Dear Readers, this is just a quick note to let you know that if you looked me up on Google you very likely came across a compelling photo of a stunning women with a penetrating, somewhat sad gaze. As the text below it says “Annette Hamilton” you may have been misled into thinking either that I was committing a very heinous sin of disguise, presenting my persona in an entirely misleading way, or that somehow I had undertaken a full head and neck transplant which as far as I know even Drs Dubrow and Nassif could not manage (if you are a fan of Botched you will know who I am talking about).

No, this is a photo of writer Anna Wiener (37) author of Uncanny Valley, a book I strongly recommended in a post in March 2020 (see Posts).

I still recommend her book as a wonderful example of auto-ethnography, but with everything that has happened in the US over the past 4-5 years it can’t help being a bit past-the-moment. She now writes for the New Yorker as a tech correspondent – her latest pieces are “On video game engines” for The New York) and “On office memoirs” for The New Yorker. The photo above comes from her website.

There are plenty of photos of Annette Hamilton on this site and I think you’ll agree there is no mistaking the two.

As a possibly irrelevant aside, you may come across reference to an Annette Weiner (note different spelling). Annette and I did in fact share a number of elements of personal experience which would make this mistaken identity far more cogent.

Annette Weiner was an outstanding and well-known anthropologist; born 1933 in Philadelphia, she died in 1997 in Greenwich Village, of cancer, at the age of 64. She had an extraordinary career, as Kriser Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, chair of the department and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She wrote a dissertation on the contribution of women to the economy of Trobriand society.

Annette Weiner was a very generous, kind and fun-loving soul who allowed me to stay in her New York apartment on several occasions. We also met up in Paris, but things did not go well between us there and our friendship collapsed under the weight mainly of my bad behaviour. But, as they say, that’s another story! Perhaps to be told in an upcoming auto-fictional memoir, Paris Vertigo, although that’s not on the immediate writing horizon. I have always regretted what happened between us, although it was probably inevitable. How much of “the truth” I can tell in that book remains to be seen. But please do not mistake me for Annette Weiner either!