What We Are Reading Today: Breaking and Entering

Updated 19 January 2019
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What We Are Reading Today: Breaking and Entering

Author: Jeremy N. Smith

In Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called Alien, Jeremy N. Smith tells a tale of computer intrigue, but not through the eyes of the black hats whose misdeeds have dominated recent political news.
Instead, Smith wants readers to meet the people behind the help desk — the tech gurus and security consultants standing between us and digital carnage.
This true thriller dives into a dark world that touches us all, as seen through the brilliant, breakneck career of an extraordinary hacker — a woman known only as Alien.
Reviewing the book for New York Times, Matt Apuzzo said: “If there’s one lesson to be learned from Alien’s story, it is this: As Russian hackers challenge democracies and criminal attacks turn our personaldata into commodities, we cannot turn to technology to save us. Security is only as strong as the employee who tapes his passwords to his cubicle, the overworked guard at the front desk and, yes, the person on the other end of the line when you call the help desk.”


What We Are Reading Today: The Correspondence

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Updated 02 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: The Correspondence

  • During this period, Thoreau was well established as a writer and lecturer, and he continued to pursue the interests and activities that had occupied him earlier in the 1850s

Author: Henry David D. Thoreau

This is the third and final volume of the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau’s correspondence in more than half a century. Together, the volumes present every known letter written or received by Thoreau, almost 650 in all, including more than 100 that have never been published before.

“Correspondence 3: 1857–1862” contains 239 letters, 121 written by Thoreau and 118 written to him. Sixty-seven letters are collected here for the first time; of these, 44 have not been published before, including five dated between 1837 and 1855 that are included in an addenda. 

During this period, Thoreau was well established as a writer and lecturer, and he continued to pursue the interests and activities that had occupied him earlier in the 1850s. 

Letters document the publication of “Chesuncook” (1858) and “An Address on the Succession of Forest Trees” (1860), as well as his preparations, a few months before his death, for the posthumous publication of “The Maine Woods “ and the essays “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” “Wild Apples,” and “Life without Principle.”