March 2013 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

(I decided to temporarily usurp RobertLumley's place in posting this thread. I hope he doesn't mind)

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

(I decided to temporarily usurp RobertLumley's place in posting this thread. I hope he doesn't mind)

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

I've been rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a formative text for me back when I was a nerdy teenager in the late Nineties, but one which I haven't touched in a decade or so.

A lot of it has already been obsoleted by real technological and social changes; its China for example transitioned directly from Maoism to neo-Confucianism without an authoritarian market economy stage, staying well behind the technological bell curve in the process, and its approach to AI is looking increasingly quaint. From a psychology/cogsci/poli-sci point of view I imagine it'd still be a deeply interesting book for many LW readers, though. The motivations behind its Primer closely approximate some of the ways we talk about rationality, for one thing

Unfortunately a lot of the interesting bits edge into politics, so I'm not sure I feel comfortable unleashing my usual rambling screed in this context.

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