Tag: books
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Rites of Spring
“This is a book about death and destruction. .. a book about ‘becoming.’” As I understand the book: Art is avant-garde. It breaks old things. Makes you wince. Fundamentally believes change is beautiful. It provokes you because it’s provoking the artist making it. Germany, in WWI, waged it to be do all of these things.…
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The Decadent Society
Great book. I finished it maybe over a month ago and didn’t immediately write down my thoughts, so my read on its base case is: Technology progress has to compound, have noticeably hire benefits each wave, and you must keep pushing more and more, or you reach a point where you’re comfortable enough to stop…
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Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?
Give to me to read by my friend, Ken Kelly. Bad to time to be a materialist! The new atheists ended up being a lot like the fundamentalist Evangelicals. Both have lost ground to the Religion of Politics. Page 276 It’s a mistake to assume (as many people seem to do) that if something doesn’t…
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American Pastoral
Last book I read this year and it was very enjoyable. It’s America Dream, both as it is and the story it tells about itself. I think it’s a tale, a commentary maybe, on what we all collectively think America was post-WWII through the 60s contrasted with the internal and external experience of people we’d…
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January 2026, Ambitions
Here’s what I plan to do in January 2026. Starting tomorrow. No measurements on how much. Just do them as a matter of existing. The purpose is the live as focused as I can in contrast to the ever-losing-battle to the attention economy. As realistically hermetic as possible.
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Age based reading list
Super cool reading list broken up by age. Get off Twitter and could read. https://educatedandfree.substack.com/p/a-library-to-build-great-americans?r=b8lae
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On reading
Found this interesting. I don’t check as many books out from the library because they feel impermanent that way.
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We’re Wrong
Read this little world-buster this morning from Philip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral. “You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try and come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot…
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Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest
Saw this recommending on Marginal Revolution and just bought it to read. I’ve recently been reading quite a bit about liberalism, and classical liberalism specifically. This provided quite a bit of awareness for me on the tensions between economic development and freedom. As I think about classical liberalism these days, it’s a sharp edge to…
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Liar’s Poker
by Michael Lewis “You don’t get rich in this business,” said Alexander when I complained privately to him. “You only attain new levels of relative poverty.” Very enjoyable to read throughout. The main thing I’ve come away thinking after reading is just how much activity is going on downstream of the word “finance” that most…