The Reading Room
The Office maintains a modest reference collection. The following works are recommended to new staff. Staff are reminded that several of the authors were wrong, and that the Office has not determined which.
Spiritualism and Its Debunkers
- William H. Mumler (1832–1884). Boston engraver who produced “spirit photographs,” double-exposed portraits with the dead hovering behind the sitter. Tried for fraud in 1869 and acquitted.
- Harry Houdini & Arthur Conan Doyle. One spent his later years exposing fraudulent mediums; the other believed in them completely. They were close friends until spiritualism ended it.
- Lily Dale. Spiritualist community in western New York, founded 1879 and still operating.
- Shannon Taggart, Séance (2019). Two decades of documentation of spiritualist practice, photographed without debunking or endorsing.
- Carbon monoxide. The material explanation for a great many haunted houses. Division III keeps a detector on every desk.
Machines, Minds, and Their Critics
- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). The author of ELIZA, on the danger of mistaking fluency for understanding. His secretary reportedly asked him to leave the room so she could speak to it privately.
- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). Argues that matter has a kind of agency. The Office’s primary framework, on most days.
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). Aura, the copy, and what is lost in reproduction.
- Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev, Newstweek (2011). A wall-plug device that edits the news other people read. Infrastructure turned against itself.
Concepts
- Apophenia. The perception of pattern and meaning where none exists. The mechanism by which intelligence is read into autocomplete.
- The dérivé. A drift through terrain, pulled by what is actually there. Field Investigation’s preferred method.
- The honest ghost. A phenomenon that works on you even after the method is shown.
Affiliated Rings
The Office is a member of one ring. Visitors who find themselves between sites of scientific interest may use it to move on.
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