Classic: Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. One of the best books I’ve ever read. Entertaining and deep thoughts included! The only philosophical, sci-fi comedy book you need.
Thank you for sharing your recommendation, but I'm afraid that this book contains misinformation and promotes conspiracy theories that are not supported by evidence. I would kindly ask that you refrain from posting recommendations for this book in the future, as it is not in line with the standards and guidelines of HN.
Sorry for the posting and thank you for the reply. I would recommend you read this book as RFK Jr references many of the facts in this book. More and more evidence is being revealed to directly support RFK's assertions. Please send me a few of the "conspiracy theories that are not supported"? Have a pleasant day.
I’ll preface this by saying that I have no problems with fauci and so I’m definitely not the target market for this book.
I wonder, though, what would make a person want to read a book about someone that they hate? I can’t imagine a more useless use of my time than that. Even if the book was true (which I highly doubt given some of the other notable books by the same author “Profiles of the Vaccine injured”, “A letter to liberals”, and “The Wuhan Coverup”), what do you gain? Sounds like concentrated rage-fuel to me…
"what would make a person want to read a book about someone that they hate"
I would/am reading history books about Hitler, Stalin, etc. You want to understand how something so atrocious can happen and how such people can rule over so many, not just rule, and how so many would follow them and love them. It is pretty valuable to try to understand that.
Changed how I think about work and makes me hyper-aware of when I or anyone I work with says that we “have” to do something. Getting into the mindset that everything I do at work is my choice has helped me feel more in control of my workday and get more done as well.
> Guns, Germs and Steel is basically a modern eugenicist theory, racist and dumb.
Um, run that by me again? It’s been a while since I read it but doesn’t the book specifically argue that the Europeans conquered the Americas because of geographic factors rather than because of race? Do I have the main thrust of the book completely backwards?
You're correct and the grandparent is wrong. I'm seeing a lot weird hate for this book by people who haven't read it. I'm guessing there is someone with a ideological bone to pick that spread a mind virus about the book.
Like any book of its scope, there are obviously things that can be criticized ... but at least read it, and state those objections clearly.
Yes I have read the book. I can't seem to access the rest of the parent tree (did our comments get shadow-banned?) but I think I was just trying to provide support for the abundant criticism that book has gotten
However, I don't think there's anything in the book that suggests Graeber and Wengrow DON'T think Diamond is a racist. The few professional anthropologists I'm friends with hold such a view (obvy with more nuance) and I get the impression this type of criticism for Diamond is the norm not the exception in the field
Anyways now that I am explicitly supporting the accusation here's meat to add to the bone:
> Timothy Burke, who teaches African history at Swarthmore College, writing in Cliopatria, says that Diamond's problem is "that a term like 'race' can still serve some useful purpose in describing variations between human populations: I’m not going to make a definitive statement on that subject here. But just to give the example of the Africa chapter, Diamond clings to the term 'blacks' as racial category within which to place most pre-1500 sub-Saharan Africans except for Khoisan-speakers and “pygmies,” even as he explicitly acknowledges that it is an extremely poor categorical descriptor of the human groups he is placing in that category."
> Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel.
> This approach distances Diamond’s analysis from much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history - indeed, his suggestions for further reading omit almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years. Thus the large debate that is currently going on over historical explanations of the wealth and poverty of nations in a global context is here reduced to a sub-set of the ultimate question about bronze tools and geographic connectedness - ‘technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness [Europe], neither too high [China], nor too low [India]’ [p. 416].
Yeah the original comment is (rightly) flagged dead
"Racist" is an extremely lazy label; it shuts down any interesting or well-motivated conversation.
It's especially silly in this case because the "traditional racist" explanation to Lali's question is genes, and Diamond's whole point is to provide a different answer to the question. Many people think he has gone too far in the direction of geographical determinism, but that's hardly a racist POV -- it's more like the opposite.
To be clear, what I was saying is NOT that anyone who disagrees with Diamond has an "ideological bone to pick". There are plenty of people who disagree with him honestly -- it's inevitable because it's a work of synthesis that "stomps on" many academic subfields. He makes leaps to the "big picture" that don't meet the standard of evidence for many (although I don't think there is any false advertising of rigor)
What I was saying that the "racist" label applied to Diamond is evidence of someone who wants to shut down conversation, probably because he doesn't conform to that person's ideology. If they understand what he wrote, they wouldn't make such a claim (especially not as a one line Internet comment)
---
These critiques linked by a sibling are better, and show evidence of having read the book!
It's weird that you say there's a lack of evidence that Graeber and Wengrow don't think Diamond is racist. If that's what you take away, it seems like a pretty big misunderstanding.
The problem that Graeber and Wengrow have with Diamond (and "big history" authors like Harari) is that they assume that inequality is inevitable and we have little agency as human societies to do otherwise.
I actually love this point and 100% agree -- we should be consciously shaping our society to be more egalitarian, and not just let evolution and capitalism play out.
However it's also true that Dawn of Everything doesn't propose solutions. It's an amazing critique, including accurate claims of Eurocentrism and male bias, but it doesn't lay out a path forward. It gives evidence for many egalitarian societies, but falls short on how we apply those lessons to our own.
i.e. people read things and don't pick up on nuance -- all information (e.g. a book on the entirety of human history) is eventually reduced to a single bit of "racist" or "not racist"
I’m not sure what their claim is based on as your memory is broadly correct. The two criticisms I’ve read basically come down to it being oversimplified (e.g. ignoring the degree to which European successes depended on local allies) and that it ends to being too passive about the decisions made at key points which weren’t accidents of geography even if some of the capability to conquer arguably was.
