Blogs

BOOK REVIEW Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters , by Naomi S. Baron, Stanford University Press, 20 January 2026 (Available for Pre-Order), 292 Pages, $28.00 (Hardcover), ISBN 9781503643949 There is a moment in Reader Bot when Naomi S. Baron describes a college student who assigns an AI system to read a dense article and return a summary. The student scans the output on a phone while standing in line for coffee, nods once, and moves on. Nothing in that scene feels dramatic. There is no alarm, no sense of wrongdoing, no teacher peering over a shoulder. Yet Baron lingers on it because something quiet but ...

BOOK REVIEW Trauma and Nostalgia: Practices in Memory and Identity , edited by Lucien van Liere, Srdjan Sremac, Amsterdam University Press (2024), Routledge (2025), 202 Pages, £92.00 (Hardback). ISBN 9789048559220, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11930990 The book opens with a small but unsettling scene. A television screen flickers in an Israeli living room during the First Gulf War. Gas masks sit beside the sofa. The broadcast mixes fear, routine, and a strange calm. The war is real, yet it is experienced through images, commentators, and familiar domestic spaces. What lingers is not only fear but also a curious longing for togetherness, ...

BOOK REVIEW The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI , by Fei-Fei Li, Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book, 02 September 2025, 336 pages, $18.48 (Paperback), ISBN 9781250898104 She is walking fast through a plain Washington hotel lobby, hearing her boots strike thin carpet like a metronome that has lost patience, trying to look calm while she feels anything but calm. In a few minutes she will sit at a witness table in the Rayburn House Office Building, her name printed in simple type, and testify about artificial intelligence, a topic that has suddenly become public property, fought over by lawmakers, ...

BOOK REVIEW The Promise: How an everyday hero made the impossible possible , by Arnold Dix, Simon & Schuster Australia (2025), 304 pages, $28.75 (Paperback), ISBN 978-1-7614-2916-3 . The book opens with a confession that feels almost like a warning. Arnold Dix tells the reader that they should not know who he is. He presents himself as a man who has worked quietly for decades, arriving at disaster sites, doing the job, and leaving without applause. This calm anonymity is shattered by a single event in late 2023, when forty-one construction workers are trapped inside a collapsed tunnel high in the ...

BOOK REVIEW The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia , edited by Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg, Routledge (2024), 592 Pages, £184.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-032-42920-5 The handbook opens with an image that feels strangely familiar. A soldier far from home, weakened not by wounds but by longing, begins to fade. In early medical writing, nostalgia was not a metaphor but a diagnosis, sometimes fatal. The editors return to this forgotten scene to remind readers that nostalgia once carried the weight of illness before it became a shared cultural language. This anecdote does more than offer historical colour. It sets up the central tension ...

BOOK REVIEW Children in Tourism Communities: Sustainability and Social Justice, by Marko Koščak, Mladen Knežević, Tony O’Rourke, Tina Šegota, Routledge, 2024, 228, GBP £145.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781032448763 The book opens with a quiet scene that stays with the reader long after the page is turned. In a small alpine village shaped by seasonal tourism, a local child watches visitors arrive with cameras, skis, and expectations. The child knows the rhythm of these arrivals better than the calendar. School schedules bend during peak season, family routines adjust, and certain village spaces feel less like home and more like a stage. Koščak ...

BOOK REVIEW How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, by Chris Wiggins & Matthew L. Jones, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023. 384 pages. ISBN: 978-1-324-00673-2 This book promises a comprehensive history of data with its technical, political, and ethical impact on individuals and authority. The book starts by discussing the importance of understanding data and its role in human society. A day after this book's worldwide release, on 22nd March 2023, more than a thousand technology leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, urged artificial intelligence labs to halt development of the most ...

BOOK REVIEW The Scrapper’s Way: Making It Big in an Unequal World, by Damodar Padhi, Harper Collins Publishers, Gurugram, India (2024). ISBN 978-9-3569-9993-0, 252 pages As a young boy growing up in rural Odisha, Damodar Padhi once struggled to understand how an indoor toilet worked. Used to open fields, he found the enclosed space unfamiliar, even unnecessary. On the very next day, confused and unsure, he relieved himself in a playground instead. This seemingly small incident, narrated with humor in The Scrapper’s Way , captures the essence of Padhi’s journey as he adapts to new environments, learns through trial and error, and constantly ...

BOOK REVIEW Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, by Liz Pelly, Hodder & Stoughton (2025), 288 pp., ($23.47) Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-399-71884-4. One night in 2018, a songwriter noticed his track had millions of plays on Spotify but earned him almost nothing. Digging deeper, he found his song buried in a "Chill" playlist between anonymous, algorithmically promoted tracks designed to keep users streaming. This moment captures the heart of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine . Through incisive reporting and clear analysis, Pelly reveals how Spotify, once celebrated as a savior from piracy, has transformed music ...

Following the tremendous success of the Space Economy PDW at AOM 2025 — the largest PDW in the Academy’s history — we are now finalizing plans for 2026–2027 community activities , which may include: 🌍 A second PDW at AOM 2026 🪐 A specialized symposium 🚀 A dedicated conference in 2027 🤝 Cross-divisional collaborations , such as special issues and joint initiatives If you would like to be involved as an organizer, volunteer, contributor, or participant , please share your input now. Your voice will directly shape the next phase of this growing community. 🔔 SECOND and FINAL CALL ...

By Judith Walls & Steve Walls 25 March 2020 In the last week you’ve probably had the capacity of your e-mail Inbox tested with communication from dozens of businesses, each telling you about their response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The majority of those messages will have told you to “Stay Home, Stay Safe.” A very small minority will have told you what they’re actually doing to help navigate the storm in a practical way. You might therefore wonder if this is all just another form of symbolic action. And yet, times of crises are precisely the points when companies can prove their purpose, and their substantive commitment to social and environmental ...

Hello !!! It is an academic master dissertation on tourism industry. The unit analyses is on small and medium enterprises located at são paulo state, Brazil, located in 22 tourism cluster and up to 7.000 enterprises. The theory used will be innovation, technical cooperation and Oslo manual as a base. The research question is focused on to discover who are the agents/actors in the process, their motivations and weaknesses on their relationships, the role of government and higher education may play on these actors in order to improve their revenues and insertion.. Please, I accept comments, critics, contributions and any suggestion to whom it may concern ...