Felicia Day at KUSP studios. Photo: Rick Kleffel

While Felicia Day is busily entertaining readers with hilarious stories about her youth in a prose that’s engagingly honest and raw, another storyline emerges. The home-schooled youth, the early-adopting gamer girl, the girl genius in college at the age of 16, the violin prodigy, all of these stories create a framework for what’s underneath You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) – a crisp vision of how computer technology can transform our lives.

Day’s autobiography is just as fun to read as you’d expect. If you’re a fan of her online persona, her many appearances in a variety of television series, her online series The Guild or her new entertainment juggernaut Geek & Sundry, you’ll find a lot to love here. If you’ve never experienced any of the above, the book will make you want to do so. The book is written with a clarity and unconscious style that will appeal to anyone who enjoys reading pretty much any sort of book.

Day is an accomplished storyteller and prose stylist. She writes with just enough net-friendliness to mine the oddity of the online world while she manages to come off as the enthusiastic girl-next-door. Day really loves her world, and knows how to reveal; both inner and outer realities to the reader by bringing the world to the reader. We both want to and are able to get every supposedly geeky thing she does. We want to cheer her on to the success we already know she has achieved.

But just under all the fun is a revealing portrait of how technology is changing the human community by changing the manner via which humans communicate. From the get-go, Internet provides the unknowingly-isolated Day with a means to be with others like herself. (She’s unknowingly isolated because she’s being raised well and home-schooled by a loving if quirky family.) She makes friends and hangs out in the place where, as she says, “nobody knows your name” – but the anonymity of the Internet is neither a plus nor a minus, it just is. The virtual identities she beuilds for the Internet help her sculpt her own sense of self.

‘You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)’ is very funny and, as the best humor is, very smart. Felicia Day seem to revel in her own shortcomings, which don’t seem to shortcomingly, as it were, when put in the perspective of her story. And her story offers a fine vision of how technology is hanging our visions of ourselves. Read ‘You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)’ for fun, and to find out about Felicia Day, and after you’re done, you’ll notice you have a rather different perspective on your own life, on and offline.

A 2015 Interview with Felicia Day: “I think you have to be attention curators for audience in every way.”

Felicia Day showed up early for our conversation at KUSP; fortunately I was even earlier. She’s an accomplished speaker, of course, who has probably been interviewed more times than I’ve interviewed authors, but she was fresh and funny and spontaneous as we sat down to talk about her book, ‘You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)’.

For me, our conversation (and the book itself, to a degree) was a very weird experience in dualism. I’m immersed in her account of the birth of the Internet but internally her timeline with my own experience. At one point in our interview, she mentioned Usenet, the collections of newsgroups (you might call them “bbs’s” or some other term) where I stepped aboard in the mid 1980′s. it was an instant trip down memory lane, to a time when one wag who called himself KIBO suggested that soon everyone in the world would have his own newsgroup.

It’s hard not to get swept up by Day’s positive enthusiasm for online work and life. For all that she speaks authoritatively of stalkers and GamerGate, her overall take is that the Internet is a transformative technology that offers us a truly new opportunity to create our own identity. Weird is an important perspective here; the idea being that the technology enables us to bring to the forefront aspects of our personality that might otherwise not come to fruition in the light of an in-person, human community. We now have a variety of types of human communities and means of communication at our disposal. We have choices never before available, and in Felicia Day, a exemplar of how to choose wisely.

Plus, William MacAskill — no relation — discusses his book Doing Good Better and his work in Effective Altruism, which uses statistics to measure just what helps the most people achieve the best outcomes.

On the interview with Claire McCaskill, by Rick Kleffel:

Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism

Claire McCaskill wastes no time getting to the point in ‘Plenty Ladylike.’ In the opening passage, we meet a young woman seeking office for the first time, knocking on 11,432 doors. One potential constituent, a man (it matters), looks her up and down and then says, “You’re too young. Your hair is too long. You’re a girl. No way are you tough enough for politics. Those politicians in Jeff City’d eat you alive. Go find yourself a husband.”

Suffice it to say she didn’t follow his advice and instead turned it into energy and determination to help her maintain her drive. ‘Plenty Ladylike’ is a top-notch memoir that moves like lightning and keeps it’s focus. Having set scene, McCaskill introduces us to her very deeply American family, men and women who all found the time to involve themselves in civic matters. From high school on, McCaskill learned that getting to know voters and their needs and desires was the best way to earn their votes.

But ‘Plenty Ladylike’ has a rather dark side as well. In her journeys through politics, most in the South (I think this matters), McCaskill encountered a steady stream of overt sexism. She was given very un-ladylike appellations by men who should have known better. While we are currently being slapped in the face by the visions of our incipient racism, we’re clearly not past sexism either, not by a long shot. McCaskill’s experiences are disturbingly eye-opening. Apparently we are not better than this.

All of this makes for a toe-tapping, tense read. even as she campaigned for the Senate as recently as 2012, McCaskill found herself in a battle where she her deep, smart knowledge of the political process to outwit her ultra-sexist opponents. We all know what he said. Finding out what she thought is a joyful revelation. Claire McCaskill reveals herself to be ‘Plenty Ladylike,’ and redefines the term at the same time. In her world, in our world, “ladylike” means smart, determined, unwavering, pragmatic and honorable. These are exactly the qualities I want to see in any politician, regardless of sex or party. There are plenty of scenes in this book that will make your hair stand on end. How you handle the styling afterward is up to you.

Author and literary scholar, Alan Cheuse. Photo: Photo: Peter Hedlund-flickr-http://bit.ly/1Keg0Cx

Author and critic Alan Cheuse died last week at age 75. He regularly participated in interviews with KUSP Rick Kleffel. On this week’s Agony Column Literary Magazine show, listen back to a selection Cheuse’s insightful interviews.

Winslow explores the intersection of economics, politics, crime and law enforcement the drive a conflict that has little visibility and offers few prospects for resolution

Robert Kurson discusses his books Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters with host Rick Kleffel.

This week on The Agony Column, it’s all apocalypse, all the time.

Author Robert Repino brings on Mort(e), in which your housecat becomes your executioner; Emily Schultz brings on The Blondes and Ernest Cline explains our fascination with video games and science fiction with his book Armada.

It’s clear that the American justice system has a problem. Rick Kleffel speaks with legal scholar Adam Benforado, who uses neuroscience, psychology and data analysis to examine how justice works. He says it’s our understanding of ‘Ourelves’ that’s the problem. His new book is Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.

Also on the program is an interview with Annie Jacobson, author of the book, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency.

And on the same program, Adam Benforado uses neuroscience to analyze the biggest flaw in our justice system — humans!

He followed an electronic trail that led him from the most powerful man in American music, to a temporary factory worker and a German genius.

The untold story of the remaking of modern music…