"Thinking in Bets" Annie Duke. Changed how I feel "bad" decisions because, per Duke, bad outcomes can happen to good decisions. I also enjoyed how she framed truth seeking as the preference over groupthink.
Finally, it was fact that she was speaking from experience (as a professional poker player) and just some idea she researched.
Warning: this book can make it difficult to communicate with other people, if you expect them to think like you do. So many people evaluate the quality of decisions based on results, and so many of them are outright hostile to the ideas suggested herein.
Further, in any given situation, variance swaps all - so don't expect to be able to say "i told ya so".
I firmly believe this book helps make my life better in terms of making better decisions, but it is not a book you want to trot out at cocktail parties unless you enjoy arguments. And I will also say - people get offended when you ask them to put money down on their perspective, even after you disagree. So it appears to be true, people know it's true when money is on the line, but will still argue with you.
Let it change how you think, but if you want something to discuss with others, go with Gladwell or Freakonomics.
Yes and no. But ultimately ironic. Duke's position on truth seeking is rock solid. Any disagreement is, in the eyes of Duke, is a positive. I would take names, and then buy them the book. If they choose not to read it then self identifying groupthinkers might be best avoided going forward.
As for Gladwell. That's the problem, isn't it? Beige ideas and slanted research, etc. Yeah, I read him to see what the "average reader" is slurping down, but he's a candy coated pop star to Duke's Radiohead ideas.
It’s a bit of a paradox. While a lot of Gladwells work is a broad brush and not generalizable, it has opened people’s minds to a new way of thinking. I have found those people are open to discussions with more rigor, but it’s possible that is selection bias at work.
I also don’t think Duke is saying all disagreement is good. She specifically says you need a small trusted circle of people who agree to basic rules. Even then, it’s difficult to keep people inside the lines. That’s why her recommended way of rigorous thinking wouldn’t work on Twitter or in a general public sphere, for instance.
It’s not that people are dumb or willful, it’s that our brains are wired for different circumstances. And it takes constant effort to swim against the stream, which is tiring and not scalable.
In the end, I have concluded that humanity is better off for having a Gladwell - someone who can connect and clearly communicate with the masses. We need these mass communicators, even if they aren’t precise, because they open people’s minds to alternative ways of thinking.
It’s like a funnel - gladwell gets more people to the top of the funnel. You end up with folks who take pop music conclusions, and some percentage will dive deeper. Without Gladwell, I would have never discovered Duke or been receptive to the message.
Just started reading, "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away" by her so can't confidently recommend it, but so far I'm really enjoying it. Again, poker experience, knowing when to fold, is relevant.
I really loved Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Too often sci-fi feels cold, and detached with characters that feel akin to chess pieces moved in complicated schemes. His stories, even if they are sketches instead of paintings, exhibit a far more heartfelt, human ethos. The characters are real people with wants and unfulfilled wishes. The subjects are both technology but also mortality, fate, raising children, loss. It's sci-fi, but also just good short story writing.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories by Raphael Bob-Waksberg is another good set of short stories, more absurd and about love, but equally fun. If you liked the funny-sad combo of Bojack Horseman (which Bob-Waksberg created), you'll probably like this.
Exhalation is one of my favorite books of any genre and Chiang is one of my favorite authors. I love listening to his interviews as well. It's very clear how the person Ted Chiang and the author Ted Chiang exist in the same space. For some authors, that connection is less clear.
Similarly, Bojack Horseman is one of my favorite shows. I had never looked into its creators and had no idea the creator also wrote short stories. I am now very excited to read this. Thanks!
+1 for Exhalation by Ted Chiang.
And also: "Sum - Forty Tales from the afterlives" by David Eagleman. A small book that makes you think very very deeply.
- Travel, Alan de Botton: This got me thinking more than anything else that I read this year
- The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester: I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, but this was the standout for the surprising (and in retrospect, obvious) twist. The other interesting aspect was that this was written in the 50s, and you can see how their idea of 'the future' is rooted in the tech of the time
Of more interest to this crowd is probably
- Math Girls and Math Girls Talk About Trigonometry, Hiroshi Yuki: Brilliant!
And finally,
- Lords of the Deccan, Anirudh Kanisetti: More relevant to people from the Indian Subcontinent, I suppose.
As parents we wanted to be one of the better ones. A while back, we started with Bringing up Bébé, and since then learnt How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk; we were even Prepared while Reviving Ophelia. This year, we realized, we want to just settle on being A Good Enough Parent.
I have read many parenting books, and those listed above are the ones I believe others parents should read through. However, if you want to pick just one, you might want to settle on the Good Enough Parents. It is a fun read.
Add it to your Wishlist on Amazon and watch it for a while. I'm pretty sure an American will resell one. I got mine used on Amazon.in after stumbling on a fine day that someone was selling it for ₹399 (~$5). So, bought it. They shipped it all the way from the USA and it took more than a month.
Checking it right now shows ₹1,388 (~$17) for the Paperback and ₹2,261 (~$28) for the Hardcover edition.
Sitting with my newborn sleeping on my chest currently. I’ve really enjoyed Brain Rules for Baby and currently reading Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. Both good, feel like the latter is going to be a pivotal part of our parenting. My wife really enjoyed The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.
I didn't realize I might have the wrong link to the book everywhere I wrote until now (this comment thread). "A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing" by Bruno Bettelheim.
From Wikipedia: “ Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community.”
"the History of Strength of Materials" By Stephen Timoshenko Dr. Timoshenko, the father of thin shell theory in the field of solids of mechanics outlines accomplishments in this field as related to the conquest of land and wars.
Another along similar lines of technology and war "The Arms of Krupp" William Manchester
4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It goes against a lot of societally enforced norms we’re coming up against, and suggests the benefits of living a more aware, intentional life and the benefits of commitment and community. Awesome, awesome book I constantly recommend to people.
I agree - this book is great. I find it hard to really explain what this book about (time management?) without making it sound less interesting than it actually is, but it really has impacted my thinking. Definitely one that I'm going to keep coming back to.
I cannot agree more. I listened to it all the way through twice and it had a profound impact on how I see the world. It feels like an essential guide for living in the modern world. I look forward to reading it on paper to see what else I can get out of it.
Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller was a great one for me. Surface level it’s a book about a great but immensely flawed scientist. Under the surface it’s about identity and purpose. Binged it in like 2 nights.
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber of Bullshit Jobs, and, more importantly, this book. Graeber was an anthropologist, and he goes through the history of debt and how it became intertwined with our culture and morality with many, many examples. The book is chock full of ideas.
Also The Dawn of Everything, which Graeber cowrote with archaeologist David Wengrow. The broader point of the book is that there is no one story of the "evolution" of society into modern states and no "agricultural revolution" triggering the rise of urbanization and social hierarchy. Instead, there have been countless arrangements and permutations of these things with intelligent, politically-conscious people thinking about how they wanted to order their society long before the invention of writing. He takes particular aim at popular writers pushing simpler stories painting Western capitalism as a natural endpoint, especially Stephen Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari.
Even if you aren't onboard with Graeber's radical left politics, both books are so chock full of ideas and examples that it's hard to come away without a lot to think about.
Graeber misinterprets the history and ideas of mainstream economics, calls the safest securities on the planet a debt that will never be paid and spins bizarre conspiracy theories about the Iraq invasion. You might learn about the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes but a lot of the ideas presented are complete nonsense.
You might say it has good and original parts. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
A non-economist makes economic claims that just so happen to reflect the political views of his political contemporaries, but it is the job of anyone who disagrees to cite an entire body of literature, reviewed to a high but unspecified standard?
I'd totally agree with you had Graeber not been an influential anthropologist (wherein one academically studies human activity, culture, trade, economics, social structures, institutions etc. from a rigorous historical lens)
Your demand would have made sense if Debt was a peer-reviewed scholarly work and not a political screed aimed at a lay readership.
But then again, there is enough nonsense in there than can be picked apart without being a domain expert. For example, Graeber claims Adam Smith's famous "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run.
And dunking on Smith is how Graeber builds his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory.
Simply, as a meta note / rational argument's sake ->
Let's assume X (Smith) makes statement S (X -> S). A few hundreds of years later, Y (Graeber) makes statement S' that refutes S and says Y -> S' and negates ~ (X -> S). Now what I'd expect is a Z, that counter-refutes Y. For example, Z -> S''. Instead, you're going back to saying yeah, we all know X -> S, so how can Y -> S' be ever true...
I've not the read Greaber's book, though I intend to, but Adam Smith is regularly misinterpreted in an extreme right-wing way (e.g. the Adam Smith Institute) so it's possibly to disagree with that interpretation without disagreeing with Adam Smith.
> The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets.
> As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’
> The merchants had spent centuries securing their position of unfair advantage. In particular, they had invented and propagated the doctrine of ‘the balance of trade’, and had succeeded in elevating it into the received wisdom of the age. The basic idea was that each nation’s wealth consisted in the amount of gold that it held. Playing on this idea, the merchants claimed that, in order to get rich, a nation had to export as much, and import as little, as possible, thus maintaining a ‘favourable’ balance. They then presented themselves as servants of the public by offering to run state-backed monopolies that would limit the inflow, and maximise the outflow, of goods, and therefore of gold. But as Smith’s lengthy analysis showed, this was pure hokum: what were needed instead were open trading arrangements, so that productivity could increase generally, and collective wealth would grow for the benefit of all
Greaber's interpretation of Smith is just as shallow as extreme right-wing one. And what's worse is Greaber's whole cloth invention of Adam Smith's supposed morality.
I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLong was a bit trolly, but nothing a competent, stable writer shouldn't have been able to handle. This impression is also borne out by my own reading of Graeber's work, and his reprehensible actions as a working academic:
I have the same impressions of Graeber in this back and forth but it doesn't change the fact that Graeber has a point
I mean making a Twitter bot to spam someone "stay away!" every day seems a lot more thin-skinned and vengeful than Graeber's response here. And Graeber points out that most of the "factual errors" pointed out by DeLong do basically nothing to detract from the main theses Graeber makes in his book.
It's clear DeLong has it out for him and the "takedown" is just a collection of "gotchas" on minor details pasted together to try to attack the overall validity of the book
Does Noah Smith consider himself left-wing? I've always tagged him as "right-wing but not totally insane" as he often seems to be explaining bits of reality to his audience who consider them politically incorrect, like renewables and climate change not being a hoax, or him explaining that being 'woke' is okay, as long as you aren't rude to white men.
I think Debt is a terrible book but that's not a convincing or even substantive review. Even more bizzare is the author admitting to dunking on the book without even having read it!
