Book Review

This is how the world ends

The book is a grim lesson in how cyberwar is waged and underlined by long-held belief that privacy and the concept of secrecy is a fiction, that anything can be hacked…… Up until this book, the hidden market for zero day exploits has been covered in bits and pieces, but it’s Perlroth’s dogged reporting that breaks through the code of lies and silence and clearly lays out for the layperson the extent of the threat  

An excellent review of Nicole Perlroth’s fantastic book, This is How They Tell Me The World Ends by my former editor David Churbuck. Perlroth spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity, digital espionage, and sabotage reporter for The New York Times. If you have not read this book, you must do it asap.

Read article on David Churbuck

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[Book Review] Trace Elements by Donna Leon

My favorite way to decompress is straightforward — turn off the phone, get off the Internet, and instead of reading some heavy and complex book, pick up a good old fashioned detective novel. It is even better if it is set in a faraway place — such as Italy or Japan. And this past weekend, I sat down and read the latest from one of my favorite writers.

Donna Leon’s Trace Elements is a book set in Venice, and it is the 29th book with Commissario Guido Brunetti as its main protagonist. It is a book about investigating a murder — of a human being but in a broader context about the slow killing of the planet that we inhabit. The book is really about the crimes we commit against the earth and its generosity. We all have seen the visual impact of humans taking a break — the planet

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The Art of Stillness: Adventures in going nowhere

Pico Iyer is a philosopher who looks at the world from the lens of a travel writer. His books have a certain poetic quality to them. And I have been inspired by his work to travel to distant places. His latest book is not about going somewhere. Instead it is about the journey within.

The Art of Stillness is one of his shortest books — you can read it in less than an hour. It is ironic that I read this on a plane, going somewhere. The book is simple, devoid of pretense or pretentious prose. It makes you aware of the virtues of being still, going nowhere. Starting a few minutes a day, we can take this journey within. It is a way healthier addiction than that Xanax.

Or as Pico Iyer says

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going

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What I learned from reading “One Great Shoe”

onegreatshoeI just finished reading One Great Shoe, a Kindle Single,  by Zach Schonbrun. This is story of a once hit basketball shoe brand, And1, which was the last American brand to truly compete with Nike and its recent attempt to make a comeback. This is the story of a company that forgot what made it successful and diluted its own brand equity in an attempt to chase scale and growth. 

I can name a few dozen startups who have done the same, forgot what they were all about and found themselves in middle of wilderness of irrelevance. Schonburn, who is a New York-based sports writer does a great job of marrying business lessons and story of the sport in this single, though I believe it merited a few more details and flourishes. 

I am interested in sneaker culture and what it means in context of broader society. This was a

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Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

At its core, Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot is a book about engineering as art. It is a poem about the human desire to connect and be somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. For its author, commercial pilot Mark Vanhoenacker, it is about a lifelong romance with flying, soaring above the terra firma, looking down on a planet that is a spiderweb of beacons, invisible routes, trails and boundaries that hardly mirror the states below.

Skyfaring is a great summer read: If, like me, you are traveling, it makes you understand planes, airports and our desires to experience the known and unknown. It is a memoir, but it is also a handy guide to the artistry and nuance of those contrails seen in the early hours of the morning.

It is a pilot’s view of the flying experience, which is different from passengers’ perspectives, those of us sealed in the metal tube

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Champagne Supernovas by Maureen Callahan [Book Review]

You can’t judge a book by its cover. In this case, you can’t judge a book by its name. Champagne Supernovas by Maureen Callahan, a Brooklyn-based writer who has contributed to magazines such as Sassy, Vibe, Spin and Vanity Fair, will perhaps stick in my mind as the most unfortunately named book of 2014. That is kind of a shame, mostly because the book itself was surprisingly much better that I had expected.

The book chronicles the rise of three 1990s fashion icons — model Kate Moss and fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs. While McQueen committed suicide in 2010, Jacobs still reigns supreme in the fashion world. Moss has reinvented herself as a fashion arbiter for Swedish fast fashion retailer, H&M.

I have an amateur’s interest in fashion and pop culture. I am fascinated by history and more importantly creation of history. I stumbled across Supernovas and was

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