Connections by James Burke 4⁄5 Burke’s Connections TV series is magnificent stuff. I love the way he manages to wrangle disparate topics across science and history to show how much of innovation and advancement is non-linear. The book sets out to do the same thing and does a pretty good job. At times I didn’t quite see how the dots connected, but I enjoyed the ride.| timkadlec.com
Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education by Ken Robinson 4⁄5 Ken, as you would expect if you’ve read his prior books or watched his fantastic TED talk, is excellent at discussing complex topics in a compelling and memorable way. The book doesn’t go particularly deep in any one area (something Ken makes clear early on), but he does include ample notes and references to books and research if you would like a more detailed look at any one specific point. ...| timkadlec.com
Time for my annual look back at what I read in the past year. Keeping in the same format as last year, each book has a rating (on a simple 5-star scale) as well as a very short review to give you (and me when I look back at this in a year or so) some idea of why I enjoyed each book.| timkadlec.com
Take advantage of the freedom and flexibility of progressive web apps.| A Book Apart
Solve the most critical performance problems with the biggest impact: start with images. Mat Marquis helps you get up to speed—and speed up your site.| A Book Apart
I’ll be honest: I had never heard of this book, or the lectures they’re based on, until Ethan Marcotte started referring to them frequently in his posts. Ursula Franklin herself was someone whose name I had heard, but that was the extent of it. It’s an absolute shame that she and her ideas aren’t more broadly known. Not only were many of her ideas prescient, but they’re just downright important.| timkadlec.com
Colson Whitehead had the idea for The Underground Railroad about 15 years before the book was actually written. When he finally convinced himself to write it, he immersed himself in research, determined to do justice to the difficult topics the book explores.| timkadlec.com
Reading A Man Called Ove is an awful lot like what it’s like to meet and get to know a person in real life.| timkadlec.com
It has never been easier to build animation into our sites and applications. New standards have emerged enabling us to build animations with a few lines of CSS or JavaScript. But as Val points out in this book, this is a relatively new thing for us and we have a lot to learn. Animation right now is still largely considered eye-candy, and it’s treated like that on most projects.| timkadlec.com
The story Masaji tells is not one for the faint of heart. Masaji was born in Japan, shortly after World War II. His father was Korean, his mother was Japanese. That simple fact stacked the odds against his family from day one. The Koreans in Japan after the war “…belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go.” In Japan, his family constantly battled poverty and discrimination. When his father was approached to move to North Korea with the promise of a ...| timkadlec.com
Accessibility is one of those topics that can be very intimidating to folks. There is a lot to know and a lot you can get wrong. Plus, since accessibility is felt so personally by many, the reaction to accessibility mistakes online tends to be…unpleasant. It makes a lot of people I’ve talked to feel stuck, not sure how to proceed.| timkadlec.com
Here’s a good litmus test for whether or not you will enjoy Giulia’s book: watch her TED talk, “The surprisingly charming science of your gut”. The style of her presentation is pretty much what you can expect from the book. If you enjoy her talk, you’ll love the book.| timkadlec.com
You might think a book about sleep couldn’t possibly be that interesting, but you would be wrong. Why We Sleep is a comprehensive, fascinating and entertaining look at sleep. Generally speaking, most of us are probably already convinced that sleep is a good thing, but we may be fuzzy on why that’s the case. Walker carefully goes over the mental and health benefits that sleep provides (and there are many), explaining what exactly is happening behind the scenes to trigger these benefits.| timkadlec.com
Exit West focuses on a young couple—Saeed and Nadia—and their life together first in a city overrun by militants. It follows them as they flee and try to find new lives in a world that seems to neither want nor welcome them. It’s not the most encouraging picture of humanity, but it’s too important to overlook and the novel is incredibly timely.| timkadlec.com
I had heard more than a few friends talk glowingly about Lonesome Dove, a book that ends up at or near the top of any list you’ll ever find of “best western novels”. When I stumbled across Lonesome Dove on a list of books Roxane Gay said she would have students read, were she to teach a course on modern fiction with a focus on diversity of voice, I decided to pick it up.| timkadlec.com
Last year I read “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy” by Tim Hartford. My favorite question that he raised repeatedly was about who benefits from what we build, and more importantly, who loses.| timkadlec.com
The End of Absence by Michael Harris 4⁄5 I found myself nodding my head in agreement quite frequently while reading this meditation on the way technology is slowing but surely filling in anything that vaguely resembles a void in our “busyness”. There was one point early on in the book where I worried the author was about to get a little too over-the-top in his critique and concerns, but as it turns out, he comes to a pragmatic conclusion at the end arguing that while every technology ca...| timkadlec.com