As suggested by its title, "Debt" is an anthropology book about the history of debt. And by extension the origins of money. Not economics.
Adam Smith and his contemporaries hypothesized that barter proceeded money. Modern economics textbooks and pundits continue to repeat this misbelief. Academics even admit the tale is often repeated as form of short hand narrative.
Too bad that the book about debt and how it became intertwined with our culture and morality relies on a spurious conflation of basic terms. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but the beliefs that Graeber choses to ascribe to him are invented whole cloth.
And for a book written by an anthropologist, the picture of China we get is a culture existentialist caricature.
Belated followup. I reread the bits which reference and quote Adam Smith. (Revised edition.) Because maybe I'm being clueless.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.
FWIW, I wouldn't expect Smith to have access to reports from the New World, or even the inclination to connect the dots (play anthropolgist). So maybe you think Graeber is too harsh there. But I certainly expect Adam's academic successors to adjust as necessary.
Also FWIW, I wouldn't care so much about barter-money genesis fables, recognizing that pop-science lags academic best avail science by decades or more, were it not for the outsized influence that economic spokesmodels have on real world policy.
With that kind of assumed power, relished and hoarded, the pundits have that much more responsibility to be intellectually honest. In my future perfect world, of course.
You don't have to explain more, beating a dead horse. But I am keen to know which explanations -- what is money? where did money come from? -- you favor.
The purpose of the book is to make the general-audience reader realize the problems with the conceptual-historical framework of neoliberal economics and politics. David Graeber rightfully argues that Neoliberalism sells itself to the masses by constructing this "quaint" tale of uncivilized barter-practicing foraging tribes turning into coin/money using farmers into debt based industrial-financial empires.
I am sure there are many factual inaccuracies in the book (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully manages to do is show the reader that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest). And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
> The purpose of the book is to make the general-audience reader realize the problems with the conceptual-historical framework of neoliberal economics and politics
And misrepresenting mainstream economics is the way to do that?
> (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully
This is a bizzare take. It's like claiming Graeber gets the premises wrong but somehow the conclusions he draws are correct?
> that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest).
But somehow these grand sophisticated economic systems did not find takers outside their niches. This is what makes rui stones and cloth bolts quaint curiosities compared to coinage and credit when discussing the 5000 years of debt.
> And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
Too bad he spins nonsensical conspiracy theories to do that.
And you agree that it's a work of political rhetoric and not dispassionate scholarship.
Personally, this brings lot of memories. It is that one novel which I remember more vividly amongst all of the others that I read. A few years back, I bought a physical copy for the archives and a digital copy for nostalgia. I re-read it in 2018 and unfortunately, I find it hard to feel as good as I felt when I was younger. I have no idea and no reasoning.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the people of my state and thus me are influenced heavily by Bengali literature, food, and culture. I might have felt closer to her or she became a common name in our tiny town. Finally, I grew up with teachers, most of who hail from South India and have heard (and I visualize) the hot Indian summers in the state of Kerala. One of my few good friends I made during school, was from Kerala and lost contact after school. During summer vacation, I visualize that he met his local friends, and play around big ponds and jump in beating the heat.
"The Constructed Mennonite: History, Memory, and the Second World War" by Hans Werner
It was a great read because it gave an insight into the "Russian" style perspective of the Anabaptist understanding, and the deep complications around: nonresistance, nationhood, language, and war. It is only a small slice of some of the horrifying realities the Anabapists' suffered at the hands of both Axis and Allies during WWII, but as a personal account, and as a detailed series of event, it is excellent.
"Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture" by David Kushner
It gave a real snapshot of what it was like making (and playing) games in the 80's and 90's. It helped to remind the reader of the technical challenges programmers faced, as well as the much less money-focused nature of video games as an industry. (I have way more to say on this, but will resist the urge.)
"Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" by Patrick Radden Keefe
Gives, in my opinion, very accurate account of both "sides" of the issue regarding The Troubles. It brought up a massive number of details I was either unaware of, or forgot about. From my perspective, it didn't appear to pull any punches, but instead laid things out precisely as they happened, and showed the blood on the shirts and knuckles of both side. It gave a personal insight to the people who were going through it first hand, and the ways in which they lived their lives; in many ways, it reminded me of some of the descriptions I had heard about the 2003-2011 Iraq War from civilians. (A common theme in both I recall hearing described was the fear of waiting in lines for things, as it meant that location might be targeted for bombing.)
"History Is Wrong" by Erich von Däniken
Although the book is meant to be a serious read, I take it as a comedy. I enjoy listening to various conspriacy theories to see whether I find any shreds of truth in them. In this book, there are some claims about how the way we understand human history is fundamentally wrong, and that "a lost subterranean labyrinth in Ecuador" held specific secrets in the form of "gold panels" - panels which mysteriously disappeared.
Note: I don't mean to sound overly dismissive to anyone who might be a "true believer" in this specific line of thinking, I just find the claims made to be preposterous.
+1 for Say Nothing, Radden Keefe is one of the best non-fiction writers around today imo. Been meaning to read his latest on the Sacklers for a while also.
Happen to have any recommendations for other resources on Irish History or The Troubles?
I checked out "The Northern Ireland Conflict: Bolinda Beginner Guides" by Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan a few years ago, but was a little underwhelmed by how the information was presented - it felt a little one sided, if I remember correctly.
