Sam King's Verbose Letters

Great story, but I don't like how it's written.  Before I speak to the things I learned, my criticisms:

The premise: all mammals have evolved with human-like intelligence, though discrimination of different species is still prevalent.  The protagonist is a bunny who wants to be the first bunny police officer.  

I enjoyed the setting a lot.  Much of the story took place in a modern metropolis.  Everyone has a smartphone, and there are plenty of other tech references.  With the city, the movie managed to present a diversity of peoples, cultures, and perspectives that can be hard to capture.  

The Good Dinosaur is a Pixar coming of age narrative featuring a dinosaur and his human pet going on an adventure.  It is beautiful, cute, and a well-done coming of age narrative.  However, it is extremely archetypal, and the archetype that it follows needs to change.

Dorothy Roberts discusses some of the problems with race-based medicine. Before seeing the TED talk, I didn't realize that there were so many issues.

Since this is a collection of short stories that are very different, I will provide thoughts for each one separately.  That said, all of them were well written and interesting, so I would highly recommend this book.

Tower of Babylon

I wrote a post for the Harvard Law and Policy Review blog.  Check it out at http://harvardlpr.com/2016/01/25/technology-development-needs-a-culture-... or read it below.

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Another article about my healthcare.gov team.  Check it out on the Atlantic's website and you can see the pictures of where I lived, too!  This article focuses a bit much on the living conditions of the folks working on healthcare.gov, but its descriptions of user centered design, attempts on doing agile development with government, and its descriptions of the government compliance landscape are all pretty good.

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A couple news organizations wrote articles about healthcare.gov after I left.  I'm not mentioned by name in this one, but I'm in one of the pictures.  I think that the article is fairly reasonable.  I pasted it below, but it's probably nicer looking if you view it on Fast Company's website.

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ENGINEERS AND DESIGNERS WHO REFINED HEALTHCARE.GOV ARE ON A MISSION TO TAME THE GOVERNMENT'S UNRULY DIGITAL PRESENCE.

In Magic 2.0 (which starts with "Off to be the Wizard"), reality is a computer program and the protagonist finds a file that lets him edit the variables underlying everything, which lets him do magic.  I appreciate the premise because that could be the nature of reality, though I think Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson deals with the idea in a more interesting way.

I hadn't read David Foster Wallace before this book.  I think that I don't like his writing style and disagree with many of his opinions, but he chooses very interesting topics to write about, so I enjoyed reading the book nonetheless.