Brains, Spies, Drone, and More From Our Reading List

brain

ANNE:  It’s been a super-busy week and to be honest, most nights I went home, put on pajamas and curled up with a glass of wine and a spy thriller. An old, dog-eared spy thriller from the stack I keep in the attic. When I’m stressed, there’s nothing as comforting as losing myself in the pages of a book I already know I like. So this week found me in bed with Daniel Silva. His books, I mean. I’ve been following the legendary exploits of his Israeli spy chief and art restorer, Gabriel Allon, for years. And now, thanks to middle age and failing memory, they’re new all over again. See? This is why you should never throw away books. Just read, forget, re-read. And repeat.

STEVE: Can a photograph capture the significance of a historical site? Not with a picture of a historical marker or even of people visiting the site, but just the place itself? That’s the challenge that photographer Andrew Lichtenstein set for himself. He visited a number of important sites in American history, including the town where Emmett Till was murdered, Bear Butte in the Black Hills where Crazy Horse took refuge, and a South Carolina plantation where Harriet Tubman led a raid that freed hundreds of slaves. Andrew’s images of these places, along with accompanying text by his historian brother Alex, have been turned into the book “Marked, Unmarked, Remembered.” It’s a remarkable work that got me thinking about historical sites and how we remember them.

CHARLES:  I listen to a lot of electronic music, and have even made some attempts to create my own in my basement (there is no audio link, I will spare you that). So when a book titled “Eight Lectures of Experimental Music” landed on my desk, I was thrilled. It’s got the biggies: Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. Each chapter is a lecture by the musician at Wesleyan University since 1989. Each of the eight lectures is followed by a transcript of the Q & A with students and the composers. This is the kind of intellectual heft I need to help me create the best drone experimental music theory can offer.

SHANNON: The largest youth poetry slam in the world, "Louder Than A Bomb," takes place every year in Chicago, giving generations of teens a chance to share their voices and their art. I watched the 2010 documentary Louder Than A Bomb this week before an interview with LTAB’s founder, Kevin Coval. There’s competition, tears, and a sense that teens and poetry need each other.

MARK: If you look at the list of most companies that received early stage investments from startup incubator Y Combinator, you'd see the companies that form the services and platforms that encompass huge parts of online life — Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb. That's what makes new entrant Nectome seem out of place on their Demo Day stage this year. They're not pitching an app, or machine learning systems, or anything you'd think of out of the conventional tech business — they're pitching immortality. The company is seeking investment for a consumer-facing service for chemically freezing your brain until it can be uploaded to the cloud. And the procedure is anything but easy — in fact, it is "100% fatal."

"For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia)."

Well, we've officially crossed over from "new business models" to "Black Mirror plot devices" when it comes to the latest investments happening in Silicon Valley.