Alternatively, "The Celtic World" by The Great Courses (audiobook) was pretty good, but a little overwhelming in the amount of time it was covering (Again, I think. It's been a few years since I listened to it.) I'd really like to hear something historical about Ireland that focuses in on one or two eras/generations, not necessarily a "Here's the last 1,000 years" type approach. Anything in particular around the time Romans had come to the English area would be of especial interest to me, due to certain religious perspectives and beliefs I'm interested with.
I seriously doubt this appeals to the modern Hacker News crowd, but it might appeal to a couple of you:
Published in October 2022, The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4B is dazzling. It's like a guide to expressing (in non-obvious ways) all kinds of problems as some variation on Exact Cover (or Boolean Satisfiability) and using wicked tight little general-purpose backtracking solvers to solve them.
If you want a peek, watch Knuth's 2018 lecture on Dancing Links Exact Cover:
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino, a great companion to the movie and expands on characters in really unique ways that make me think about them.
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson, a near future book about climate change and trying to fix it with an interesting geopolitical look of China acting like the US. I also liked Ministry of the Future but it was less fun of a read.
Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a reasoned look at how social media and devices are negatively impacting society and children.
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, a weird near future declinepunk with bioengineering and evil corporations.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, very short book with a glimpse into post colonial colonialism in remote locations. Wanted to read a book about Congo.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a portrait of a character in a time I didn’t experience.
Tarantino's novelization was fantastic. He just released a piece of nonfiction with 'Cinema Speculation', which is definitely worth a read if you're into film and especially his films.
If you like audio books Kenneth Branagh’s reading of Heart of Darkness is incredible. I listen to it all the time. He really brings out the dark humour in Marlow’s narration.
Also, Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness; so it’s definitely worth rewatching after having read HoD.
> Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, a weird near future declinepunk with bioengineering and evil corporations.
I loved Shriek: An Afterword, and have wanted to read more VanderMeer for a while. Did you just coin the term 'declinepunk'? I've never heard it before.
I don’t know what the right term is but the world is worse than today and on the way down. It’s not apocalyptic, but it’s decaying and declining with loss of services, crime, chaos. But there’s still tech and big companies and stuff.
Similar would be Battle Angle Alita and the last section from Bone Clocks.
Price of Time by Chancellor. Out of the new books I read, will be a classic of financial history. It isn't technical, it isn't a complete critique of QE but it is the most understandable, fully-explained critique...also well-timed (again, Chancellor wrote a book in 1999 about financial bubbles).
Postwar by Tony Judt. Published in 2005, it covers 1945 Postwar Europe to ~2005. Good coverage of not just the major Western European countries like the UK, Germany, and France, but attention is paid to the Eastern European countries and Soviet Union. The US of course comes into the picture at parts, but the book is firmly focused on Europe. I found the economic development, political attitudes and party shifts, and the coverage of the Soviet Union and countries behind the iron curtain.
I am looking for a follow up and may read Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, Stalin by Kotkin, or The Free World by Mendand. Suggestions appreciated
+1 for "You're Not Listening". I had it on my shelf for too long. When I finally pulled it down and read it there was a feeling of "I wish I would have done that a lot sooner."
Think Again was good as well, but didn't hit me as hard as "Listening."
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[ 1.0 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadWhere the hell do people get off?
But the post in question does not necessarily match the above, though in a way possibly leaning.
It may still just reflect a point of interest.
I wonder, though, what would make a person want to read a book about someone that they hate? I can’t imagine a more useless use of my time than that. Even if the book was true (which I highly doubt given some of the other notable books by the same author “Profiles of the Vaccine injured”, “A letter to liberals”, and “The Wuhan Coverup”), what do you gain? Sounds like concentrated rage-fuel to me…
That's what you gain. You get a cardboard villain to hate.
I would/am reading history books about Hitler, Stalin, etc. You want to understand how something so atrocious can happen and how such people can rule over so many, not just rule, and how so many would follow them and love them. It is pretty valuable to try to understand that.
I recommend watching this
He's been dead for like 20 years. I think you mean RFK Jr.
Changed how I think about work and makes me hyper-aware of when I or anyone I work with says that we “have” to do something. Getting into the mindset that everything I do at work is my choice has helped me feel more in control of my workday and get more done as well.
The Body - Bill Bryson
The Way of Kings - Sanderson
So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport
Um, run that by me again? It’s been a while since I read it but doesn’t the book specifically argue that the Europeans conquered the Americas because of geographic factors rather than because of race? Do I have the main thrust of the book completely backwards?
Like any book of its scope, there are obviously things that can be criticized ... but at least read it, and state those objections clearly.
Not really "someone", more like most anthropologists. E.g. David Wengrow and David Graeber's takedown in Dawn of Everything
Or
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503687
However, I don't think there's anything in the book that suggests Graeber and Wengrow DON'T think Diamond is a racist. The few professional anthropologists I'm friends with hold such a view (obvy with more nuance) and I get the impression this type of criticism for Diamond is the norm not the exception in the field
Anyways now that I am explicitly supporting the accusation here's meat to add to the bone:
> Timothy Burke, who teaches African history at Swarthmore College, writing in Cliopatria, says that Diamond's problem is "that a term like 'race' can still serve some useful purpose in describing variations between human populations: I’m not going to make a definitive statement on that subject here. But just to give the example of the Africa chapter, Diamond clings to the term 'blacks' as racial category within which to place most pre-1500 sub-Saharan Africans except for Khoisan-speakers and “pygmies,” even as he explicitly acknowledges that it is an extremely poor categorical descriptor of the human groups he is placing in that category."
