271–280 of 651 posts
During the pandemic, I got heavily into the "Revolutions" podcast, and I wondered about these "liberal nobles" who were always cropping up trying to push for civil rights. So I wanted to read something about the history of liberalism. The typical story is "John Locke, Adam Smith, America's founding fathers (rah rah), John Stuart Mill, etc." But Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism" makes a really stron…
A tie between two well known books: "The making of the atomic bomb" and "Manufacturing consent". Both great in very different ways.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-People-Things-Clearly-e...
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-...
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. Extremely well written history of Sackler family detailing their involvement in the opioid epidemic and inner workings of FDA. Bad blood by John Carreyrou.
I haven't read that Keefe book but I really enjoyed The Snakehead.
The Odyssey, translation by EV Rieu. Made an effort to read a bunch of the Classics at the start of the year and the Illiad and Odyssey were very enjoyable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly recommend Left Hand of Darkness if you haven’t read it yet
I was very excited to read LHoD after hearing so many glowing reviews, but it didn't resonate with me at all. I kind of regret spending the time to read it. Curious what you took away from it?
I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari this year. It was long and fascinating, incredibly well researched, and easy enough for "light reading" that I had time for between writing research papers. A couple things that stuck with me were stories of giant land mammals that used to exist, many more than I realized, alongside humans. Wherever humans colonized, the large mammals were killed off soon after. This happened in Austral…
This particular story with large mammals is a good example. The assumed causality does not hold closer scrutiny. Climate was also changing into something that works better for humans, and into worse for large mammals. There were many things at play. Humans may had or may not have had a role. However, it is very unlikely that humans had a defining role.
Good read nevertheless! Changed my mind how I view humans as mammals, and made me dig deeper into the topic.
During the pandemic, I got heavily into the "Revolutions" podcast, and I wondered about these "liberal nobles" who were always cropping up trying to push for civil rights. So I wanted to read something about the history of liberalism. The typical story is "John Locke, Adam Smith, America's founding fathers (rah rah), John Stuart Mill, etc." But Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism" makes a really stron…
So where does that leave Locke, Smith, et al?
Personally, I think she takes the argument a bit too far. She credits Constant and de Staël for formalizing liberalism in the aftermath of the Revolution, essentially trying to save the good parts from the wreckage. But, like, Thomas Jefferson helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which laid out the key principles Constant was trying to salvage, and he was most certainly influenced by Locke.
Still, I think this book is well worth reading as a corrective to the Anglo-centric, individual rights-based history of liberalism I've been exposed to in the past. There's a lot more to the story.
Great intro to particle physics even for an ordinary, non-science person. Blew my head by the very basics of reality is literally a simple formula. Like a codebase.