Dinner at Rose’s Luxury

Tuesday, 14 February 2017Thursday, 16 February 2017 StarrLeave a comment

Happy Valentine’s Day! I wanted to share how Ben and I celebrated early a few days ago, but please remember to love yourself, however you are able to best do that.

This is my 400th post on this blog, and I have officially been posting twice a week consistently for an entire calendar year. I’m really proud to have reached this point and may be taking a small hiatus in posting regularly while I pull myself together and refocus. (Might not, we’ll see how I feel!) Thank you so much for being with me this past year and these past 400 posts.

I have a lot of thoughts about the DC food scene, but I will admit that it is improving. (I’ll put up all my gripes about the DC food scene and places that have shown this improvement in the near future!) Last year, Washington DC was recognized as Bon Appetit magazine’s Restaurant City of the Year and also received its first-ever Michelin stars, and that is thanks to many great new restaurants and chefs that have made enough of a name for themselves to do fresh, bold things.

But we aren’t here to talk about the hot new places. Rose’s Luxury has been one of the most-hyped restaurants in the District since I started working in the area. It earned a Michelin star last year and can be reliably found on Washingtonian’s 100 Very Best Restaurants list year after year. I’ve only ever heard good things from friends who’ve visited the restaurant, citing that yes, it is worth the hype!

Where does most of the hype come from? 2 things:

Their most famous dish, a pork & lychee salad
The fact that they do not take reservations, so people have to start waiting in line at 3pm in order to get a table for dinner… 2.5 hours later.

They do take reservations for large parties (6 or more), but I couldn’t find that many friends so I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to eat at Rose’s.

BUT THEN! Towards the end of last year, Rose’s Luxury announced that they would be accepting reservations! For parties of 2! With the purchase of a gift card that could be used towards that meal!

TL;DR Rose’s Luxury does an impressive job of combining a lot of different flavors in a balanced and unexpectedly delicious way, all while injecting a bit of sassy personality along the way.

Despite the name, Rose’s Luxury is not a luxurious, pretentious, fancy restaurant. In fact, you might walk past it if you’re not paying attention.

dcguide1015-roses-luxury — Photo: Travel & Leisure

Inside, the ambiance is similarly not-stuffy and, in fact, more on the hipster-trendy side. Rose’s has a lot of personality, and it shows in their decor. We were seated upstairs near the bar, and walked past my friends’ favorite seating area that is lit overhead by globe string lights.

“All unattended or misbehaving children will be given a shot of espresso & a free puppy.” Better keep your kids in line!

Behind me was a shelf with books and fun knick-knacks. A certificate in dining from Hooter’s did not escape me among the otherwise very Pinterest-worthy collection. The servers were dressed casually and otherwise indistinguishable from guests, who were not dressed to the nines for their 9pm dinners. In the bathroom, behind a small mirror was a window that overlooked the dining area below and still had elements of the personality that was subtly embedded in the entire restaurant experience.

“All employees must wash their hands before returning to work. Fortunately, we hire smart enough employees that we don’t have to remind them to do so.”

We had a gift certificate to blow on our 5th Valentine’s Day together, so let’s get into the food!

The meal kicked off with a soft potato brioche w/ bacon butter. This wasn’t particularly outstanding as far as breads go, but I liked the soft texture and the warmed, soft bacon butter a lot. I only wished it didn’t crumble so much because I want bread to go in my belly, not on the board.

LITTLE BITES

We enjoyed these little bites, and they were a great way to prep us for what is, I believe, the core of the Rose’s Luxury experience: pulling off interesting, unexpected, and bold flavor combinations.

Stuffed dates w/ cultured butter & walnuts // Ben took a bit to warm up to these, but I really liked the sweet and soft dates, the savoriness and warmth of the butter, and the slight crunch and bitterness of the walnuts.

Foie gras tart w/ hazelnut, white chocolate, & Asian pear // This was the strangest of the little bites because of the white chocolate chips embedded in the not-sweet foie gras filling of the tart. But it still came together because of its creaminess and it complemented the sweet flavors of the chocolate and the pear. Kind of hated it when I first bit into it, but found myself liking it a lot by the time the bite was gone.

Sake & wasabi-marinated oysters w/ apple granita // I don’t usually like wasabi very much (sorry wasabi pea lovers!), but these oysters were great because of how the very different flavors and textures came together. It was a bit much for one slurp, but I liked how the frozen apple granita helped mollify the burn I would’ve felt from the wasabi and even from the sake, while still allowing some of flavor of the oyster to come through.

SMALL PLATES

Pork sausage, habanero, peanuts, & lychee // Here we are. The most famous dish at Rose’s Luxury, cited in over 250 reviews on Yelp. At the bottom were herbs and on top was a dollop of coconut cream that, as you stirred the whole thing, would melt over the salad and act as the dressing. There were a lot of flavors happening in this small plate and I do think this is a good example of how Rose’s Luxury really pushes the envelope with combining flavors. Ben and I found this salad a bit too salty and not really worth the hype, to be honest. It was tasty and honestly, I do admire what Aaron Silverman did with this flavor combination, but it didn’t change my life and I wouldn’t go out of my way to get it again.

Fried brussels sprouts w/ benne tahini, eel sauce, & bonito // The prominent flavors in this one were brussels sprouts and tahini, both of which are very strong flavors. I felt this was maybe the least successful in terms of balancing the flavors of all the components, but it was still tasty because the sprouts and tahini were an interesting combination. I just didn’t think the other flavors had much of an effect in the quantity that they were used.

Crispy squid w/ Yemeni hot sauce, romaine, & sweet lemon puree // By the time this came out, Ben and I were starting to feel the effect of the food. We hadn’t really eaten that much, but I think we felt very satiated by the sheer quantity of flavors that we were consuming. The flavors were pretty well-balanced in this one, although I didn’t detect much heat from the hot sauce and I’m not sure if that was intentional or not. The squid itself was… prepared okay? Not that crispy, but it’s hard for me to find a calamari I don’t like.

Thai-marinated pork blade steak w/ nahm prik slaw // Again, by the time this came out, Ben and I weren’t as eager about the food anymore. I was also really sleepy by this point in the evening, as we were seated for dinner at close to 9:30pm and I have been getting sleepy very early because I’ve been attempting exercise in the mornings. As a result, I don’t really have any thoughts about this pork dish, it didn’t stand out as particularly good or bad.

PASTA

If you’re thinking that maybe we were regretting ordering a pasta… you’d be right. I was nodding off at this point in the meal and my belly was trying to come to terms with how many flavors and ingredients it had met over the past hour. We ordered the farro reginetti w/ garlic, kale, & mustard greens and… it was okay.

The two of us, personally, do not like our pasta cooked very al dente, so the bite-y pasta was a bit of a struggle when 10:30, 11 was rolling around. The taste was fine but… pretty ordinary, to be really honest. A touch of sauce didn’t really help how overwhelmingly al dente this pasta was, and I wasn’t super excited about the leftovers I brought to lunch the next day.

However, our server, Janine, sent a “gift” of a little bit of their Martelli spaghetti w/ tomato, chili, basil, & Parmesan and that was coated in maybe the best pasta sauce I have ever tasted in my entire life? I like my tomato sauces to be a bit sweet, and this was the perfect amount of sweetness that I could tell wasn’t the result of the sloppy addition of sugar. We only were able to take some of this home because we were so done with the meal already, and having those two bites to enjoy over the weekend was nothing short of glorious. I really want the recipe for this tomato sauce, it was the highlight of the entire meal for me and we didn’t even order it! Thank you so much, Janine!

DESSERT

Listen, I know I said that I was basically passed out and unable to eat but I didn’t come all this way to celebrate Valentine’s Day and not eat dessert. You just gotta open up that dessert compartment in your stomach and you’re good to go. Based on Janine’s recommendation, we got the coconut ice cream with burnt caramel coconut and kiwi.

I didn’t love this, unfortunately. The ice cream was tasty, but I think it felt weird to have more coconut after the coconut cream from the pork & lychee salad during a meal where my mouth was constantly being surprised by different flavors and how they were combined. A repeat performance by coconut was like, “Hey… what are you doing back here?” Also, I did not like the burnt caramel coconut. It was sticky in that unpleasant way that lent it a kind of poor mouthfeel and I found the bitterness to just not really work at this point in the evening. And kiwi was a fun choice but I’m not sure I loved the tartness of the kiwi with the sweet and creamy ice cream. I know that people really love this dessert, but I think I just wasn’t in the mood for more coconut or for a flavor to come from burnt-ness.

At the end of the meal, our receipt was brought out to us with a sesame brittle and little touches that made us smile.

1 Hooray! 2 Side of Winning, 1 Helluva Time, 1 Side of Awesome, all free of charge

I enjoyed my time at Rose’s Luxury but I’m glad I never had to wait hours to eat here. I don’t think it’s worth that kind of wait, and as a result I don’t think it’s worth the level of hype it has achieved. That being said, Aaron Silverman and his team are doing some incredible things with food and flavor that I think DC needs more of. Even the small plates format – which I normally loathe here in DC – works for this because you are getting small punches of these crazy flavors.

Rose’s Luxury
717 8th Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 580-8889
www.rosesluxury.com

Reservations for the tasting menu can be made for groups of 6-8. Private parties for 8-12 on the rooftop garden can be reserved and include a different tasting menu.

What are some of the most famous and/or hyped restaurants where you live?
What makes a restaurant worth the hype for you?

2016 in Books

Tuesday, 10 January 2017Monday, 9 January 2017 Starr3 Comments

Last year was one of the first years I managed to keep my meager reading resolution! I had to face the hard truth and be realistic with my goal of one book per month, which was very achievable given that I either didn’t read at all in a month or would go on a streak and read many books.

One of the biggest challenges was dedicated reading time. As I mentioned in my 2016 resolutions post, dedicated reading time is key to achieving a certain quantity of books read. For most of my post-grade school life, my dedicated reading time has been on my commute. This meant a lot of reading during my painful 2-hours-each-way days, but not as much reading at my significantly more comfortable 20-minutes-door-to-door job. I also have been reading less on my morning commute, specifically, since we got an Express hawker at my metro stop, which means I will opt to read that morning’s paper instead of my book in the morning. Before committing to reading, I would read the paper in the morning and do the crossword and/or Sudoku puzzles in the afternoon. Now, I try to just read as much as I can in the morning, and then recycle the paper as soon as I get off the train. (I miss my puzzles, though.)

As listed in my 2017 resolutions post, here are some contributing factors for how I was able to achieve my modest reading goal this year:

The Blogging for Books program gave me fresh reading material and motivation to complete books so I could review them.
I invested in an eReader, after years of hardcore resisting, because it really is very convenient to be able to carry so many books so easily.
There was extensive work on the metro that led to some severe delays during my commute, so I tried to make lemonade from that lemon and would read during these hour-long delays. Ah, it was almost like the olden days of my commute, except instead of traveling several miles, I was just sitting underground waiting for 5 trains to pass. Good reading was done, and it kept me calm.

I reviewed the books I received through Blogging for Books here, but I wanted to just give a shoutout to my favorite reads of the year and put together a little cover-collage like I do with my annual movie round-up.

The Tsar of Love and Techno is, by far, one of my favorite fiction novels. I’ve been recommending it left and right for Anthony Marra’s devastatingly gorgeous prose and insights into Russia through the ages. I don’t often reread books, but I get the feeling I’ll be revisiting it soon. Even though I finished the book a year ago, now, I still remember lines and characters and storylines really vividly. It’s a book that will stick with me for a long time.

The Street of Eternal Happiness was a better read than I was expecting. Written by an outsider journalist, this book and its narrative style taught me a lot more about China and its different generations of people than I think I would have learned organically. If you enjoyed Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, another book written with several non-fiction narratives that paint a telling portrait of a city and a country (Mumbai, India vs. Shanghai, China), you’ll like this one. I would recommend both of these books to anyone interested in people, anthropology, history, and how narratives emerge from the three.

The Martian had a lot of hype to live up to, since I watched the stellar movie before reading Andy Weir’s original book, but it exceeded the hype. It was so smartly-written, so well-researched, and didn’t fall victim to the little things that Hollywood did to the story to try to, well, Hollywood it. (Looking at the erasure of Asian characters and that absurd Iron Man scene at the end…) I laughed out loud, I anxiously sat at the edge of my seat, I found myself so disappointed when the book came to an end. All the hype about Weir’s intense research for the science of the book couldn’t prepare me for how real it all felt. So worthy of a film adaptation that helped me visualize things that were harder to conceptualize in the novel (like where things on Mars were respective of each other) but both media are both consuming for this story.

Weapons of Math Destruction first came across my radar when author Cathy O’Neil came to DC for a reading and signing. I didn’t go and I regret it now, because she really nailed how shifting to a data-driven world without considering the consequences of doing so sloppily is hurting those who are already disadvantaged. Read this if you care about data, how it’s used, and how it can affect you, but also because the style of writing is simple, straight-forward, informative without being dry, and keeps you wanting more.

Crazy Rich Asians popped up on my radar when it was published by Kevin Kwan over a year ago, and I absolutely devoured it – start to finish – during my train ride from Beijing to Changde. First of all, it’s going to make you want to go to Singapore ASAP to eat. Second of all, it provides a look at the people who are part of the statistic of Singapore being home to the most millionaires in the world. The Western world doesn’t really hear much about the rich Asians that are quietly buying up companies and running the world, but even more interesting than this look at the upper echelons of life was the characters. They are full of depth, their Asian-ness is both a big part of their identities and not a defining characteristic. What would I give to be in the film adaptation of this movie, which I hear will be casting Chinese and Asian actors.

Those are my stand-outs from this year. Some notes I have for books I haven’t reviewed on this blog:

As much as I like the KonMari method and the idea of it, I am such a sentimental hoarder that it causes me a lot of pain to think about throwing away my stuff when all my junk does, in fact, “spark joy”. I may have to reevaluate how much joy and if it’s worth it, but I hated how she suggested just throwing out bags of stuff. There has to be a better way.
Aziz Ansari is underrated for how astute his observations about modern romance are. The characters he portrays on TV and on stage seem very silly, but he seems like a very observant, empathetic guy who really understands people’s motivations and thoughts.
The Book Thief was so hyped up for me and I was on the waitlist for it so many times but I just didn’t feel it. (I did cry when one of the characters died, though.)
I really love the Game of Thrones books, they are much better than I was expecting them to be. I haven’t read fiction at this epic level in a long while, and boy, is it a treat. The books are so long but I am enjoying them a lot.
Unfortunately, I really didn’t like Between the World and Me. Something about Ta-Nehisis Coates’s writing style just isn’t my cup of tea, as I felt similarly reading his write-up in The Atlantic about President Obama.

screen-shot-2017-01-09-at-12-48-31-pm — Are we friends on Goodreads yet?

What books would you recommend I read in 2017? There are a lot of classics I’m thinking about reading, including books everyone read in high school but my class, apparently. (Sorry Harper Lee fans.) I don’t even know how to find new books now. I get really scared when I start a new fiction since one of my biggest busts this year was a work of fiction by an author I am unfamiliar with. It’s been so long that I just read and read and read, and I feel like now I feel the stakes are higher since my reading time is more precious.

Right now, I finally have my hands on Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words so I’ll be starting the year with that, if I like it enough to finish it!

… and I believe that should be the last of my 2016 recaps! I am back from China and will be putting up some recaps and thoughts from that trip shortly.

2016 in Film

Friday, 6 January 2017Friday, 23 December 2016 StarrLeave a comment

As you may know, I love movies. I used to dream of achieving stardom in Hollywood (it’s not too late, you say?) and I started truly enjoying watching movies as art as well as for entertainment when I was in middle school. Here are the new releases I saw in 2016, in the order that I watched them (* denotes an early viewing):

Deadpool
Knight of Cups*
Zootopia
I Saw the Light*
Mother’s Day*
Keanu*
Captain America: Civil War*
Me Before You*
The Lobster
Nerve*
Star Trek Beyond*
Jason Bourne
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Rogue One

2016 in film.jpg

Not a lot, this year… You can see how strong I was going with the early screenings and then it just kind of… fizzled away as I started feeling the toll of all those movie screenings. But on the plus side, I managed to write reviews for nearly every new release I saw this year! (Except for Jason Bourne. Sorry, Matt Damon.)

This list is subject to change as I am putting it together before I leave for China, where I am unable to update this blog. However, in the past, I have had a lot of last-minute additions to the list due to my flight to China carrying new titles!

I know I missed a lot of movies this year that I’ve been meaning to see.

What are the movies I definitely need to find and watch? I still want to see Moana and I have heard so many great things about La La Land.

Past new release round-ups: 2015 | 2014 | 2013

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Tuesday, 20 December 2016Tuesday, 20 December 2016 Starr3 Comments

There were a lot of expectations coming into Rogue One. It is a prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy and it is a standalone film; it is not part of the sequential story and is the first standalone Star Wars movie. It is not Episode VIII; if you’ve been eagerly awaiting the next installment in the story that is ongoing, you’ll have to wait one more year.

Here’s what I knew going into this movie:

The events of Rogue One immediately precede the events of the first Star Wars film: A New Hope.
- It provides the backstory that gives a reasonable explanation for the long-persistent fan question: Why was the Death Star so easy to destroy?
This was the most ethnically diverse main cast of any Star wars film, with specific actors being the main draw for me to go see it, as a more casual and recent Star Wars fan.
The main protagonist is a female lead.

The basic premise of the movie is this: At the end of Episode IV: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star, a hyper-advanced weapon capable of annihilating entire planets, by blowing up the reactor via the thermal exhaust port. It’s a tight shot, but even so, many fans wondered why such a powerful weapon would have such a fatal flaw. Rogue One seeks to answer that question while sort of almost bringing in the backstory for the line, “Many Bothans died to bring us this information.” (Just minus the Bothans… I do not recall seeing many Bothans at all in Rogue One.) There is no opening crawl after “In a galaxy far, far away…” because the events that take place in Rogue One ARE the events that are described in these opening crawls.

rogueone_onesheeta — Love the prominence of Jyn on this poster

The most accurate summary of Rogue One I read in the weeks leading up to the movie’s release was that Rogue One puts the “war” in Star Wars. We don’t really get a feel for the sheer personal cost of war in the original trilogy. (I have heard that the prequels is a lot of politicking, but the war between the Empire and the Rebels has not begun at that point.)

War is ugly.
War is senseless.
War is devastating.

Rogue One isn’t just a space opera; it’s a war movie. Let me warn you now about getting attached to some of the characters: War doesn’t discriminate and people die.

And I appreciate that Rogue One doesn’t really sugarcoat it. Characters die. Even if they’re likeable?! Yes. Even if they’re not bad guys? Yes. Even if they’re on the movie poster? Why should that mean they survive? In fact, I think the only thing I found a little hard to swallow was how one of the villains survived as long as he did in the movie.

I really enjoyed the new cities and planets we were able to explore with Rogue One. Star Wars has been a successful franchise largely because of the fantastic world-building, and I think Rogue One continued to expand the Star Wars universe with places like Jedha, a sandy desert planet that Anakin would have hated with a holy city, and Scarif, a tropical planet that is the scene of a beachfront battle at the climax of the movie.

The new characters were also pretty good. Everyone really loved K-2SO, the former Imperial droid voiced by the inimitable Alan Tudyk. In contrast to droids like R2-D2 and BB-8, who only communicate in beeps and whirs, and C3-PO, who is uptight and not particularly hands-on, K2 has a much more direct flavor of sass and proves himself (itself?) to be a doer.

And yes, of course, I was excited to see Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen in their roles in this movie. Donnie Yen is a huge star (you might know him from Ip Man, if you are into international martial arts film hits) so I’m always happy to see Hollywood embracing Asian talent. Plus, their characters played off each other very nicely.

After seeing the movie and the trailers, I’m left to wonder how hastily they had to do rewrites and reshoots. There are a lot of discrepancies (spoilers in this link) as far as scenes that are in the trailers that not only don’t make it into the movie (iconic trailer lines like “This is a rebellion isn’t it? I rebel“) but don’t make sense with the progression of the story (characters being in settings that they don’t survive to see in the movie). I was a little bit disappointed with the development of the new characters, and I wonder if that is a result of the reshoots or just more poor planning and screenwriting or decision-making as far as what to keep and what to cut. I know that this is a standalone movie and, in the grand scheme of the entire saga, these characters don’t really matter since they don’t appear in any of the core story movies. There were a lot of I did feel that they wasted a lot of talent by doing such a disservice to these characters. Some specific issues I took:

Diego Luna as Andor Cassian was supposed to have some kind of dark, brooding past. I got the impression that I was supposed to know he knows the things he did for the Rebellion don’t really differentiate him from the Empire, but I didn’t get a good sense of that at all. I just saw Diego Luna, a great actor who I haven’t seen in a while, scowling through most of the movie. Obviously, war doesn’t breed many smiles, but he just seemed to be trying to be a character carrying a heavy emotional burden… that he doesn’t know what it is. There is a line that Donnie Yen’s character Chirrut Îmwe says to Andor: (paraphrasing because I don’t have the exact line)

“I’ve been in cages worse than this one. You carry yours in your heart.”

But I just don’t believe it. It felt like the screenplay really didn’t give Diego Luna much depth, other than his brief moment of indecision as to whether he should assassinate someone. And then it was over, and his character’s depth taken away.
Forest Whitaker as Saw Guerrera was also a wasted talent. Although his role in the trailer was fairly prominent, he only has a few brief moments of screentime. Although Mon Mothma talks about how Saw is an extremist who is a source of concern for the Rebel Alliance, we don’t really see any evidence of that other than his rough treatment, fueled by paranoia, towards the defector Imperial pilot. He is just… old… and raspy… and justifiably worried about the Empire sending assassins to take out one of their biggest threats. His relationship with Jyn is also explored within the span of a 1-minute conversation and that’s it? And after all the fighting he supposedly does, he puts up very little fight by his last scene, which came much sooner in the film than I thought. I just had no sense of what his character… was? What he stood for? What motivated him? Who he was in any sense. It was very disappointing.
Mads Mikkelsen as Galen Erso, who is the architect that designs the Death Star and its fatal flaw, is a small role but, again… underutilized. I don’t mind seeing Mads play a non-villain for once, but I felt like the movie wanted us to make assumptions about his character that they didn’t give us the grounds for making. Everyone seems a little unsure about whether or not they could trust Galen Erso, who is a hostage of the Empire but has, in fact, built this terrible weapon. We are told that it’s difficult to know where he really stands, but we are not shown that.
Riz Ahmed as Bodhi Rook, the defector cargo pilot, was so underutilized. Riz has a Golden Globe nomination for his amazing work in The Night Of and I just don’t understand how his character was just this nervous guy. That is the defining characteristic of Bodhi: nervous. As happy as I am about the South Asian representation in this movie, with a South Asian character playing a crucial role in defeating the Empire, we still have a bit of a ways to go. (See: the Asian guy playing a mystical monk.)

IN FACT, that is one of my biggest criticisms of this movie: Rogue One tells you things that it should show you, that it should let you learn on your own. One of my least favorite exchanges in the movie goes:

Jyn: “I’ve never had anyone come back for me before.”
Andor: “Welcome home.”