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/guns-germs-an...
> Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2013.84...
> This approach distances Diamond’s analysis from much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history - indeed, his suggestions for further reading omit almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years. Thus the large debate that is currently going on over historical explanations of the wealth and poverty of nations in a global context is here reduced to a sub-set of the ultimate question about bronze tools and geographic connectedness - ‘technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness [Europe], neither too high [China], nor too low [India]’ [p. 416].
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/51
(this paper is called Fuck Jared Diamond lol)
"Racist" is an extremely lazy label; it shuts down any interesting or well-motivated conversation.
It's especially silly in this case because the "traditional racist" explanation to Lali's question is genes, and Diamond's whole point is to provide a different answer to the question. Many people think he has gone too far in the direction of geographical determinism, but that's hardly a racist POV -- it's more like the opposite.
To be clear, what I was saying is NOT that anyone who disagrees with Diamond has an "ideological bone to pick". There are plenty of people who disagree with him honestly -- it's inevitable because it's a work of synthesis that "stomps on" many academic subfields. He makes leaps to the "big picture" that don't meet the standard of evidence for many (although I don't think there is any false advertising of rigor)
What I was saying that the "racist" label applied to Diamond is evidence of someone who wants to shut down conversation, probably because he doesn't conform to that person's ideology. If they understand what he wrote, they wouldn't make such a claim (especially not as a one line Internet comment)
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These critiques linked by a sibling are better, and show evidence of having read the book!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
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It's weird that you say there's a lack of evidence that Graeber and Wengrow don't think Diamond is racist. If that's what you take away, it seems like a pretty big misunderstanding.
The problem that Graeber and Wengrow have with Diamond (and "big history" authors like Harari) is that they assume that inequality is inevitable and we have little agency as human societies to do otherwise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-d...
I actually love this point and 100% agree -- we should be consciously shaping our society to be more egalitarian, and not just let evolution and capitalism play out.
However it's also true that Dawn of Everything doesn't propose solutions. It's an amazing critique, including accurate claims of Eurocentrism and male bias, but it doesn't lay out a path forward. It gives evidence for many egalitarian societies, but falls short on how we apply those lessons to our own.
----
The original post in this subthread reminds me of
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128061
i.e. people read things and don't pick up on nuance -- all information (e.g. a book on the entirety of human history) is eventually reduced to a single bit of "racist" or "not racist"
Here’s a reasonable summary:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/guns-germs-an...
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-ger...
There’s hours of reading in the Reddit r/AskHistorians FAQ:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
Fears of a Setting Sun by Dennis Rasmussen. About the Founding Fathers loss of faith in the Constitution over time.
The Greek Plays. Edited collection of 16 plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. Fascinating reads.
Grand Strategies by Charles Hill. Short book on literature and statecraft.
Finally, it was fact that she was speaking from experience (as a professional poker player) and just some idea she researched.
Further, in any given situation, variance swaps all - so don't expect to be able to say "i told ya so".
I firmly believe this book helps make my life better in terms of making better decisions, but it is not a book you want to trot out at cocktail parties unless you enjoy arguments. And I will also say - people get offended when you ask them to put money down on their perspective, even after you disagree. So it appears to be true, people know it's true when money is on the line, but will still argue with you.
Let it change how you think, but if you want something to discuss with others, go with Gladwell or Freakonomics.
As for Gladwell. That's the problem, isn't it? Beige ideas and slanted research, etc. Yeah, I read him to see what the "average reader" is slurping down, but he's a candy coated pop star to Duke's Radiohead ideas.
I also don’t think Duke is saying all disagreement is good. She specifically says you need a small trusted circle of people who agree to basic rules. Even then, it’s difficult to keep people inside the lines. That’s why her recommended way of rigorous thinking wouldn’t work on Twitter or in a general public sphere, for instance.
It’s not that people are dumb or willful, it’s that our brains are wired for different circumstances. And it takes constant effort to swim against the stream, which is tiring and not scalable.
In the end, I have concluded that humanity is better off for having a Gladwell - someone who can connect and clearly communicate with the masses. We need these mass communicators, even if they aren’t precise, because they open people’s minds to alternative ways of thinking.
It’s like a funnel - gladwell gets more people to the top of the funnel. You end up with folks who take pop music conclusions, and some percentage will dive deeper. Without Gladwell, I would have never discovered Duke or been receptive to the message.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories by Raphael Bob-Waksberg is another good set of short stories, more absurd and about love, but equally fun. If you liked the funny-sad combo of Bojack Horseman (which Bob-Waksberg created), you'll probably like this.
Similarly, Bojack Horseman is one of my favorite shows. I had never looked into its creators and had no idea the creator also wrote short stories. I am now very excited to read this. Thanks!
- Travel, Alan de Botton: This got me thinking more than anything else that I read this year - The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester: I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, but this was the standout for the surprising (and in retrospect, obvious) twist. The other interesting aspect was that this was written in the 50s, and you can see how their idea of 'the future' is rooted in the tech of the time
Of more interest to this crowd is probably - Math Girls and Math Girls Talk About Trigonometry, Hiroshi Yuki: Brilliant!
And finally, - Lords of the Deccan, Anirudh Kanisetti: More relevant to people from the Indian Subcontinent, I suppose.
