This is the best book I've read in 2012 so far. May we all write good enough to transcend our own opinions, right? Shorrock manages to do that here. I especially appreciate the fact he's not afraid to let details slow down and tangle up the narrative. I'm not being facetious: I appreciate anyone willing to err on the side of their reader's intelligence and interest. So while Shorrock plays the outraged outsider throughout this book, the amount of operational details he manages to piece together from the inadvertently public domain marketing material that major defense & intelligence contractors distribute at trade shows and online amounts to a counter-intelligence detective story. The picture that emerges is surprising at every turn.

This had nothing to do with my lost list. I found The Cult of Information in a basement book sale I recently wandered into. This being Vermont, they were selling hardcovers for a whopping ten cents so I wound up emptying out my backpack of spare clothing and vaguely vegan leftovers to accommodate about two dozen books. You know, priorities.

This was the best of the batch, and way ahead of it's curve. Recent critics of techno-progress like Evgeny Morozov and Nick Carr were scooped by Roszak, word for word and far further besides, back in 1986. He recognized that "computer literacy" was horseshit, that Silicon Valley's charitable habit of donating computers to schools was intended to acclimate future consumers, that online communication would enable and accelerate state and corporate surveillance, and most of all, that "tech jobs" was empty hype and the digital, globalized future was a non-stop race to the bottom the American workforce could not win in any sense. That's the first two chapters. I've been re-reading off and on ever since I finished it, and of course this is far from perfect stuff. He is ultimately a grumpy old guy, but it's great writing and time has only strengthened Roszak's case.

The Big Test - Nicholas Lehman.

This wasn't as broad or deep as I hoped it would be, but Lehman is such a dedicated writer I still enjoyed this. The subject of American schooling and standardized testing has been an abiding weirdo interest of mine, and what this meaty book does is fully illustrate one single lineage in the quasi-Eugenic movement to engineer a meritocracy to rule the world...or at least, you know, get into Harvard. It is a careful and honest accounting of the lives and legacies of very odd & remarkable men. As both psychology and history, this was a real contribution to my education and I'm grateful that I gave it a chance.

Wow. I put off buying this for years, on the hipster rationale that I was already so jaded and, like, informed that I didn't have to even read it. Isn't all this shit on the Internet? Answer: Hell no, no it is not. This is a selection of essays by journalists, editors and producers who tried to cover stories that involved national security interests and marched "into the buzzsaw" of disinformation.

What a beautiful and strange book! This was on backorder for so long I completely forgot having even known about it, so when it arrived I puzzled over it like a chimp fumbles with alien technology. It stands as an artifact from simpler and more certain times, and certainly, much has been improved in terms of equations and conceptual clarity since this was published back in, you know, 1877. Helmholtz was obsessively thorough and the result is a music theory textbook written by a physicist fixated on psychoacoustics, and grounding the pure tonal theory in actual human hearing and perception. Truly one of a kind, and so comprehensive I'll be reading it for years.

Exactly as cheerful, inspiring and heroic as it sounds. My decision to finally order this morbid classic was undertaken very late at night, somewhat under the influence of Victory's perfect Imperial Stout, the Storm King. It is a thick, heavy brew that tastes insanely rich and delicious, and generally results in better decisions than Factories of Death.