Selections from the Web:

Andrew Liu: Who Digs the Mines?

A review of Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics.
Computer History Museum: Real Time Computing

A web exhibit with lots of great material on Whirlwind, SAGE, and early real-time computing.
John Warner: Produce or Perish?

On the productivity lessons of doing government work.
Mark Novak: Larry Ellison’s Oracle Started As a CIA Project

A short 2014 article looking at the long relationship of Oracle with the national security state.

Books and Journal Articles:

Books:

Peter Gay: Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (1968).

This has aged a little unevenly, especially in its (underdeveloped) Freudian framework and its hand-wavey treatment of the political “irrational.” But it’s a quick read–easy to knock out of a Saturday afternoon–and has some especially vibrant sketches of Weimar literary, artistic, and academic life.

Journal Articles and Chapters:

Erika Lorraine Milam: “A Field Study of Con Games,” Isis (2014)

On Huey P. Newton and Robert Trivers’s abortive attempt to find a biological basis for con games and self-deception.