Thoughtful citizens of the digital world will want to have a look at Hwang’s intriguing exploration.
A deep dive into the marketplace that is the internet.
Hwang, the former global public policy lead on artificial intelligence at Google, examines the role of advertising in the online realm as “a marketplace for attention,” one that aims to grab your eyes, if even for a moment, and with any luck sells you something—an idea, a product, a political candidate. This marketplace may once have resembled a local fair. However, as the author shows, it has been thoroughly upscaled, with vast technologies and a commercial realm known as programmatic advertising, which “leverages software to automate the buying and selling of advertising inventory.” This automated, algorithmically driven advertising has its creepy dimensions—e.g., you look at an ad for a toaster, and the next day a dozen toaster manufacturers bombard you with their approaches. Human ad-sales teams are rapidly becoming a thing of the past with the advent of this machine-informed advertising, as Google’s sales force discovered when AdWords and AdSense took pride of place. Our attention—the vaunted target of the machine—has thus become “commodified to an extent that it has not been in the past,” made part of a massive system. Champions of programmatic advertising hold that it allows for better price transparency, but Hwang argues that it has created “an unsustainable market due for a painful correction” and certainly not one amenable to self-regulation. Online advertising must be regulated in the same way as hedge funds, requiring the intervention of government into an arena beloved of libertarians for its anarchic nature, albeit one that “remains murky and opaque, constantly oversold by an unhealthy ecosystem of conflicted players.” That call for regulation alone is likely to make Hwang’s book controversial, but it would help level a playing field that is dominated by a few big actors—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the like.
Thoughtful citizens of the digital world will want to have a look at Hwang’s intriguing exploration.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-53865-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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