My (still to be updated) list of books I read this year: https://shrirang.karandikar.org/reading-in-2022/
1. https://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Up-Bébé-Discovers-Parenting/...
2. https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/14516638...
3. https://www.amazon.com/Prepared-What-Kids-Need-Fulfilled/dp/...
4. https://www.amazon.com/Reviving-Ophelia-Saving-Selves-Adoles...
5. https://brajeshwar.com/2022/books/
6. https://goodenoughparenting.com/
There are at least three books with similar name, can you please say the author as well?
Edit: oh wait you were being serious
Also a fan of
Our babies ourselves - https://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/...
Hunt, Gather, Parent - https://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/...
wow, the book is only physical and it costs $60 to get it where I live... (without import taxes)
Checking it right now shows ₹1,388 (~$17) for the Paperback and ₹2,261 (~$28) for the Hardcover edition.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4tf95ulhkt4tn9g/screenshot%202022-...
It is not a popular book. The approaches and ideas were great though, and that was indeed the beauty of the book. Here is the correct link - https://www.amazon.com/Good-Enough-Parent-Book-Child-Rearing...
The article describes all of this in detail.
- "What do you do with a problem?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-Problem/dp/1943200009
- "What do you do with an idea?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-Idea/dp/1938298071/
- "What do you do with a chance?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-Chance/dp/1943200734/
- "I wish you more" https://www.amazon.com/Encouragement-Gifts-Uplifting-Books-G...
Of course, there are others. These are just the ones that come to mind ATM.
I've given the "What do...?" books as gifts to plenty of adult and young adults. My point is, a book doesn't have to be 200+ pages to have an impact.
Incidentally this and the original are some of the best managing resources you can read.
Another along similar lines of technology and war "The Arms of Krupp" William Manchester
He also has a short series inside Sam Harris' (paid) 'Waking Up' meditation app which is how I got on to him (Oliver Burkeman).
Also The Dawn of Everything, which Graeber cowrote with archaeologist David Wengrow. The broader point of the book is that there is no one story of the "evolution" of society into modern states and no "agricultural revolution" triggering the rise of urbanization and social hierarchy. Instead, there have been countless arrangements and permutations of these things with intelligent, politically-conscious people thinking about how they wanted to order their society long before the invention of writing. He takes particular aim at popular writers pushing simpler stories painting Western capitalism as a natural endpoint, especially Stephen Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari.
Even if you aren't onboard with Graeber's radical left politics, both books are so chock full of ideas and examples that it's hard to come away without a lot to think about.
Graeber misinterprets the history and ideas of mainstream economics, calls the safest securities on the planet a debt that will never be paid and spins bizarre conspiracy theories about the Iraq invasion. You might learn about the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes but a lot of the ideas presented are complete nonsense.
You might say it has good and original parts. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Can you provide a well researched body of literature that counters Graeber’s thesis as opposed to just stating an opinion?
But then again, there is enough nonsense in there than can be picked apart without being a domain expert. For example, Graeber claims Adam Smith's famous "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run.
And dunking on Smith is how Graeber builds his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory.
Let's assume X (Smith) makes statement S (X -> S). A few hundreds of years later, Y (Graeber) makes statement S' that refutes S and says Y -> S' and negates ~ (X -> S). Now what I'd expect is a Z, that counter-refutes Y. For example, Z -> S''. Instead, you're going back to saying yeah, we all know X -> S, so how can Y -> S' be ever true...
A starting point for ideas on rational arguments etc is https://www.lesswrong.com/library
https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-s...
> The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets.
> As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’
> The merchants had spent centuries securing their position of unfair advantage. In particular, they had invented and propagated the doctrine of ‘the balance of trade’, and had succeeded in elevating it into the received wisdom of the age. The basic idea was that each nation’s wealth consisted in the amount of gold that it held. Playing on this idea, the merchants claimed that, in order to get rich, a nation had to export as much, and import as little, as possible, thus maintaining a ‘favourable’ balance. They then presented themselves as servants of the public by offering to run state-backed monopolies that would limit the inflow, and maximise the outflow, of goods, and therefore of gold. But as Smith’s lengthy analysis showed, this was pure hokum: what were needed instead were open trading arrangements, so that productivity could increase generally, and collective wealth would grow for the benefit of all
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bradford_DeLong
Here's the ceremonial link for whenever this crap is linked:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164707
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-...
I mean making a Twitter bot to spam someone "stay away!" every day seems a lot more thin-skinned and vengeful than Graeber's response here. And Graeber points out that most of the "factual errors" pointed out by DeLong do basically nothing to detract from the main theses Graeber makes in his book.
It's clear DeLong has it out for him and the "takedown" is just a collection of "gotchas" on minor details pasted together to try to attack the overall validity of the book
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...
Adam Smith and his contemporaries hypothesized that barter proceeded money. Modern economics textbooks and pundits continue to repeat this misbelief. Academics even admit the tale is often repeated as form of short hand narrative.
Charlemagne was quaint?
And for a book written by an anthropologist, the picture of China we get is a culture existentialist caricature.
> Charlemagne was quaint?
At least as quaint as Sher Shah Suri.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.
FWIW, I wouldn't expect Smith to have access to reports from the New World, or even the inclination to connect the dots (play anthropolgist). So maybe you think Graeber is too harsh there. But I certainly expect Adam's academic successors to adjust as necessary.
Also FWIW, I wouldn't care so much about barter-money genesis fables, recognizing that pop-science lags academic best avail science by decades or more, were it not for the outsized influence that economic spokesmodels have on real world policy.
