Recently Mentioned Books

Scott Hodge, Taxocracy: What You Don’t Know About Taxes & How They Rule Your Daily Life .  An excellent short book on the power of tax incentives, written by the former head of the National Tax Foundation.  Incentives matter!

Benjamin Nathans, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement .  The definitive book on its topic, consisting largely of profiles of dissidents.  The title is taken from a longstanding dissident toast, and yet they won eventually, sort of.  So your cause isn’t hopeless either.

The author is Kathleen Duval, and the subtitle is A Millennium in North America .  This is an excellent book.  Here is one excerpt, strung together by me from three separate pages:

5. New Cass Sunstein book on campus free speech .

He has a new and excellent book out, namely American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873 .  Among his other virtues, he is renowned for tying in American history to developments in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.  So what should I ask him?

That is from his new book A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity .  I had not known that in the early 16th century Iran was still predominantly Sunni.  And:

6. Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity .  Mostly ends at 1800, this will become one of the standard, must-read histories of Islam and its multiple homes.  The section on India, which is what I have been reading, is strongly conceptual and novel compared to other survey books such as Hourani.  At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.

5. Austin Bush, The Food of Southern Thailand .  The best book I know of on southern Thailand flat out.  This one has recipes of course, but also photos, maps, anecdotes, and plenty of history.  The food is explained in conceptual terms.  Recommended, for all those with an interest.

4. Sahar Akhtar, Immigration & Discrimination: (un)welcoming others .  Can the idea of wrongful discrimination be applied to immigration decisions?  Maybe you believe this is a pure and simple matter of national autonomy, but what if the potential immigrants are from a former and wronged colony?  From an island nation perishing due to climate change?  Or they were previously pushed off territory that is now part of the host nation?  And yet open borders as an idea also does not work — how should...

3. Paul Seabright, the subtitle says it all, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People .  I’ve just started to crack this one open, Paul’s books are always very smart.

2. David Caron, Michael Healy, 1873-1941, An Túr Gloine’s Stained Glass Pioneer . An excellent book, can it be said that Michael Healy is Ireland’s fourth greatest stained glass artist?  Clarke, Geddes, and Hone would be the top three?  It is good to see him getting this attention, but what will happen when so many Irish churches are decommissioned or abandoned or simply never seen?  What does that equilibrium look like?  All the more reason to invest in this book.  What an underrated European t...

1. Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor .  An amazing book, full of life and energy on every page, and yes there are 605 of them.  Imagine if Camille Paglia had stuck with it and produced case studies.  The main problem is simply that most people don’t know or care about Burton and Taylor any more?

No, it is not Bari Weiss, not Naveen or even Community Notes.  Please try to guess first, but if you must you can peek here .

Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him.  Here is the first one , in Norway with a live audience.  I am very much enjoying his new book Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist .  Slavoj is one of the very few CWT guests (can you guess the others?) who can handle pretty much any question about any area, and have something fresh to say in response.

Very interesting throughout, recommended.  And do not forget that Jon’s argument is outlined in detail in his new book, titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness .

2. The Miracle Worker , Amazon streaming, an old Arthur Penn movie, black and white, about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.  There is plenty to object to about this movie, including some dramatic clunkiness and a variety of stereotypes, including (but not only) about the disabled.  Nonetheless the best scenes are amazing, most of all when Anne and Helen “have at it,” in extended fighting sequences, without dialogue of course.  They are some of the most powerful and best acted scenes in Hollywood ...

Excellent throughout.  And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present .

It was North Korea who started the whole thing, you can buy the book here .

Ethan Mollick is the best and most thorough Twitter commentator on LLMs, he now has a forthcoming book Co-Intelligence .

Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy argues for proportional representation and accompanying reforms.  Putting aside whether this ever can happen, I am never quite sure how this is supposed to work when nuclear weapons use is such a live issue.

Beth Linker, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America .  For a long time I’ve been thinking there should be a good book on this topic, and now there is one.  Both fun and interesting.

Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth .  About five percent of American women end up having five children or more — what do you learn by talking to them?  (“Which one should I give back?”)  The author herself has eight children.

Christopher Phillips, Battle Ground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East .  A good, “simple enough” introduction to the wars going on in Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East.  If you are worried you will hate, you can just skip the Palestine chapter.

That is the title of the new Judith Butler book , focusing mostly on trans issues.  To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives.  For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests.  And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected.   And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think...

The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World , and the author is David van Reybrouck.  An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it.  First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries.  Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence.  Excerpt: