Eclectic Wine and Cheese Book Club

We invite you to an engaging evening of wine, cheese and lively conversation around Cory Doctorow's Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, a book which explains the process of the “enshittification” of digital platforms over time and what to do about it.

From Goodreads:

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off great—before they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of "enshittification," turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.

As always, please feel free to join even if you have not finished the book - no stress :-)

All attendees are asked to please bring one of the following:

1. A bottle of wine
2. Cheese and Crackers
3. An alternate beverage or nosh of your choice

Host will provide glasses, wine opener, plates & napkins.

To enhance the opportunity for great conversation, we would like to keep the group small. Please feel free to sign-up to meet us along with up to 2 friends.

We invite you to an engaging evening of wine, cheese and lively conversation around NYT Bestseller Relic, a horror novel and techno-thriller by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child about a series of brutal murders at the New York Museum of Natural History just before a major exhibition opens. The killings are blamed on a prehistoric, beast-like creature from the Amazon that has a connection to the museum's new exhibition. Museum researcher Margo Green must team up with FBI agent Pendergast to find out what the creature is and how to stop it before the killer strikes again.

From Goodreads:

Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human...

But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.

Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who—or what—is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?

As always, please feel free to join even if you have not finished the book - no stress :-)

All attendees are asked to please bring one of the following:

1. A bottle of wine
2. Cheese and Crackers
3. An alternate beverage or nosh of your choice

Host will provide glasses, wine opener, plates & napkins.

To enhance the opportunity for great conversation, we would like to keep the group small. Please feel free to sign-up to meet us along with up to 2 friends.

We invite you to an engaging evening of wine, cheese and lively conversation around NYT Editor's Choice All The Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians, a bridge-burning, riotous memoir by Phil Elwood, a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the $129-billion industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media—from a man who used to pull the strings, and who is now pulling back the curtain.

From Goodreads:

After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that’s made him so successful. The first step is revealing exactly what he’s been up to for the past twenty years—and it isn’t pretty.

Elwood has worked for a murderer’s row of questionable clients, including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar. In All the Worst Humans, Elwood unveils how the PR business works, and how the truth gets made, spun, and sold to the public—not shying away from the gritty details of his unlikely career.

This is a piercing look into the corridors of money, power, politics, and control, all told in Elwood’s disarmingly funny and entertaining voice. He recounts a four-day Las Vegas bacchanal with a dictator’s son, plotting communications strategies against a terrorist organization in Western Africa, and helping to land a Middle Eastern dictator’s wife a glowing profile in Vogue on the same time the Arab Spring broke out. And he reveals all his slippery tricks for seducing journalists in order to create chaos and ultimately cover for politicians, dictators, and spies—the industry-secret tactics that led to his rise as a political PR pro.

Along the way, Phil walks the halls of the Capitol, rides in armored cars through Abuja, and watches his client lose his annual income at the roulette table. But as he moved up the ranks, he felt worse and worse about the sleaziness of it all—until Elwood receives a shocking wake-up call from the FBI. This risky game nearly cost Elwood his life and his freedom. Seeing the light, Elwood decides to change his ways, and his clients, and to tell the full truth about who is the worst human.

As always, please feel free to join even if you have not finished the book - no stress :-)

All attendees are asked to please bring one of the following:

1. A bottle of wine
2. Cheese and Crackers
3. An alternate beverage or nosh of your choice

Host will provide glasses, wine opener, plates & napkins.

To enhance the opportunity for great conversation, we would like to keep the group small. Please feel free to sign-up to meet us along with up to 2 friends.