The Leak by Kate Reed Petty
The Leak has been on my radar for a while now. But the timing to read it was never right. I finally got an email on a Friday that the book was available for me at the library. I would retrieve the book Saturday. Read it on Sunday. And would write about it on Monday. But what was this book? Yes, you can boil it down to the line of Kate Reed Petty created a fun story about the politics of journalism, the politics of […]
Bad Blood: Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup by John Carreyrou
I wasn’t aware of Theranos, the blood testing startup which imploded spectacularly in 2018 from one of the USA’s most-hyped new tech companies to bankruptcy and federal investigation, until Elizabeth Holmes, architect of the whole thing, was actually charged with fraud. The Pajiba commentariat pointed me in the direction of 2018’s Bad Blood (since I’m not a fan of podcasts), and it was well worth the read. Carreyrou, an investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal, first got interested in the story long after Holmes […]
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
CBR12 BINGO: Money Be a near-genius-level Stanford dropout with a revolutionary idea. (Say, performing dozens of different types of blood tests on a drop of blood on a machine that can fit into people’s homes.) Impress the hell out of potential investors with your charisma, intelligence, and salesmanship. Recruit your staff from the best tech firms Silicon Valley has to offer. Give your company a snappy, tech-sounding name. Pack your board with illustrious individuals, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of State […]
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
There is something particularly powerful about reading someone’s accounting of their dogged pursual of truth, of what is right, of what matters and we are treated to just that in Catch and Kill. In his second book Ronan Farrow reckons with the institutional powers and societal inequities that create the sort of stories he’s worked on reporting for the past few years at The New Yorker. Part memoir, part investigative report, Catch and Kill is an imminently fast read, jumping from one unbelievable if it […]
