Ben East Books

Category: Nonfiction

  • COVID, or Covfefe?

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    Ben East
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    Covfefe is the sound of an old man choking on his attempt to say “COVID” While forced isolation has us looking for ways to pass the time at home, I look for something meaningful to read and settle on Poe. The meandering path of my literary pursuit began this morning with Book Fight!, a Podcast…

  • Facebook vs Google in the Bubble

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    Ben East
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    The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There’s a big difference between “you are what you click” and “you are what you share.” The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser (2009) looks at how personalization on the Internet transforms the Internet itself, creating a different user experience for everyone. Through…

  • Blogging in the Filter Bubble

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    Ben East
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    The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble. Eli Pariser’s 2009 The Filter Bubble is a call to self-reflection on how we represent ourselves—consciously and unconsciously—in the digital age. “You click on a link, which signals an interest in something,…

  • Government Abuse of the Filter Bubble

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    Ben East
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    The FBI needs a warrant from a judge to search your laptop. But if you use Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail for your e-mail, you ‘lose your constitutional protections immediately…’ Ideas worth re-visiting from Eli Pariser’s 2009 The Filter Bubble. This third installment looks at how governments might abuse Internet personalization. “The FBI needs a…

  • Life in the Filter Bubble

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    Ben East
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    “The dynamics of personalization shift power into the hands of a few major company actors.” The best lines from Eli Pariser’s 2009 The Filter Bubble in ten parts. This is Part II: How do corporations abuse Internet personalization? “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” –Andrew Lewis as…

  • The Filter Bubble

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    Ben East
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    You Are What You Click “Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating ‘compulsive media’ to get you to click things more.” Quotes from Eli Pariser’s—The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think Perhaps the scariest thing about Pariser’s book is the fact…

  • Poetic Feminist Rant

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    Ben East
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    I talked with a group of poets yesterday. Poetry operates at a level beyond my ordinary grasp; often it reads like an excuse for lazy incoherence rather than stabs at truth. In yesterday’s case, the writers had forged their art around efforts to ensure equal rights and legal protections for women. The event rose above…

  • Thoreau’s First New Yorker Cartoon

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    Ben East
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    The wordless cartoons of Nurit Karlin. The sketched illustrations of R.O. Blechman. Turns out these staples from The New Yorker have an antecedent in Henry David Thoreau. Had The New Yorker been around, how might Thoreau have captioned this sketch from Journal XVII, kept February 1854 to September 1854? Certainly not as follows: At the steam-mill sand-bank was…

  • Thoreau, Hold the Joe

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    Ben East
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    Noble and wise, Henry David Thoreau also could be irascible, judgy, and temperamental. In Walden, we learn why: a conspicuous absence of coffee. Take his list of supplies: Rice….. $ 1.73½ Molasses….. 1.73     Cheapest form of the saccharine. Rye meal….. 1.04¾ Indian meal….. 0.99¾     Cheaper than rye. Pork….. 0.22 Flour….. 0.88  Costs more than Indian meal, both money…

  • Sold Out at In-N-Out

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    Ben East
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    Must applaud the good fortune visited upon author Ted Gup this week in the form of free advertising for his former best-seller The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. Published almost two decades ago, Gup’s book found renewed celebrity when it appeared on the front page of New York’s gift to…