Citizen Reader

I have been bummed lately, feeling like machines and algorithms are taking over the world. I'd be less bummed if I thought they were doing a very good job.*

So I wasn't all that titillated to hear that Goodreads, the social reading/cataloging site, is now offering a book recommendation service based on an algorithm they bought from another company. But I was glad to read this article about it in the New Yorker, where the author concludes that books, and humans, are messy, and algorithms don't always do well with messy. For some reason that cheered me up.

*I swear, now that CRjr's pediatrician's office is on computerized record-keeping, our visits take twice as long. How is that possible?