Pretty Face by Lucy Parker

Pretty Face

3/5. Het romance about the screen actress typecast into a sexy role trying to make her debut on the stage, and her super cranky director. If this were on the AO3, it would be tagged snark to lovers, workplace romance, we can't touch oh no, except we totally did anyway, family issues.

I'm enjoying this series. The characters are actual adults with adult problems and families that hit that right balance between complicated and charming. And the romance is one of my preferred shapes, where they both realize relatively early on that this might be the real deal, but at least one of them has completely explicable reasons to hesitate.

If I have a complaint, it's that this leans too heavily on that trope where someone is sexist to the heroine, and the hero gets to ride to the rescue. It's not as annoying as this usually is, as it's part of the hero's growing understanding of her, and how much sexism she is subjected to, and the ways she is resigned to it and the ways she isn't. Still. It's a little annoying.

The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones - Confronting a New Age of Threat

The Future of Violence by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum

3/5. A lot more big theory than I was expecting, based on the title. Think many references to Hobbes and extensive ponderings of the role and shortcomings of nation states in creating peace and conflict. Good and thought-provoking, particularly the sections on privacy and security, which challenged me. They have a point that the thing we mean when we say "privacy" is a lot more complicated than the dictionary definition of the word.

Mostly, this was interesting to me because I have spent the past five years sliding unintentionally into a national security adjacent field, and it has changed me. I remember a decade ago having lofty intellectual opinions about the dysfunction of nationalism as a system. I still sort of do – I still have wildly leftist views on immigration, for example. But living and breathing national security has changed how I think about these things, and my country, and its place in the world, and the very concept of 'country.' My wife asked if this is based in substantive thought or just drinking the cool-aid, and I have to say . . . definitely both. But this book helped me articulate the parts that are substantive.