book review – Davood Gozli

Marie Bergström’s The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy

Davood Gozli — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:09:15 +0000

The way modern dating has changed reflects the general pattern of fragmentation and atomization seen in other domains of life. Dating has become disconnected from other social domains, partly due to the growing role of online dating apps. This is the central insight of The New Laws of Love by Marie Bergström, a study of...

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Nexus: Yuval Noah Harari’s Perspective on Information, Power, and AI

Davood Gozli — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:50:14 +0000

Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, is a narrative treatment of history, anthropology, political theory, and artificial intelligence. It’s a continuation of his ambitious style that began with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. One of the main arguments of Nexus is that...

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‘The Thibaults’ by Roger Martin du Gard: Reflections on a Masterpiece

Davood Gozli — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 17:39:23 +0000

Reading The Thibaults (Les Thibault) was one of my highlights of 2024. Published originally in serial form between 1922 and 1940, the novel tells the story of a family—their historical context, their relationships, and their movements across the private and public spheres. World War I also casts a heavy shadow over the story, but du...

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Re-Discovering the Richness of Everyday Life

Davood Gozli — Thu, 04 May 2023 21:05:05 +0000

Over the past two years, I have created a series of videos based on the book, Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life by Svend Brinkmann. I posted the final part a few days ago. In this post, I want to discuss the book’s importance and who can benefit from it. Why is this book important? First,...

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James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain”

Davood Gozli — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 01:18:21 +0000

The feeling of existential unease, of not being at home in the world, is present in James Baldwin’s novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, to a painfully concentrated degree. The novel takes that feeling of unease as its starting point and goes on to explore broader themes related to family, history, and religion. The...

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Review of “More than a Glitch” by Meredith Broussard

Davood Gozli — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 23:09:14 +0000

In her book “More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability in Tech,” Meredith Broussard explores how various tech fields, including AI, user-interface design, surveillance, and predictive coding, perpetuate social biases on the basis of race, gender, and ability. She covers topics such as face recognition software, predictive policing, predictive grading in education, and...

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Review of ‘the Tyranny of Metrics’ by Jerry Z. Muller

Davood Gozli — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:29:24 +0000

Among the books I have recently borrowed from the library, Jerry Muller’s (2018) book, the Tyranny of Metrics, has been the one I’d like to purchase a copy of and keep at hand for future reference. Muller is a historian who has written books on Adam Smith, various aspects of capitalism, and the history of...

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On ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ (by Cathy O’Neil) Book Review

Davood Gozli — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 18:21:44 +0000

O’Neil’s book offers a wide-ranging and alarming critique of Big Data technology and profit- and efficiency-driven algorithms. The title and the central concept in the book, Weapons of Math Destruction (WMDs), refer to prediction models that inform decisions at large scale and damage the well-being of many people subjected to them. They include models that...

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Thoughts on ‘Naked Statistics’ (by Charles Wheelan)

Davood Gozli — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 19:49:07 +0000

Let’s begin this post with a comment by Chris Schuck on my recent video about The Data Detective by Tim Harford. Chris wrote: Some of the books in this genre look really great, but I was also thinking about how these statistical/quant critical thinking analyses are often at their most effective when placed in the...

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Thoughts on ‘Data Detective’ (by Tim Harford)

Davood Gozli — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 02:29:12 +0000

Tim Harford’s (2021) book, Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics, isn’t really about statistical methods. It has a much broader scope, and it is less technical than book on methods. It deals with knowledge in general, our relationship with knowledge, and the factors that determine that relationship for individuals and collectives....

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