My Reading List

Book Review: The Most Beautiful Book Places in the World

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Lovely pictures”

The title of this book is key: it’s “the most beautiful book places.” Not libraries or bookstores specifically, but just places with books.

That said, it’s lovely. Some wonderful photographs of different places around the world that have a lot of books. The pictures of often two page spreads, which makes the binding a little annoying, but it was still amazing in places. Some of the pictures almost literally took my breath away (I mean, just look at this).

Lots of libraries and bookstores, of course, but also a fair amount of coffee shops, bars, and restaurants.

I especially liked The Library at The NoMad, which is in a hotel in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. The website says:

The Library is a members-only workspace by day that transforms into an intimate cocktail lounge by night.

That sounds like a dream. I’ll have to look that up next time I’m in the city.

Book Review: In the Beginning Was Information

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Reread

Added on March 22, 2026

So, this is actually a reread, even thought I didn’t have any notes back when I read it for the first time (probably in 2010, or so?). I do remember this was recommended to me by a guy I sat next to on a plane. He was reading the Bible, and we got into a discussion about that, then realized we were both in IT, and he recommended this book.

I reread the book because I was hoping I would get some amazing insight from it that I missed the first time, but the basic message is the same: it’s an attempt to prove the existence of God via Claude Shannon’s information theory.

The author – who is a German mathematician, and Young Earth Creationist – goes deep into examining Shannon’s theories, to prove a seemingly simple point: the transmission of “information” requires an intelligent sender. Meaning, the formation of information requires that a being with a thought process was able to form the message and transmit it, otherwise everything is just gibberish.

I’m onboard so far, and I don’t think this is disputed much in science.

However, the author then extends this to say that DNA is the “original information” of the world. It fits all the criteria for information, and it – by definition – existing before Man did, therefore we must accept that the creation of man was via information (hence the title of the book), and this requires us to accept an intelligent designer.

I actually like the theory. But the author makes a massive tonal shift in the third part of the book when he attempts to prove that all this validates the Bible. That’s a illogical extension of his core theory I think: he goes from proving that some intelligent designer existed, to saying that the Hebrew Bible is therefore valid. I just don’t think his central theory – which, again, I rather like – supports this.

I’ve often thought there are different “levels” in someone’s journey of faith. They kind of go like this, using myself and my current faith position as a destination.

Atheist: “There is nothing”
Agnostic: “I don’t know if there’s anything”
Supernaturalist: “There’s… something”
Theist: “There’s… someone(s)”
Monotheist: “There’s a single someone”
Christian/Jew: “There is the God of the Hebrew Bible”
Protestant: “Martin Luther was right! The Pope is bad!”
Baptist: …I have no idea
Converge Baptist: …no idea about this either

If you accept what this author is saying, that takes you from #1 to… #4? Maybe #5? His argument really has no relevance beyond that.

Outside of the third part, the book is actually a really good discussion of information theory in general. And his central point about an intelligent designer proven by the existence of information is thought-provoking. It’s not an unassailable point, by any means, but it’s interesting.

But the third part is a big leap, and I’m just not sure the prior portions of the book support it.

Book Review: The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting, prescient ideas”

This author is claiming that the “essence” of software isn’t code, rather it’s concepts. He’s arguing that we should design software more on the conceptual level.

Concepts are the user’s mental model of how the software works, and how the big pieces of the software interact. He argues for designing these concepts along multiple axes:

Structure: what is the concept?
Purpose: why does it exist?
Composition: how does it relate to other concepts?
Dependency: what other concepts depend on it?
Mapping: how does it manifest in the UI?
Specificity: does it serve only one purpose?
Familiarity: is it shared with other applications?
Integrity: how does it “protect” itself from encroachment by other concepts?

I’ve known this as a “noun” analysis. When trying to learn new software, sometimes it’s helpful to analyze the “nouns” – the… things, in the software, that you do stuff with. That really helps you organize the software in your head.

What’s interesting is how relevant this is in the new era of AI-driven software development. Writing code is no longer the critical thing. What’s becoming more important is understanding how your users will use the software, and the models they will use to think about the problem domain.

Future software will likely be designed at the conceptual level, and here’s a great example:

Configuration Language: Specification

This is a configuration language that I designed (…or maybe “evolved” over years of use). I wrote a detail specification for it, delineating the concepts behind it. Since then, I’ve had Claude Code implement it – write the actual code – for two different languages. It’s neat because it works the same in both, because the concepts are the same.

This is the future of software development. The book was ahead of its time.

Also, the book has an interesting format, in that it’s divided into two halves. The first half is the meat of the argument, without much elaboration of asides. The second half is basically an extended set of “notes” to the first half, in which the author tells colorful anecdotes and explains the concepts with more narrative. (The author is a professor at MIT, so if he was using this as a textbook, I think the students find that helpful.)

Finally, the author has an entire website in support of the book. It’s not just promotional – some of the content expands on and reinforces the concepts of the book.

Book Review: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “An amazing experience you will never forget”

This was an amazing…experience. I call it that because I listened to this book on audio during a long road trip. I loved it so much that I ordered the hardcover before I even got home.

The audio version is read by a multi-voice cast of almost 50 voice actors. They need to do this because the book is a literal oral history – it’s a thousand (two thousand? three?) little vignettes of the 24 hours after the first 9/11 plane took off from Boston, told in the first person.

It goes through the day in chronological order, step by step, minute by minute, telling the stories by the people who lived through it. There are hundreds and hundreds of individual retellers. Many of them you come to know, because the story keeps coming back to them over and over again, throughout the day.

When introduced, the speakers give their name, what they were doing (like, which company they worked for), and – ominously – which floor of the towers they were on when the planes it.

The people are from all walks – some survivors, some rescue workers, some celebrities. There are stories and anecdotes from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Dennis Hastert, even George Bush.

This is what I believe to be the most comprehensive account of what happened on 9/11. The audio book was 16 hours long. It goes into excruciating detail, from every possible perspective. It’s a staggering work of compilation.

Some things I learned –

The biggest immediate fear was that the rescuers didn’t know if there were more hijacked planes. Until the FAA got all the planes on the ground, rescue work would stop when a plane got near, because they didn’t know which planes were weapons.
The Pentagon crash would have been much worse, except they crashed into a section of the building that had just been remodeled, and not everyone had moved back in.
Some people still in the Twin Towers survived the collapse. The building came down around them, but they managed to be in a pocket of space, like an elevator shaft. Several people were pulled out of the wreckage after the collapse.
A “shootdown” order was given, to bring down any threatening planes. There was one plane inbound from Europe that was the only plane left, and discussion was had about whether or not to intercept it, but it eventually turned back.
The President was genuinely desperate to get back to Washington, but his security wouldn’t allow it until they were sure all the planes were down. He went from Florida, where he was reading to an elementary school, to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, then to Offut AFB in Nebraska because it had better communications. Then they flew back to Washington so fast that the fighter escorts had trouble keeping up without running out of fuel (apparently Air Force One is a very fast plane).
During the travels of Air Force One on 9/11, the Secret Service posted an armed guard at the bottom of the stairs leading to the upper deck where the president was. The implied message was, “We don’t even know for sure that a terrorist isn’t on this plane right now.”
United 93 – the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania – was delayed at takeoff. This meant that they were in the air later than planned, and the passengers had seen news reports of the other planes hitting buildings. This is why they stormed the cockpit – the passengers on the other flights had acquiesced to the hijackers, but the United 93 passengers had seen what was going to happen to them. If their plane had taken off on time, they might have stayed in their seats, and it might have hit the Capitol (where investigators believe it was headed).
The F-16s that took off to intercept United 93 were not armed. They left before they could be loaded with missiles or bullets. The pilots debated whether or not to ram the plane out of the sky, but it crashed before they intercepted it.
There is audio recording of the struggle on United 93. I do not know if this is public, but apparently there is very clear audio from the cockpit recording of the fight for control of the plane. They cannot tell if the passengers ever got in the cockpit, but the terrorists voices are heard responding to the passengers trying to get in. The last words recorded are “Allahu Akbar” repeated eight times.
When the towers collapses, dust and ash became a huge problem. People couldn’t breath. Multiple people tell of having to literally scoop gobs of ash out of their mouths so they could breath.
In the afternoon of 9/11, boats of all kinds started pulling up to docks in Lower Manhattan to ferry people across the East River and the Hudson to safety. It turned into one of the largest maritime boat lifts in history, far bigger than even Dunkirk. An estimated 500,000 people were evacuated.
The hospitals in New York braced for a massive influx of patients… that never came. They realized, to their horror, that almost everyone had died, and that there were relatively few injured to care for.
Falling bodies from the towers was a significant problem for the rescue workers. More than one firefighter was killed by a jumper landing on them.
Some of the most harrowing survival stories are people who had to make it down the stairs of one of the two towers. They descended hundreds of flights of stairs in darkness and smoke. Lots of people died on the way down. Survivors headed down were constantly being passed by firefighters heading up.
When the plane hit the North Tower, a massive fireball shot down an elevator shaft and exploded into the lobby, killing people all the way down on the ground.
Rudy Guliani happened to be in the area when the planes hit. He was a few blocks from Ground Zero for most of the day. Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon and went to the affected area to help survivors.
An American Airlines ticket agent had unwittingly helped two of the hijackers make it onto their flight. He didn’t realize what he had done until the next day. He struggled with it for years afterwards.
Lots of survivors didn’t know what to do when they got out of the towers. A lot of them just walked home across the closed bridges to New Jersey, Brooklyn, or Queens.
The last survivor at Ground Zero was rescued at about 10 a.m. on the next morning. No one else was found alive after that.
In the weeks after 9/11, tow trucks were dispatched to train stations in New Jersey to remove all the vehicles that hadn’t moved since that day. These were owned by people who never returned for them.
An older woman named Josephine was rescued from one of the towers by a group of firefighters. When she died of natural causes years later, she asked that the firefighters be her pallbearers.

