The novel tracks pretty closely to the real-life mother/daughter duo that lived in LA in 1940 and spied on a group of American Nazis who were organizing various meetings and propaganda efforts before we officially entered WWII. The two infiltrated the group, taking notes and names and eventually providing the details to the FBI. What is interesting about this story is how many parallels we have with present-day America, and the power of disinformation and hate to polarize and energize the general public. The mother/daughter duo — who have German heritage — have various adventures as they try to keep up appearances and convince the Nazis that they are genuine sympathizers, even though they want nothing to do with them. Coming on the heels of the new Ken Burns documentary about American’s role during this period, it presents some thought-provoking choices that were made.

Normally when I finish a book I have some strong opinions either pro or con. I am of two minds with this novel by Gabrielle Zevin which is excellently written and an epic tale of its three principle characters. We follow their exploits for the next 20 years, starting when they are all in their late teens. If you are interested in computer gaming, the book portrays the world of game creators and the gaming industry very realistically — I covered this world as a tech journalist once upon a time. And the relationships of the trio — who form their own gaming studio and quickly become successful — is also very believable and interesting as they and the industry matures. The downside is that the ending is less than satisfactory as the author takes us inside a game itself that the characters play new roles. It just felt off somehow. Nevertheless, this novel is one of hope, of loves found and lost, of how people work together and work against each other in interesting ways that drives the plot forward. And maybe one day you will find those secret underground LA freeways that are posited in the book. (You ‘will have to read it to understand this reference.)

What does the Greek king Ptolemy I, the way you type in your sentence endings, a WWII weather report, and the word “northeast” have in common? They are all clues to solving some of the grandest puzzles of all time, and what con men and magicians often call “tells” or personal habits that give away the game.

The 1987 movie House of Games has a wonderful take on tells that is actually central to its plot, so I won’t go into detail just in case you haven’t seen it yet. Even if you have seen it and know how it ends, it is still delightful to rewatch it years later. Another wonderful memory of mine is watching one of Penn and Teller’s magic acts where they repeat the same trick several times, each time providing a fake tell to fool you repeatedly about the trick. (Penn wrote the foreward of my first book about email BTW.) Magicians excel in having you focus on something other than what they are doing, so the tell is part of their act. Con men — such as card sharks and swindlers depicted in the movie — look for their mark’s tells so they can manipulate them into getting money.

I was reminded about tells and clues after reading The Writing of the Gods, a wonderful book that came out last fall by Edward Dolnick about solving the translations that appear on the Rosetta Stone. The book describes how two scholars tried over decades to make progress on the translation. It is a wonderful read, especially if you have interest in ancient Egypt, like solving codes and puzzles, want to hear about mathematicians behaving badly, or just interested in a fascinating description about life back in the day when colonial powers ruled the world and could just appropriate artifacts with never a care. Dolnick brings the puzzles of the stone to life for me, showing us the pure thirst for knowledge and showing the drive that these two men had in trying to figure out what was going on with the three languages written on that piece of rock.

As you might have guessed, the Ptolemy clue that opened this post is what got scholars working on figuring out how the text, which is written in three different languages, were related. Given that he was Greek, there was no easy way to write down his name using a word that was not part of the languages of ancient Egypt. The scribes had to spell it out, phonetically. The hardest part about the stone was the hieroglyphics, because they can play the role of symbols, letters of the alphabet, and grouped together to form ideas or other concepts.

One of my favorite stories about tells has to do with solving the German wartime codes Enigma and Lorenz. I have written about my visit to Colossus here. The tell used to break these codes had to do with knowing the vocabulary used by the military to provide the local weather report, and knowing that this report was usually placed at the top of each message. Given that the Allies recorded thousands of messages, they had a large corpus to use in their decodes.

But unlike these wartime puzzles, figuring out the Rosetta Stone had a major problem: you first had to find the context and get into the heads of the ancients without really any idea of what their lives were like or what they did. It is one thing to be solving a puzzle with contemporary references. It is another thing to try to reconstruct a dead language with no known speakers, and to do so by using yet another dead language.

Dolnick mentioned something in his book that got me looking further into our next tell. He was nice enough to answer my query with a link to this story in the NY Times which recounts the double-space-at-the-end-of-a-sentence debacle. The problem has to do with college essays, and having your parents write them, or more accurately, type them. Because those of us of a certain age learned to type back in the pre-PC era, we have this ingrained habit of using two spaces after a period. Kids who were digital natives didn’t have this habit, and college admissions staff could quickly recognize what parts of the essay were written by the parent as a result. If you didn’t know the context or the history, you probably would have missed this tell.

Finally, there is the “northeast” clue. Astute readers will probably recognize this as part of the decoding effort with the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters. I wrote about this several years ago when I got a chance to meet Elonka Dunnin, who maintains a wonderful resource page here. The clue is from the sculptor, James Sanborn, who is trying to help people decrypt the final piece of the puzzle. And just to bring things to a delicious full circle, one of the passages in the sculpture relates to the diary of archaeologist Howard Carter on the day he discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922. It is all about Egypt!

Karin Reed and Joseph Allen have written a great sequel to their book, Suddenly Virtual, titled, naturally enough, Suddenly Hybrid: Managing the Modern Meeting. It should be required reading for all of us as we try to keep up with the changing nature of work as we move into the third year of the COVID pandemic.

The authors have a few suggestions on how to improve hybrid meetings and other practical tips and tools to both run them and participate in them. This book will help you build upon the habits from our fully remote world over the past few years and use the collaboration tools found in videoconferencing platforms, even when we are conducting meetings in person or with hybrid audiences. It will help you figure out where an organization wants to land on the “hybrid meeting spectrum,” and remove any obstacles from fully realizing their benefits.

