We Are Not Saved

And here's all the book reviews I posted in October in one place: The Traveler By: Joseph Eckert Astounding By: Alec Nevala-Lee Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything By: James Gleick Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen By: Donald Miller X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga By: Chris Claremont and John Byrne The Descent: Witnessing Russia's Spiral into Madness U...

I. While listening to a recent podcast discussing the events of 10/7 I heard something that really stuck with me. The guest on the podcast explained how Israel had spent the vast majority of their planning and espionage resources on Hezbollah and Iran. This is why, when the time came, they had the brilliant pager and walkie-talkie attack already prepped. Additionally, they had a clear plan for inv...

I. I attended the Faith Matters conference a few weekends ago. For those unfamiliar with the organization (most of you, I suspect) Faith Matters is an independent, privately run LDS nonprofit that defines itself as a " space in which an expansive, radiant approach to the restored gospel can be considered. " I attended a handful of sessions, and in several of them this "radiance" was on full displa...

I. When I pivoted a month ago I stopped posting book reviews to this space, and started posting them to Notes. My idea was that I would then do one long book review every month and also link to all the reviews I had done through Notes , so that anyone who was really interested in my take on the great historical novel, Ivanhoe , or alternatively the queer, postmodern New Testament essay collection,...

While everyone else is talking about AI, I'm going to engage in an exegesis of a single verse in the Old Testament, and yet somehow AI will still sneak in!

Is there some deeper meaning to the traffic cone on Sherlock's head? Or is it just silly vandalism? Most people seemed to think it was the latter, but I think it was a hidden symbol of some mystery. How could it not be? I. June 25 was the tenth anniversary of my blog. I understand that, traditionally, an anniversary post would come out on the actual day, or at least the same week, but I blew past...

This was my entry to the 2026 ACX Book Review Contest. Given that it was, sadly, judged inadequate to the high standards of the ACX readership, I must now inflict it on you. Hopefully, with your obviously lower standards, you'll enjoy it. It is ridiculously long. These warnings aside, I would urge you to at least read parts one and two. The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Scien...

I. If you don't live in Utah, you may not have heard that the Great Salt Lake is in trouble. It's been rapidly dwindling in size and depth, and while it's never going to disappear entirely (though look at the Aral Sea ), there are always issues when an environment goes through a rapid transformation. The big worry is that the lake will become so salty that even brine shrimp and brine flies can no...

The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity By: Carl R. Trueman Published: 2026 256 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? In the standard story of the transition from the premodern to the modern, the world has gradually been disenchanted. Depending on who you are, this is either a good thing, a sad thing, or a mixed thing. Trueman's contention is that disenchantment ha...

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by: Eric H. Cline 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed by: Eric H. Cline and Glyinnis Fawkes The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing by: Brink Lindsey The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History by: Odd Arne Westad

Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death By: Kathleen Stock Published: 2026 304 pages Briefly, what is this book about? The general topic is right there in the subtitle, but Stock separates out two distinct ideological foundations. There are those who consider assisted death (a term she prefers over "assisted dying") to be a way of eliminating suffering. And then there are those who view...

Annihilation: A Novel By: Michel Houellebecq Translated by: Shaun Whiteside Published: 2022 (English translation 2024) 544 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Houellebecq is a well-known French author, and this book felt very French to me. What does that mean? Good question… Certainly there is a lot of wine drinking, a fair number of R-rated sex scenes, and French politics plays a major part a...

Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History By: Helen Zoe Veit Published: 2026 304 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Stop me if you've heard this one… Up until the beginning of the 20th century we never ever did this one thing, and then starting in the 20th century attitudes and culture gradually changed until now, this very new thing, that basically never existed hist...

Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today's Supreme Court By: Sarah Isgur Published: 2026 416 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A deep dive into the Roberts Court, with a historical framing of the Court as a whole. Two main themes run through the book.  First, while people want to evaluate the Court on the single axis of liberal vs. conservative,...

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)  by: Jerome K. Jerome Something to Do with Paying Attention  by: David Foster Wallace The Leopard  by: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Rendezvous With Rama by: Arthur C. Clarke

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity By: Paul Kingsnorth Published: 2025 368 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Before Kingsnorth can tell you how to be against the Machine, he first sets out to define it. The Machine is multi-faceted, but Kingsnorth distills it down into four S's: Science, The Self, Sex, and the Screen. To take a position "against the Machine" he urges a return t...

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy By: Nathan Thrall Published: 2023 272 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The book operates on three levels: First, the book spends quite a bit of time giving you Abed's history: his youth, his participation in the Palestinian resistance, his marriages, the associated family dynamics, etc. Second, there's the actual "day" from th...

Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History By: Kyle Harper Published: 2021 704 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A comprehensive historical overview of the never-ending war between humanity and disease. From its earliest days all the way down to the COVID-19 pandemic. With a specific focus on what he calls the "paradox of progress": every new advance creates new opportun...

Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis By: Annie Jacobsen Published: 2017 544 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An exhaustive history of the government's attempts to systematize and weaponize paranormal abilities. It also covers the broader paranormal research landscape, with lots of discussion of Uri Geller.   Wha...

Black Easter by: James Blish The Day After Judgment by: James Blish Into the Storm by: Larry Correia A Prisoner's Cinema by: Justin Lee

Delano is very much an example of something being wrong with psychiatry, the question is how emblematic is her experience? Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance By: Laura Delano Published: 2025 352 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An autobiographical tale of Delano's experience with the mental health industry starting at the age of thirteen. Among other things, it covers her...

The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by: Ryan Holiday The Enchiridion & Discourses by: Epictetus The Lives of the Caesars by: Suetonius

There's a concept within statecraft known as grand strategy. The "grand" strategy means paying attention to every avenue of conflict, not just the military sphere, but also the diplomatic, the logistical, and the domestic, and everywhere else advantage might be gained or lost. It encompasses soft power, irregular actions, public opinion, etc. But at the same time, it also encompasses prioritizatio...

Or how America went from the platonic ideal of goal-scoring to the messy theatricality of flopping. And whether we can stop it before someone get's stoned in the forum.

Eugenics and Other Evils By: G. K. Chesterton Published: 1922 188 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Once this book entered the public domain, someone (most likely Inkling Books) added a subtitle to their edition: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State". This is a pretty good description of the book's thrust, though the book's major focus is still definitely eugenics. When th...