A couple things in particular struck me –

There was so much bravery. There are so many stories of people running back into the buildings, and people helping other people at huge personal risk to themselves. I kept wondering: would I be that brave, if I was there?

Another theme was the sheer physicality of survival. Many people who survived went to hell and back to get out. They carried other people, they moved heavy things, they through fought dust and heat and smoke.

There are other heartbreaking stories of people in poor physical condition who didn’t make it. Bodyweight was an unavoidable factor – there are several stories of obese people who couldn’t be easily moved, or who just gave up and couldn’t go on. I kept wondering: would I survive? Would I have had the physical capacity necessary to make it out? Would I have had the tenacity to carry on?

This is just an amazing book, and a rare instance where I’m going to say: listen to it on audio. The voice acting is very well-done. Clearly, each of the actors speak multiple parts, but I didn’t start to notice that until the end.

I did not speed up the audio of this book like I usually do. I listened to every last minute of the 16 hours.

It was an incredible experience. I am a different person for having listened to it all.

Book Review: James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Exactly what it claims to be”

This is a huge coffee table book. So big that I’m having trouble finding a place to put it, as it won’t fit in my of my bookshelf spaces.

True to the title, it’s essentially a picture book of movie posters of all James Bond films through SPECTRE, with one image of the Skyfall teaser poster as that must have been the only thing released when the book was printed.

Each image has a caption and some discussion. After looking through all of them, I have some observations.

Here is the classic Bond poster: James Bond, staring intently into the camera, holding a gun, flanked by the two Bond girls (because there’s always two…). Surrounding them is a montage of action sequences from the film. This is an uncannily common formula, I imagine because the films don’t need much explanation – everyone knows what a James Bond film is, these days.
I don’t know why I was surprised that different countries have different posters. Obviously, there are language differences, but the tone of the poster is often different as well, to emphasize some aspect more or less, based on the local culture and appetites.
The Bond women are extremely prominent on every poster, seemingly more so in other countries. During the 1960s, they were mostly illustrated, with clearly exagerrated breast size.
Bond’s gun is most often silenced – meaning, it has a long silencer attached. This is so common as to be odd. I supposed it makes Bond seem “secret,” but it’s also an interesting visual thing – it draws more attention to the gun, and it makes it seem… ungainly. Like, this is a thing you would do to a gun only if you know what you were doing and has a specific reason. (I’m avoiding the phallic implications…)
I was a little surprised to see that Grace Jones was incredibly prominent on the A View to a Kill posters. She almost the focus of every poster – where as Tanya Roberts was almost nowhere to be found. I suppose it’s because of Jones’ exotic looks and her adversarial role in the film’s plot.

