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Miek Zwamborn presents a book of many parts that is very poorly named as it has almost nothing to do with seaweed. In nine chapters, a history of seaweed in art and science is described, drawing from many artists, thinkers and writers. These sections are presented as if they share themes (with msmatched names as poorly chosen as the book title), but often the sections are so scattered with good information poorly connected that the threads get lost. This can be forgiven only because the content is fascinating and because the reproductions of artworks are beautifully printed.

At the end of the book, recipes using seaweed are printed and then follows a section with Zwamborn's fantastic illustrations next to descriptions of many different types of seaweed. This final section alone makes the book worthwhile, but the other parts add value. It would be a perfect book if the early sections were not so disorganised.

Extinction Internet is a nice artistic object, a good pocket-sized bite of theory and meme-aesthetic that satisfies a need to keep up to date with one of the thought-leaders on network theory. The text is the inaugural lecture delivered by author Lovink for his new position as head of Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam.

Overall, this is like other pieces of Lovink's writing but more concise and delivered as a call to action. It is nice to read to keep on the pulse of contemporary theory, and it finishes dramatically, but I would only recommend this to people who are already interested in network theory. Strangely for a lecture from 2022, if it had been delivered only a few months later I think the references to AI would have been much more pronounced as they line up with many of Lovink's predictions. Perhaps that is for the next lecture.

This is a book about love, which begins by promising a different perspective than the common romantic-love angle in similar books. I hoped I would love it, but perhaps it was just the wrong introduction for me to bell hooks' writing. There are moments of brilliance, such as the excellent sixth chapter: Values, which discusses richly and poetically in how social systems influence thoughts on love.

However, most of the writing failed to land. It felt like an attempt to marry academic writing with memoir, with too little rigour for the former and too little reflection for the latter. Narrow personal reflections are given as evidence for problems with love painted with broad brushstrokes, and throughout the book the perspective is very US-centric, never considering love from any non-US or non-western perspective. Repetition also mars most chapters. In the end, the book is a bit too loose and while hooks' perspective is joyful, loving and admirable, it doesn't translate here into writing that works.