With that kind of assumed power, relished and hoarded, the pundits have that much more responsibility to be intellectually honest. In my future perfect world, of course.
You don't have to explain more, beating a dead horse. But I am keen to know which explanations -- what is money? where did money come from? -- you favor.
I am sure there are many factual inaccuracies in the book (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully manages to do is show the reader that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest). And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
And misrepresenting mainstream economics is the way to do that?
> (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully
This is a bizzare take. It's like claiming Graeber gets the premises wrong but somehow the conclusions he draws are correct?
> that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest).
But somehow these grand sophisticated economic systems did not find takers outside their niches. This is what makes rui stones and cloth bolts quaint curiosities compared to coinage and credit when discussing the 5000 years of debt.
> And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
Too bad he spins nonsensical conspiracy theories to do that. And you agree that it's a work of political rhetoric and not dispassionate scholarship.
Winner of the booker prize, a delightful tale set in Kerala, a province of India where our ancestors first landed on the subcontinent.
Very well written, and invokes powerful imaginery of Kerela's environ and social setting.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the people of my state and thus me are influenced heavily by Bengali literature, food, and culture. I might have felt closer to her or she became a common name in our tiny town. Finally, I grew up with teachers, most of who hail from South India and have heard (and I visualize) the hot Indian summers in the state of Kerala. One of my few good friends I made during school, was from Kerala and lost contact after school. During summer vacation, I visualize that he met his local friends, and play around big ponds and jump in beating the heat.
It was a great read because it gave an insight into the "Russian" style perspective of the Anabaptist understanding, and the deep complications around: nonresistance, nationhood, language, and war. It is only a small slice of some of the horrifying realities the Anabapists' suffered at the hands of both Axis and Allies during WWII, but as a personal account, and as a detailed series of event, it is excellent.
"Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture" by David Kushner
It gave a real snapshot of what it was like making (and playing) games in the 80's and 90's. It helped to remind the reader of the technical challenges programmers faced, as well as the much less money-focused nature of video games as an industry. (I have way more to say on this, but will resist the urge.)
"Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" by Patrick Radden Keefe
Gives, in my opinion, very accurate account of both "sides" of the issue regarding The Troubles. It brought up a massive number of details I was either unaware of, or forgot about. From my perspective, it didn't appear to pull any punches, but instead laid things out precisely as they happened, and showed the blood on the shirts and knuckles of both side. It gave a personal insight to the people who were going through it first hand, and the ways in which they lived their lives; in many ways, it reminded me of some of the descriptions I had heard about the 2003-2011 Iraq War from civilians. (A common theme in both I recall hearing described was the fear of waiting in lines for things, as it meant that location might be targeted for bombing.)
"History Is Wrong" by Erich von Däniken
Although the book is meant to be a serious read, I take it as a comedy. I enjoy listening to various conspriacy theories to see whether I find any shreds of truth in them. In this book, there are some claims about how the way we understand human history is fundamentally wrong, and that "a lost subterranean labyrinth in Ecuador" held specific secrets in the form of "gold panels" - panels which mysteriously disappeared.
Note: I don't mean to sound overly dismissive to anyone who might be a "true believer" in this specific line of thinking, I just find the claims made to be preposterous.
I checked out "The Northern Ireland Conflict: Bolinda Beginner Guides" by Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan a few years ago, but was a little underwhelmed by how the information was presented - it felt a little one sided, if I remember correctly.
Alternatively, "The Celtic World" by The Great Courses (audiobook) was pretty good, but a little overwhelming in the amount of time it was covering (Again, I think. It's been a few years since I listened to it.) I'd really like to hear something historical about Ireland that focuses in on one or two eras/generations, not necessarily a "Here's the last 1,000 years" type approach. Anything in particular around the time Romans had come to the English area would be of especial interest to me, due to certain religious perspectives and beliefs I'm interested with.
Published in October 2022, The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4B is dazzling. It's like a guide to expressing (in non-obvious ways) all kinds of problems as some variation on Exact Cover (or Boolean Satisfiability) and using wicked tight little general-purpose backtracking solvers to solve them.
If you want a peek, watch Knuth's 2018 lecture on Dancing Links Exact Cover:
https://youtu.be/_cR9zDlvP88
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson, a near future book about climate change and trying to fix it with an interesting geopolitical look of China acting like the US. I also liked Ministry of the Future but it was less fun of a read.
Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a reasoned look at how social media and devices are negatively impacting society and children.
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, a weird near future declinepunk with bioengineering and evil corporations.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, very short book with a glimpse into post colonial colonialism in remote locations. Wanted to read a book about Congo.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a portrait of a character in a time I didn’t experience.
Also, Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness; so it’s definitely worth rewatching after having read HoD.
I loved Shriek: An Afterword, and have wanted to read more VanderMeer for a while. Did you just coin the term 'declinepunk'? I've never heard it before.
Similar would be Battle Angle Alita and the last section from Bone Clocks.
Came across this nice wiki when googling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives
I am looking for a follow up and may read Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, Stalin by Kotkin, or The Free World by Mendand. Suggestions appreciated
You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy - If you're like me and "listening" actually means "solutioning", read this book.
Longitude by Dava Sobel - The fascinating and infuriating story of how longitude was created/discovered/measured/whatever.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - I loved The Martian and after what felt like a misstep with Artemis this is a return to form.
Think Again was good as well, but didn't hit me as hard as "Listening."