This was a fun book. I spent about a month paging through it.

Now, if I could only find a place to put it…

Book Review: Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Compelling and well-written”

This is the from the same author that wrote Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste. Bianca Bosker is developing a track record of someone who immerses herself in a subculture and tries to figure it out from the inside.

This book is about the art world. Specifically, the “contemporary art” world (which, I learned, is newer than “modern art” – the modern art era ended in the 70s). To try and figure it all out, Bosker embarks on a series of journeys:

She becomes a gallery assistant, twice. Once at a small gallery in Brooklyn, where she gets abused a little, and once at a larger gallery in Manhattan where she becomes an assistant director and works a large art festival in Miami
She takes a detour into performance art, with a woman who sits on people’s faces (not a typo)
She becomes a studio assistant to a semi-famous contemporary artist
She becomes a docent at the Guggenheim museum ion NYC
She follows two Instagram-famous art collectors from North Dakota (“the Icy Gays,” they call themselves) around a show while they select and buy art

All throughout, Bosker keeps asking herself: What is art? Why do people like the things they like?

Like wine, art is the “anti-math.” Mathematics is a simple, objective discipline where things are as they seem and there’s pretty much always a right answer to everything.

But there are no “right” answers in art. Things are the way they are because someone says they should be. And what one person says, might not be what another person says. Art is the supreme stronghold of the personal opinion.

…or is it?

What Bosker finds is that there’s something like a “deep state” in the contemporary art world. There are movers and shakers and a very tight social network – centered in NYC – that tends to drive opinions. There are “The Heads,” which are a shadowy network of gallerists, museum directors, collectors, and other elite that tend to make or break the really famous artists. Bosker never uncovers an actual secret society or anything, but there’s a pervasiveness sense of string-pulling all throughout the book. Someone – or some group of someones – drives influence in the art world.

Related to all this, Bosker discovers the power of “context.” This is the conversation about the art or the artist – the “buzz,” if you will. To “break out” in the art world, you have to have the right context. The right people need to talk about you in the right ways. You need to have the right story. When someone is “explaining” a painting to someone else at a party, they need to have some depth of interesting anecdotes to tell about the artist’s history or thought process or whatever.

As it turns out, fame in the art world is never just about the art. It’s about market positioning and story telling. The exact same painting can be noticed or ignored by The Heads and everyone else because it has or doesn’t have great context.

So, there are two sides to art: what does the market thinks of it, which is separate from what you think of it.

For the latter, Bosker digs into the science of visual comprehension and color constancy. She comes to the conclusion that we ignore more of what’s around us. We just don’t stop to see things anymore, and this is one of the things that art does: it forces us to see something, sometimes by simply excluded everything else.

As a docent at the Guggenheim, Bosker contemplates how long people look at art. She comes to understand that you really have to stare at art for a long time. In doing so, you come to see things that you never would have otherwise.

Throughout the book, she sort of pokes fun at the phrase “makes the familiar unfamiliar,” which is something of a cliche in art showing press releases. But, in the end, she decides that this is pretty accurate: one of the the tricks of art is to show someone something they think they know (the “familiar”) and get them to understand it in a new way (the “unfamiliar”).

…or at least that’s one trick of art. In the end, I think Bosker just comes to the conclusion that art is self-justifying. Humans have loved art for thousands of years, and do we really need to spend a lot of time asking why?

