Quick capsule reviews

I've been plowing through books on my kindle and on paper, so the backlog of ones I wanted to mention is getting insurmountable. Here's some short takes on them anyway.

1) Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson. An amusing and surprising pop history of the world's most important language. Highly recommended.

2) Losing Mum and Pup, by Christopher Buckley. Poignant and surprisingly hilarious. I miss WFB, the old scoundrel. Highly recommended.

3) Blackwater, by Jeremy Scahill. The subject is important and the research exhaustive, but the preening moralizing is irritating. Mildly recommended.

4) The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Insanely ambitious yet rather whimsical, for Robinson anyway. Fun for nerds. Recommended.

5) Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. One of the last Vonneguts I hadn't read, and among his best. Highly recommended.

6) Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. If you think copyright law is boring, think again. Chapters 13-14 are about the most disturbing thing I've read all year. Highly recommended.

7) The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. By far the best philosophical overview I've read, mainly because Russell doesn't pull his punches. If he thinks someone is full of crap, then by God he'll say so. Probably egregiously unfair in parts, but that's part of the charm. Recommended.

8) Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, by John Wesley Powell. Still probably the best book about running the Grand Canyon. Highly recommended.

9) The Silmarillion, by Tolkien. Finished it for the second time awhile back. I loved it, but non LOTR geeks probably wouldn't. Recommended anyway.

10) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. Definitely a product of its time, but beautiful and moving nonetheless. Very highly recommended.

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Internet Writing and the Content Vacuum

It's been a few times now I've had full weekday control of the Monthly 's headline blog, Political Animal, and I feel like I have a decent idea now what it's like being at the top level of blogging. (Not to say that I am at the top level, of course, just that I've walked in those shoes for a few days and gotten some blisters.) Anyway, the first thing I've noticed is that it is really, really hard to do well. I've had days before when I just didn't have anything to do and ended up at home writing 4-5 posts in one day on this site, but pro blogging is an entirely different beast. The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something , with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts. This ferocious demand for content is both good and bad. The iron weight of responsibiliy—the knowledge

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog