (I’ll blame BlueSky), and I’m curious to how it reads, even though I’m not really enthused to read serial killer fiction. To be honest, this might site on the TBR pile for a while…


It’s Complicated, danah boyd (2014)

boyd’s work looks at the intersection of youth and online spaces, and this work is a more recent summary of the some of her earlier work, arguing that youth actually do find meaningful interactions online (contra to a lot of the doomer narratives that are presented in mass media), and are using the tools in ways that suit their needs. As the title suggests though, there’s a lot more nuance to the topic than is largely thought. Looking forward to reading this.


American Cosmic, D.W. Pasulka, (2019)

This remaindered title looked interesting, an ethnographic study with those who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, and how it is more mainstream of a belief that commonly suspected, and how media like the X-Files drives the spread and normalizes the assumptions. This ticks a lot of boxes for me, so I’m interested in checking it out.


Robot Proof, Joseph Aoun, (2018)

Written prior to the explosion in AI-related work in academia since the public introduction of ChatGPT and other LLMs, this book anticipates the coming changes to academia with the automation of education, and proposes where educators can focus their time and energy to ensure the students are prepared for what that future world looks like. I’m curious how much this overlaps with the elements of echanger we’ve already discussed.


Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, Steiff and Tamplin, eds., (2008)

A rather lengthy anthology of articles on the theme of BSG and Philosophy. (There was a bunch of [Blank] and Phil books in the early 2000s, as I guess it sold books.) With the renewed focus on agentive robots and the push towards AGI by a number of companies, this showing up in the pile for $5 had a bit of serendipity to it, and I think it’s well worth another look.


Computing and Technology Ethics, Swiatek, Burton, Goldsmith, Mattei, Siler, eds., (2023)

Created as a textbook for a college class, this looks at key questions in ethics for a computer science class, and uses excerpts from several sci-fi stories to unpack them. I got it mostly for this last reason, as we’ve done similar things with the podcast and in our academic career, though not on this specific subject. Looking forward to a full read of this.


and Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams, (2025).

When I heard that promotion of this book was being suppressed by Meta, I figured it was worth grabbing a copy in case it eventually became harder to get. A memoir about the behind-the-scenes operations of Facebook in the pre-Meta era, this ended up being a collection of anecdotes and scenes that covered the authors time at the company. I was somewhat disappointed in it, as much I didn’t find anything really “new” or revealing, and spending that much time with the background of awful people wasn’t necessarily endearing either.


As always, as we get through them we’ll share the full review or notes about them in future posts.

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

“Read a book!” (Handy, 1994)

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

Technology Matters (Nye, 2006)

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…