I have my fingers crossed that Bosker writes about the fashion world next. Paging Miranda Priestly…

Book Review: The Last Intellectuals: American Culture In The Age Of Academe

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Sort of interesting, but maybe obsolete”

This book is from the late 80s, and it decries the loss of something that might not exist anymore – or might exist so much that it’s simply no longer notable.

The author is discussing the fate of “public intellectuals,” which are some of the great thinkers of the 20th century that would regularly be published in magazines and journals and books. His argument is that a lot of them have moved on to academia, since it’s a much safer business to be in.

Apparently, the life of a “public intellectual” was under constant threat of poverty, and, in fact, one of the reasons he cites for their decline is that “bohemia” – meaning cheap living conditions in cities like New York – has largely disappeared. So a lot of them became university professors just to survive (note the subtitle).

But, here’s the thing – I’m not sure that a “public intellectual” is a notable thing anymore, because the internet and mass media have generated a lot of them.

Back in the 20th century, getting “published” meant something. If you were in a magazine or got a book published, that got you in front of people. This made you a “public intellectual.”

Well, fast forward a few decades, and everyone is public now. The concept of being “public” in the past meant that you got past the gatekeepers: the magazine and book editors. Those barriers have largely been removed, which means the gatekeepers have really become the public, who decides to what they will pay their attention.

So who is a public intellectual anymore? We have the talking heads on video media, but we also have podcasters now, and YouTubers and bloggers. Is Mr. Beast a public intellectual, meaning someone who has opinions and is in the public sphere and who commands attention? Am I a public intellectual, considering that I’ve been regularly publishing my opinons in public for almost 25 years?

What’s additionally odd about the book is the antipathy the author has for higher education, even though he is employed by it himself (he’s some professor at UCLA, I gather). There was a documentary just over a decade ago with the subtle title of “Velvet Prisons: Russell Jacoby on American Academia” which further expounded on his condescension over the university system (I tried to watch it, but it was painfully boring). He apparently thinks that tenure stifles opinions, and an intellectual who goes to work for such an institution is forever compromised. I found this a little weird.

So, an interesting book, both because of the subject matter, and because of the perspective we have over it so many decades removed from when it was written.

Book Review: Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Great content in an annoying-ish format”

Let’s get the format out of the way: this book is presented as a conversation between a Christian Black man and a Jewish woman. The man is a sportscaster and the woman is a Jewish activist. It is supposedly their dialectical about the struggles of being Jewish in the world today. Some years ago, the man wrote a similar book about being Black. (Also, his brother wrote this book about Christian faith.)

I didn’t like the format. It seemed contrived and even cringey in places. I have no illusions that these two people actually had this conversation or said these things.

But, besides that, it’s a good book.

It covers Judaism from the very basics, starting with, What is a Jew? It talks about the trends and vibe of the Jewish religion, and the intersection between Judaism and race, including the sticky question of whether or not Jewish people are “White.” (It’s complicated, it turns out. People claim Jews are White or not White depending on the point they want to make.)

The gist: being a Jew is not a race or ethnicity, but, clearly, Jewish people do tend to cluster in several ethnicities and racial backgrounds, simply based on where Judaism is popular as a religion. This is the same reason that Christians tend to be White because Christianity is the dominant faith in areas where lots of White people live.

I found the book most interesting when it discussed the sources of Jewish stereotypes and discrimination. I’ve been interested in The Greedy Jewish Moneylender Stereotype for a while (see also: The Money Kings). It turns out that my discussion in that article was pretty spot-on (re: the loaning of money between faiths), but Jews also trended towards banking and retail because they weren’t allowed to own property or work in factories, which I wasn’t aware of.

She also pointed me to Exodus 34:29, which describes Moses after he received the Ten Commandments. It says (KJV):

…when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.

Apparently, a Catholic translator back in 400 AD translated “shone” (as in “glowed”) as “grew horns.” This kick-started the idea that the Jews were somehow in league with the Devil. It also segued into the stereotype of the hooked Jewish nose, assisted by a sketch in 1233 showing the Devil tapping a Jew on the nose, described in this commentary:

The earliest known anti-Jewish caricature is a sketch – actually, an elaborate doodle – in the upper margin of an English royal tax record from 1233. It shows three bizarre-looking Jews standing inside a schematic castle, which is being attacked by a host of cartoonish horned, beak-nosed demons. Another, larger demon in the center of the castle tweaks the freakishly long noses of two of the Jews, as if to underscore the resemblance between their profiles and his own.