You can read my full review on Biznology here.

As someone deeply steeped in the tech industry, I am embarrassed to admit that reading Ahead of the Game by Kevin Ryan (a business tech reporter) is the first time I have heard of Delane Parnell and his rise to run one of the most successful startups of the modern era. His company, PlayVS, has grown into an eSports powerhouse, and Parnell’s origin story is told with lots of verve and interest in this book.

Parnell showed early signs that he was going to be a great business leader. As a teenager, he leveraged his way from working in a cell phone store to becoming a partner and owning several of them in his native Detroit.

When he funded his first venture round, he was the third largest such round by a Black-owned business. PlayVS was responsible for recruiting thousands of high school gamers to participate in the first ever varsity-level gaming contests, with almost half of the players being in their first after-school activity ever. The story shows the numerous obstacles that the venture capital world — like the rest of society — places on successful Black entrepreneurs and how Parnell managed to overcome them to build his company. For all potential entrepreneurs, this is a must-read book.

My former boss Jason Calacanis interviewed Parnell at the beginning of the Covid pandemic in April 2020 on This Week in Startups. If you don’t want to read the book, you can watch the interview, where Parnell talks about going to Jason’s Launch event as a teenager and getting inspired by the conference and meeting other startups.

Alvy Ray Smith played a key role in creating a great deal of digital graphics content over the decades he worked at Lucasfilm and Pixar, and this book is a tour de force and a tour of the people, places, technologies, and companies that played key roles in these creations. The book, A Biography of the Pixel,  serves to correct the historical record about how the early digital computers and computer graphics software came to be and also provides the links between these early efforts — some of which might be well-known to you and some won’t be — and how different (almost always) men stood on each other’s shoulders to get us to where we are today. The illustrations are genius and help to explain his points in the evolutionary cycles of the Fourier series, Kotelnikov’s sampling equations, and Turing’s computational efforts, how computers and digital animation worked hand-in-hand, and the great digital convergence that we know and love today and celebrate what Smith calls Digital Light. You don’t have to know any math to find his explanations lucid and indeed, delightful. These innovators not only had a great scientific idea but drove technology into a fruitful application, while finding powerful supporters to help promote them. Along the way, you’ll see some old myths busted that digital can fully represent analog pictures and sound and how computers don’t have to be electronic numerical calculators — instead, they have become the most “malleable tool ever invented by humankind.”

I realize that a 500+ page book is a big commitment. I would start by reading the Finale chapter, which is a neat summary of all that Smith has presented in one cogent narrative. That should whet your appetite to want to dive into the entire epic journey.

The best recommendation that I can give to a work of fiction is the feeling I get when I finish the book that I haven’t read a novel. With this book The Spectacular chronicling the lives of three generations of women, I felt like I was reading real reporting about what happened to each of them and had to check to make sure that it really was fiction. The three women are all flawed in interesting and complementary ways: grandma has adjustment problems as an immigrant from Turkey, mom doesn’t want to be a parent initially and leaves her daughter in grandma’s care to go find herself, and the daughter has so many issues that drive the narrative that to document them here would spoilt the book. The author tackles some very real issues: gender identity, understanding how to live with others, finding your calling and your passions, etc. I really enjoyed this book, even as a white cis male. There are many familiar chords that were struck while reading its pages, and I wanted to meet these three women in real life when I was done. Highly recommended. I have read an earlier work by Zoe Whittall and would recommend her earlier works as well.

For those of you who are avid readers, you might want to investigate a service called NetGalley. I have been using them for seven years and have read hundreds of books for free. The only catch? I have to read them on my Kindle (or Nook or equivalent device) and then write a short review that I then post to Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, and other bookselling websites.

It is a terrific service which publishes the pre-publication versions of books, which used to be called galleys back in the days of Gutenberg, to a select audience of what they call “professional readers.” These versions often have small editing mistakes but are otherwise close to the actual text that you will see in the finished book.

The workflow is as follows. Once you join the service, you will get weekly notifications in your email about upcoming new books. Sometimes there is a short description, and you can click on that and get a longer one that will give you an idea if you are interested in reading the book. The service is used by both new authors and established ones alike, and there are tens of thousands of readers and authors using the service. Some books are immediately available for download; some will require the publisher to approve your request. Sometimes I get turned down, but usually within a day or so I have a new book waiting for me in my NetGalley account. I then send the digital file to my Kindle reader, and within minutes I can be reading a new book. Pretty neat, this whole internet thing, right?

I would say over the past several years I go through phases where I read more books on my Kindle than in print, and then the reverse. Given that bookstores have been mostly closed for browsing under the pandemic, I have gone back to using my Kindle more.

The NetGalley service keeps track of when the book is actually available for sale on the book ecommerce sites and sends you a tickler so you can post your review accordingly. That appeals to me, because I like to be in the first batch of folks posting my review.

There is a wide range of books available on the service, and this also includes audiobooks as well as the traditional printed text. You can set your subject matter preferences and other parameters for your account. If you don’t want to wait for the weekly notifications, you can browse for new titles at any time.

If you really like a book and want to get to interview the author, NetGalley will help facilitate that relationship. They also make it very easy to take your review and get it put on the bookselling sites with a couple of clicks.

As I said, the service is free for readers. They make their money from publishers (and self-published authors) who pay a fee to post their galleys on the service for a specific time period. The fees vary from a single book for $450 for six months to discounts for multiple books for publishing houses or members of various publishing associations.

I will be giving a seminar on NetGalley in September for the St. Louis Publishers Association. Email me if you are interested in seeing this presentation.