Politics

I’ve recently been reminded of Tom Nichols’ 2017 book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, which I very much wanted to like and be able to recommend. I bought it when it was published, read it, and gave it three stars at Goodreads with this very brief review: “Marred by the author stepping out of his area of expertise and making causal and explanatory claims without proper data or argument on journalism, education, and philosophy of science.” ...

   Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2025. Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of HumanityRutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019)Samuel D. Brunson, Between the Temple and the Tax Collector: The Intersection of Mormonism and the StateKate Conger and Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024)Mark Jonathan Davis, Grateful: 25 Years of Music, Movies, and Medical Emergencies with Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine, Part One: Stranger in a Strange LoungeRenée DiResta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality (2024)Cory Doctorow, Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench NovelErle Stanley Gardner (Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, eds), The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner (1981)Brooke Harrington, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (2024)Gabriel Kennedy, Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson (2024)Thomas Levenson, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious DiseaseMary Roach, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human AnatomyOliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind (1996)Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye (2010)Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988, 2009 edition)Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far RightDana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (2023)Katherine Stewart, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American DemocracySpencer Sunshine, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (2024)Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed AmericaMark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom (2013)Tim Weiner, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st CenturyLawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost IdealismTop for 2025 published in 2025: Tanenhaus, Levenson, Roach, Weiner, Davis, Wynn-Williams, Becker, Doctorow; other top reads for the year: Sheehan, M. Weiner, Sacks A few planned or already (or still) in-progress reads for 2026: Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1975)G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (2020)Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History (2017)Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014)(Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)  ...

 Another case of conservative animal abuse, via libraryjayne on Threads, Illinois state representative Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro): The earliest episode dates back to 1986, when a neighborhood beagle named Rusty bit Bost's 4-year-old daughter. The report filed by animal control officials indicates that the girl provoked the attack by chasing the dog. She ultimately had to get 19 stitches on her face. ...

 If your reasons for voting for Donald Trump for president included that you wanted to cause unnecessary death and suffering and reduce to the standing and trustworthiness of the United States with the rest of the world then congratulations, you've been given what you wanted. If not, maybe you should engage in some reflection on what you've helped to bring about. On Bluesky, doctor Atul Gawande, author of the excellent book Being Mortal (which I read in 2019) and The Checklist Manifesto (which was well-reviewed but I have not read), who was USAID Assistant Administrator for Public Health from 2022 to 2025, wrote the following posts: ...

  Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2024. James Bamford, Spy Fail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence (2023)Benjamin Breen, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic ScienceJennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)Bryan Burrough, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra (1992)Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990, 2010 foreword)Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King (2012)Daniel C. Dennett, I've Been Thinking (2023)Cory Doctorow, The Bezzle (fiction)Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2002)Jon Friedman & John Meehan, House of Cards: Inside the Troubled Empire of American Express (1992)Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022)John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990sMasha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)Martin Kihn, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time (2005)Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2020)Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (2017)Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over AmericaMilton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (1955)Michael Warren Lucas, git commit murder (2017, fiction)Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the DifferenceCraig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (2006)Ryan J. Reilly, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System (2023)Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Volume 2 (2016)Zoë Schiffer, Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's TwitterMatt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of LibertarianismTop for 2024 published in 2024: Doctorow, Breen, Ganz; other top reads for the year: Gage, Dennett, Kinzer (2020), Cohen, Gessen, Rodda A few non-books of relevance for 2025: What the Southern Baptists used to believe, but no longer do: https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-moral-character-of-public-officials/Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism," New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995Dorothy Thompson, "Who Goes Nazi," Harper's Magazine, August 1941 (but contrast with Mayer 1955 and Gessen 2017 above) A few planned or already (or still) in-progress reads for 2024: G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (2020)Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History (2017)Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014)Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom (2013)(Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.) 

 Per Stephanie Kirchgaessner in The Guardian, 14 October 2024: Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time. ...

Alabama and the GOP are discovering what this blog pointed out 15 years ago--if you're going to adopt a policy that embryos are full bearers of moral personhood, then you can't allow in-vitro fertilization (IVF). From my five-part debate with Vocab Malone about abortion in 2009: Once the zygote becomes a blastocyst, it forms into an outer layer of cells, which later becomes the placenta, and an inner cell mass of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, each of which is capable of differentiating into any kind of human cell. Only after this stage does the blastocyst implant in the wall of the uterus, about a week after fertilization, and begin taking nutrients directly from the blood of the mother--a dependency that can itself be of moral significance, as Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist argument shows. As already mentioned above, a great many fertilized ova do not reach this stage. Further, the percentages of implant failure are higher for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure which Vocab's criteria would have to declare unethical, even though it is the only way that many couples can have their own biological offspring. ...

In the March 21st, 2021 Washington Post story “The rioter next door: How the Dallas suburbs spawned domestic extremists," Annie Gowen writes of a Texas pastor who claimed prophecy that Trump would remain in office: Shortly before Biden’s inauguration, Pastor Brandon Burden of the KingdomLife church — a boxy, largely windowless sanctuary in Frisco — mounted the pulpit and gave a stemwinder of a sermon that went viral. ...

 In the 1980s, Trump was concerned about nuclear proliferation and thought that he could do a better job negotiating a nuclear deal with the Soviets. In a 1984 Washington Post interview (which I believe you can see excerpts from in the film "Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn" about his mentor, Roy Cohn), he said: "Some people have an ability to negotiate," he says. "It's an art you're basically born with. You either have it or you don't." ...

Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2020.Nicholson Baker, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information ActJohn Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House MemoirBen Buchanan, The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of MadnessMichael Cohen, Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. TrumpMyke Cole, Legion versus Phalanx: The Epic Struggle for Infantry Supremacy in the Ancient World Libby Copeland, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance StateFiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2012)James W. Johnson, Arizona Politicians: The Noble and the Notorious (2002) Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and WinTalia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (2018) Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (2017)H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace, with Henry R. Schlesinger, Spy Sites of New York City: A Guide to the Region's Secret History (2020)Jefferson Morley, Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK InvestigationBastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich & Powerful Hide Their Money Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare Brad Smith and Carol Anne Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital AgeMary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton with Henry R. Schesinger, Spy Sites of Washington, DC: A Guide to the Capital Region's Secret History (2017) Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A MemoirIsabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Top for 2020: Copeland, Macintyre, Cahalan, Smith and Browne, Buchanan, Obermayer and Obermaier, Gellman, Rid. I started the following books I expect to finish in 2021 (yes, I also said that about LeFeber and Wilson last year--I'm well in to LaFeber's book and thought I might finish before the end of the year, but had only read Wilson's intro so it's barely started): William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2nd edition) Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History I've also pre-ordered and am looking forward to reading: Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapon Arms Race (due to be published on February 9) (Previously: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)