The authors dig into the idea that Jews have a lot of power and control the world. There’s an interesting passage where the Black author recounts how all the powerful people in his life are Jewish. He’s in the entertainment industry, and almost every agent and person of power in his industry are Jewish. Additionally, he was an NFL player, briefly, and the owners of both the teams he played for were Jewish, as were the general managers.

This comes back to the aforementioned reasons why Jews drifted into banking, finance, retail, law, etc. They were forced into certain industries – including entertainment, or “Hollywood” – because they were barred from others. Their success in those industries tended to make them wealthy, and in today’s world, wealth is power.

Essentially, prejudice pushed Jews away from “real jobs” like farming and manufacturing. Consequently, they drifted into … “managerial jobs” (?), and, ironically, the Industrial Revolution then marginalized the “real jobs” and made the managerial jobs very powerful.

Add to this the natural tendency for marginalized communities to be insular and over-achieving (see The Triple Package), and the natural tendency of sour grapes and envy, and you get a perfect incubator for antisemitism.

The book was written just after the October 7 attacks. There is some drama between the two authors because the Black man had a Palestinian activist on his podcast… or something. I didn’t quite follow that, but the two authors had a big falling out which almost ended the project.

This is related to a long discussion of the Holocaust and the case for Israel and its right to exist, and then naturally into the concept of Zionism and whether or not you can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic.

The Jewish author says there’s a three-pronged test for anti-semitism:

Does your statement generalize something to all Jews?
Does your statement use stereotypes?
Does your statement blame the simple existence of Israel, rather than specific policies of the Israeli government?

She also makes a very interesting comparison to Pakistan.

Both countries were decolonized from Britain
Both were created as safe haven for persecuted groups (Pakistan was meant to protect Indian Muslims)
Both have frequent land disputes
Both control religious sites of other faiths
Both were created at about the same time

Very few people outside that specific region complain about Pakistan. Yet, everyone seemingly has a position and opinion about Israel.

As I said, this is a good book with a lot of good information. I didn’t love the format, but I’m wondering if maybe I found it engaging anyway? I seemed to really connect with the book and got a lot out of it, and maybe that’s because of the format? If the book was written more traditionally (by only the Jewish author, because she’s 85% of the content, really), would it have held my interest the same way? I don’t know.

Book Review: End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Entertaining, not particularly deep”

I enjoyed this book, for what it was. I’m trying to get better about predicting the content and tone of a book before reading it, so I can better absorb it. I correctly predicted this one as a fun trip into some morbid scenarios, and that’s what it was.

The author covers all sorts of ways the world might end, how it might happen, and what we’re doing about it. They are:

Asteroid impact
Volcanic eruption
Nuclear war
Climate change
Disease epidemic
Bioltechnology (so, an artificial disease)
AI run wild
Alien invasion

Notably, the book was written in 2019, which means it was written without knowledge of (1) COVID-19, and (2) the huge advances in AI in the last five years. The author had no idea what was coming.

Also, the threats fit along some different axes:

Instant (asteroid, volcano) and incremental (climate change)
External (asteroid, aliens) and internal (and perhaps self-inflicted; nuclear war, AI)

Of all the things he wrotes about, climate change is the one clearly happening right now, so we’re in the middle of something that could effectively end the world.

I was interested to note that volcanic eruption is one of the most devastating to happen in our history. The book refers to the Toba eruption in particular. Some scientists believe it created a 10-year “volcanic winter” in which volcanic ash obscured the sun, and it cooled the planet for up to 1,000 years afterwards.

The author describes volcanic eruptions as “the Earth turning itself inside out,” which I thought was a creative way of putting it, and it’s genuinely pretty accurate. We don’t often think of the fact that the Earth is basically a hard shell around a seething ball of lava. Volcanos are holes in that shell. Imagine nuclear waste in a sealed container. Then punch a hole in it, and that’s about the truth of the situation.

