Recent reading

Read Going Infinite by Michael Lewis, about Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX infamy, which - as an avid reader of chronicles of the collapse and/or dysfunctional inner workings of massively overvalued startups with unscrupulous founders (e.g., Theranos, WeWork, Uber) - struck me as surprisingly... sympathetic? credulous? defensive? Lewis' view of Bankman-Fried and the nuclear meltdown of his ostensibly multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange is that it was all incompetence, rather than malice, but I am not entirely sure that "eccentric wunderkind accidentally misplaced several billion dollars of his company's (and clients') money because he just did whatever he wanted all of the time and left other people to handle the logistics" is really that much more defensible than a calculated scam/theft?? Even if best taken with several shovels of salt, this was an entertaining read. I didn't need or particularly want to know how much of Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison's romantic communication was written in business memo-style bullet points, but I've enjoyed imposing this knowledge on others.

Read People Collide by Isle McElroy: an American couple living in Bulgaria wakes up one morning to find themselves in a Freaky Friday-like bodyswap situation; or rather, a struggling writer wakes up to discover that he is in his wife's body and his wife - who is presumably in his - has disappeared. This book feels like the middle of a Venn diagram between Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl and Aimee Pokwatka's Self-Portrait With Nothing, which is kind of wild, actually— to have recently stumbled across three different books that seem to form a kind of conceptual/thematic spectrum, without reflecting a definable trend...?