The latest installment in the Call of Duty videogame series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the entertainment hit of the year. It took in more than $300 million its first day, and $550 million its first five, outpacing every movie release this year, including the latest Twilight chapter. (I predict it will beat out Avatar, too.) Given the historic significance (no one can deny anymore that videogames are bigger than movies), it seems worthwhile to call everyone's attention to a piece I posted last year that got an amazing amount of attention: Do First Person Shooters Make You Smarter? Keep in mind that there's a difference between the game I was talking about then and this new installment. The Modern Warfare 2 version of Call of Duty is not historical; this time it is set in a highly speculative near future. So one of mycentral points -- that these games promote an interest in history -- doesn't really hold. Still, it's deeper implication, that the runaway success of first-person shooters doesn't necessarily signal cultural apocalypse, is more relevant than ever, no?
Reading List
Barcelona by Robert Hughes
Read while visiting Barcelona for the first time this fall. Hughes always writes like a dream. (Don't believe me? Check out his books on modern art, on Australia, on fishing...) Jennifer was reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and between us, we couldn't have been in better hands. The biography of a city is a genre I'm fascinated by. Can you write about a city as if it were a person, discovering its psychology and soul through its history? Short answer: Yes. Barcelona is exhibit A.The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen
I read Matthiessen's 1972 classic (originally a series of New Yorker pieces) while hiking and camping in Tanzania this summer. As I read his account of travels in East Africa a generation ago, I realized that, at times, I was in the exact same spot he was writing about. It's a classic of nature writing, deservedly so.Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux
This is the travel book I read after returning from a two week trip to East Africa. Surely, it's the necessary antidote to the tourist tendency to over-romanticize the African landscape while ignoring the dysfunctional political and economic side of things. Theroux lived in Africa during the 60s, a time of great optimism, and is revisiting four decades later. He finds everything worse.The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
A sublimely readable thriller set in Sweden. It features the unlikeliest pair of hero-investigators: a middle-aged male journalist and a 25-year-old female computer hacker. What's not to like? There are two more in the series, and the Larsson juggernaut, though already at full throttle in Europe, is still building here. Part of the author's developing legend centers on his sudden death at age 50, just after delivering all three manuscripts to his publisher. This month's Vanity Fair (Dec, 2009) speculates about foul play.Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
Professor Lessig's arguments should be familiar to Wired readers (he's a longtime contributor), but they still need to be made more familiar to everyone else. How many times does he have to explain the fact that technology has changed the rules, that antiquated copyright laws (or worse, draconian new copyright laws) are stifling creativity and holding back cultural and economic progress? This is essential reading for policy makers.Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Busi- ness by Jeff Howe
What started as a piece in Wired last year is about to be the big business book of the Fall. Watch for it at the end of August.Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife
Seife is one of our favorite science writers (he also wrote Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and Decoding the Universe). He's back in October with a hugely entertaining history of the follies and frauds surrounding the century-long search for cold fusion.There's a talk with Seife in issue 16.10.Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson's first novel since The Baroque Cycle hits stores September 9th. He's one of the few people ever to grace Wired's cover twice, and he's written for us too. I've just started this 900-page doorstop, and I'm definitely in for the long haul. Steven Levy profiles Neal in the 16.9 issue of Wired.
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November 30, 2009
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