This was a fun book. I enjoyed it.

Book Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Slightly ponderous, but interesting”

This is the story of a journalist’s experience with LambdaMOO, which was the original “chat room” of the early 1990s.

A couple definitions –

A “MUD” was a “Multi-User Dungeon,” which was original a game-ish environment where you could move through a virtual space, described via text only.
A “MOO” was a “(MUD) object-oriented,” which referred to a specific new method of technology and design of the original MUDs, but generally came to mean nothing more than a more advanced MUD.

LambdaMOO was one of the original MOOs, originally founded at Xerox PARC. The author is a journalist who connects to the environment in the 1990s. He originally wrote a story called “A Rape in Cyberspace” on the cover of the Village Voice in 1998 which detailed a specific event that happened in the MOO. A player hacked the system to force the virtual avatars of other players to engage in (and describe) sexual acts performed on his avatar.

The fallout from this event, and the journalist’s subsequent adventures on the MOO turned into this book.

Fundamentally, the book is about how we were all adapting to online life in the 1990s. It’s about the projection of our corporeal selves into virtual analogs, and how that affects us psychologically.

Are we our virtual selves? Do our actions as our virtual selves reflect our real selves? Does an act performed virtually (the aforementioned “rape,” for example) carry the same weight as if performed physically?

The writing style is very dramatic. The book reads kind of a like a novel, or a memoir. The journalist often compares and contrasts his adventures on the MOO with his relationship with his real-world girlfriend, and the idea of love, emotion, and sexual experience weigh pretty heavily on everything.

The author spends a lot of time talking about “cybersex” (quoted, because there’s no settled definition of it). There’s a section where the author is determined to participate in cybersex, and has a debate with his girlfriend about whether or not it’s real sex and would constitute cheating. At some point, I believe he does go through with the act, but I skipped the last half of that chapter because it got cringey and really didn’t want to read about it.

I’m fascinated by the history of technology, and specifically how humans have adapted to it. In this respect, the book is a good look at back when we were on the cusp of a revolution. In the late 90s, we were all moving swiftly online, and we were trying to figure out the relationship between our digital lives and our real lives, and wrestling with the confusion this brought about.

So, I enjoyed that part of it. As a whole, however, the book can be a bit of a tedious read. It’s very memoir-ish, so it’s left to the reader to decide what – if anything – is to be learned from the experience.

Book Review: The Oppermanns

Tue, 6 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Engrossing historical fiction”

I read this on the recommendation of a friend. I knew nothing about it, but I’m trying to lean more on recommendations.

It’s a novel, written in the 30s, though I didn’t know that at the time. I thought it was contemporary.

It tells of a year in the history of the Oppermann family – a successful, high-achieving Jewish family living in Berlin in 1933. They own a furniture store which bears their name. One of the sons is a doctor, another is an author. They’ve all done very well in life.

And then the National Socialists start to rise, and society changes. Hostility toward them grows. The family has to sell the store to a rival company with a non-Jewish name. Eventually everything they’ve worked for starts to unravel.

The decline is slow at first, and then suddenly – seemingly in a flash – the pogroms start, and family members get carted away in the middle of the night to be accused of various invented crimes. Some of them end up in concentration camps. Some escape over the border.

One of the younger family members gets a new teacher who is a budding Nazi. He assigns a subject about Arminius, a legend of Aryan history. When the student says something less than complimentary, the teacher humiliates him and demands a public apology, which ends in tragedy.

All throughout, there’s a pervasive effort to humiliate Jews. Not only were they physically harassed, but they were constantly reminded of their second-class status. They had to sing Nazi songs, salute Hitler, and when the family store is picketed, the Nazi protesters have the gall to demand reimbursement for the cost of making the signs.

The non-Jewish populace stood by while this happened, apparently hoping it would end soon. Some Gentiles stick up for them, but many others see it as not their problem. Others – like the Gentile they have to sell the furniture store to – might not hate the Jews, but their persecution is financially and socially beneficial all the same.

