We Are Not Saved

Should I translate someone's glee at the murder of Charlie Kirk into an actual willingness to commit it?

Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) By: Chinua Achebe Published: 1958 209 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The main character is Okonkwo, and saying that he's complicated is to put it mildly. He's desperately afraid of failure, which in his case means following in the footsteps of his father. On top of the complexity of Okonkwo there's the additional complexity and richness of the I...

Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina By: Chris Frantz Published: 2022 208 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The life and musical career of Chris Frantz and his wife Tina Weymouth. With particular attention paid to his antagonistic relationship with David Byrne, the front man for Talking Heads, a band they were both members of.   What's the author's angle? Frantz seems to be goin...

Regretting Motherhood: A Study By: Orna Donath Published: 2017 272 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Donath interviewed 23 Israeli women who regretted motherhood. In most, but not all, cases these mothers asserted that they still loved their children, they just didn't like the responsibilities and restrictions that came with being a mother. In some cases they only realized this after having...

Perhaps it's not how fast technology moves, but where it's impact is felt? Also S-curves...

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command By: Andrew Gordon Published: 1996 708 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An incredibly detailed examination of the battle of Jutland, combined with an equally detailed history of naval command, and its failings in the lead up to the battle.   What's the author's angle? Gordon's target is excessive signalling. And he's written a very lon...

Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy By: Mark Regnerus Published: 2017 280 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A data-driven look at the modern dating and "hook-up" culture. As you can tell from the title, he argues that sex has become cheap, not so much in dollars and cents, but in the level of commitment it requires. He points to three reasons for this change: the pil...

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 3]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1918-1956) By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Published: 1973 608 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The final piece of Solzhenitsyn's amazing, depressing, baffling, chilling, frightening, absurd, terrible, cold, weighty chronicle of the Soviet gulags. This part includes the period after his release which, by itself, could be...

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection By: John Green Published: 2025 208 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The ubiquity of tuberculosis (wait, did I just restate the title?) especially outside of the US. And its prevalence despite the fact that a cure is available. What's the author's angle? Green was already interested in global health when he me...

Biden was just the tip of the iceberg...

Everything you know about WWI is wrong! Okay... maybe not everything, but some things definitely. Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities By: Gary Sheffield Published: 2001 318 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An apologetic work directed at British leadership during WWI. It refutes the claim that the British Army was composed of "lions led by donkeys", and instead lays o...

Forbes magazine, the bastion of conservative American business journalism, called it "a filth-spattered lens of depravity and dysfunction". Crisis Zone By: Simon Hanselmann Published: 2021 296 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A very non-traditional household navigates the pandemic using violence and porn production.  Who should read this book? I would not recommend this book to anyone. It i...

Noticing: An Essential Reader (1973-2023) By: Steve Sailer Published: 2024 458 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A collection of essays from Steve Sailer covering immigration, culture war stuff, and human biodiversity. What's the author's angle? For some, Sailer is a horrible right-wing racist. For others he's a data-driven contrarian. I mostly fall in the latter camp. Also whatever you thin...

Collapse of Complex Societies By: Joseph A. Tainter Published: 1988 262 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A new (at the time) theory for the collapse of societies based on declining marginal returns to complexity. What's the author's angle? This is a book definitely written in opposition to previous theories (think Spengler , Toynbee , etc.) many of which Tainter rejects as overly moralistic...

By: Patrick McGee Published: 2025 448 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? How Apple went all in on China, not merely moving manufacturing there, but also educating their companies in, and co-developing with them, numerous advanced manufacturing techniques. These techniques then spread all throughout China. As such, Apple, far more than any other company, enabled China's rise to be the world's...

In which I start by using my massive intellect to predicte a timeline for the end of the world and end with admitting that I couldn't remember whether I'd read a specific book or not.

In which I engage in an extended, and somewhat clunky Star Wars metaphor. And eventually conclude that clunkiness is sort of the point.

Hamlet  by: William Shakespeare Gods and Generals (The Civil War Trilogy, #1)  by: Jeff Shaara We Solve Murders  by: Richard Osman Stop All the Clocks: A Novel  by: Noah Kumin Pyrebound  by Brayton Cole Grunge (Monster Hunter Memoirs, #1) by: John Ringo and Larry Correia Sinners (Monster Hunter Memoirs, #2) by: John Ringo and Larry Correia Saints (Monster Hunter Memoirs, #3) by: John Ringo and Lar...

A review of Douglas Murray's "On Democracies and Death Cults" with broad discursions into Sam Kriss' article "Douglas Murray, gruesome toady" and the entire Israel-Hamas-Gaza Mess.

Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth  by: Catherine Pakaluk The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities  by: Mancur Olson This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness  by: T. R. Fehrenbach Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House  by: Jonathan Allen Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous...

People are worried about a lot of things at the moment, but one thing near the top of everyone's list is a war between the US and China over the fate of Taiwan. What most people have forgotten is that the US already fought a war with China. It's easy to overlook this previous conflict because we called it the Korean War (and initially it wasn't even called a war). This is understandable given that...

A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural  by: Peter L. Berger The Four Cardinal Virtues  by: Josef Pieper Analects  by: Confucius Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious  by: Ross Douthat

Someone needs to point out the potential problems with superforecasting. For some reason it as fallen to me.

The movement is called anti-aging, not anti-injury. How do people who believe they have a real shot at immortality interact with the phenomena of safetyism?

The Moral Sense by: James Q. Wilson The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1918-1956) by: Alekandr Solzhenitsyn Stalin's War: A New History of World War II by: Sean McMeekin Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's by: Charles Piller How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by: Peter S. Goodman Careless...