Ugh. I get it, Jyn is forced into exile when her father is taken hostage and he never makes it back to her, Saw takes her in but one day leaves her behind. She hasn’t had a home or something/someone to fight for since the last time she saw her parents. Okay, sure. I actually do buy that.

But show us, don’t tell us with this cringe-worthy cheese-ball dialogue. You don’t have to spoon-feed your audience. This is something that should be in the liner notes for the character in this scene: Jyn looks around at the Rebel fighters and back at Andor, smiling. No one has ever come back for her before. He smiles back and she knows that she has finally found home. This is not something that has to be spelled out and it takes away from this small but significant emotional moment for Jyn.

Image result for rogue one jyn — I just wanted to show you how much of a BAMF she is, by the way.

This is a common problem in a lot of movies: it’s easier to have characters do story exposition through dialogue and to say things that maybe viewers wouldn’t pick up on otherwise. But I rolled my eyes at that scene, not least of all because it began to hint at a wholly unnecessary romantic subplot between Jyn and Andor. I’ve said it a hundred times and I will continue to say it: Romantic subplots are not necessary to make a story more compelling or emotional and, in fact, they often distract from a very compelling and emotional story. Stop romantic subplots.

I have a lot more to say about Rogue One, but I’ll let you go before the spoilers start, below the jump after the trailer. TL;DR I enjoyed the movie, its more honest portrayal of war, and the great Easter eggs showing how it fits into the existing Star Wars universe and films, but I was disappointed by the underutilization of great actors.

This is the post-reshoots trailer, so these are scenes you will see in Rogue One.

Weapons of Math Destruction (2016)

Tuesday, 6 December 2016Monday, 5 December 2016 Starr2 Comments

If you enjoyed Freakonomics, I think you’ll really enjoy Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. This book is crucial as we become an increasingly data-driven, automated world.

http://images.randomhouse.com/cover/9780553418811?width=450&alt=no_cover_b4b.gif — Weapons of Math Destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy

While it’s very exciting that we have machine learning and big data, O’Neil highlights how important it is to realize that the algorithms that we allow to run our lives in an attempt to avoid human biases are, in fact, developed by biased humans. Or they run in a biased context. And it’s important to think about this, especially in the wake of things like social media algorithms that keep us in echo chambers of people repeating shared opinions back at us and with more and more tasks becoming automated to the point where we don’t know why things happen anymore – we can only point to the computers and say “the algorithm did it”. Although the book came out before the 2016 US presidential election, she touches on the danger of our News Feeds and the fake news that can circulate in these echo chambers, which has become a huge topic of late. She also touches on how Weapons of Math Destruction were involved with the 2008 housing crisis, which was why she left the hedge fund she previously worked at.

O’Neil is not afraid to name names, either. She calls out specific companies that enable and encourage data-based biases, like police predictive software and teacher evaluations. This book really opens your eyes to the kinds of injustices that we are no longer able to say is the fault of people and, instead, just shrug and say, “Well, the numbers don’t lie.”

And it’s true, numbers don’t lie. But the thing with the Weapons of Math Destruction, which are carried out at a huge scale, is they often don’t receive feedback as to whether or not they’re working. Unlike sports statistics, which O’Neil thinks is an ideal use of data because they are constantly calibrated based on whether or not the predictions were correct, these WMDs plow forward with no regard to whether or not the predictions are correct. This is all the more dangerous if they are written with biases in them or designed as self-fulfilling prophecies.

This was one of my favorite reads this year because I am fascinated but apprehensive about the role that big data is taking in our world. While I was busy worrying about what companies can do with my data (still a valid concern!), it’s so important to understand the the lack of transparency with how some of these big data predictions and decisions are made have very serious consequences.

I highly highly recommend you pick up this book and learn about how companies are using data to perpetuate biases and to learn ways that we can start critically thinking of solutions to avoid just that.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest review.