The book brought back memories of the Bonhoeffer biography, which taught me that most of the German populace was horrified by the rise of the Nazis, but felt powerless and just hoped it would end soon.

I love ensemble stories, and I really enjoy vast family histories (see What’s Bred in the Bone for the Canadian version of this).

What’s really terrifying about all this is reading it and then learning it was written in 1933. This wasn’t a history when it was written – it was literally still happening at the time.

Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Mon, 5 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Timeless lessons wrapped in good fiction”

This is technically a re-read for me, but it had been something like 20 years. My group at work read this together over the holidays, then discussed it.

This is business fiction (“A Leadership Fable”), which is always tricky. Some of it is written so poorly.

But, thankfully, Lencioni is really, really good at this. The story is about a new CEO of a Silicon Valley startup. She leads her executive team through a series of off-site meetings to try and figure out why they don’t work together.

There is drama. A couple executives bail out. Revelatons occur. People argue. And it all rings so true. The conversations seems absolutely authentic to me – I’ve been in multiple versions of all of them. There’s a lingering background tension because humans bring baggage to work with them. We just don’t usually talk about it.

Here are the “five dysfunctions” of the title –

Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results

That list does it zero justice, because Lencioni does such a great job of unpacking it all and putting it into context. You genuinely need to read the book because you can’t understand it comprehensively unless you read the “fable” that Lencioni has written.

The underlying point is valid and true: we are humans. We suck, in many ways. We have emotional hangups that we bring with us to work, most of which we’re not willing to discuss. And the key to a great team is to bring this stuff out in to the open.

(A lot of what he talks about was also mentioned in Trillion Dollar Coach.)

Book Review: Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Interesting, but didn’t totally convince me”

This book promises a global indictment of the business of private equity. But it didn’t deliver on that. What it did was tell four stories of specific cases of private equity associated with negative outcomes.

However, I’m not totally convinced that:

…all private equity causes negative outcomes
…in these examples, private equity was the thing that specifically caused the negative outcome

First of all, the book did teach me that private equity and venture capital are not the same thing. I had conflated the terms for years. VC is very early-stage money for speculative companies that may or may not work out. PE involves purchasing larger stakes in mature, running companies that someone thinks they can improve or simply because they generate a solid profit.

The book is organized around four stories:

The acquisition of Toys R Us by a consortium of private equity funds
A roll-up of two rural Wyoming hospitals by a large health care conglomeration
The acquisition of a series of newspapers by a larger company
One tenant’s experience with with apartment when a national apartment chain buys the building

(Actually, all the stories – not just that last one – are told from the perspective of specific people: a Toys R Us retail employee, a doctor at the hospital, a reporter at the newspaper.)

Here’s the biggest problem with the book –

At least two of the stories – Toys R Us and the newspapers – involve industries that were chronically failing at the time. The implication of the book is: these situations ended poorly, and private equity was the reason. Put another way, these organizations would have been fine if not for the PE activity.

I just don’t believe this is true.

Toys R Us was getting destroyed by Amazon and Walmart. The newspaper business was getting destroyed by the internet. The idea that they could have stayed independent and everything would have worked out for them is kind of laughable. Like I said before, I’m not convinced that PE was the cause of the negative outcome here (Toys R Us eventually liquidated, and almost every newspaper in the country is going under).

The other stories are a mixed bag. In the hospital example, the two facilities are 28 miles apart. The PE firm closes the maternity ward of one of them for the sake of less duplication of services, which infuriates the doctor at the center of the story. (It does seem that the acquiring firm was a little dishonest about their plans, but that’s not an argument against PE as a whole.)

What we have here is a difference in priorities. The doctor wants maximum patient care, while the PE firm wants maximum profit. The argument is, does closing the maternity ward of one of the hospitals to increase efficiency (and therefore profit) compromise patient care to a severe enough degree that it shouldn’t be done? Clearly, you’re going to get two different answers to that question from a physician or an investor, and where does the balance and power over the decision lie?

Consider that you really can’t have “maximum” patient care. That would involve a team of physicians waiting on every single patient at all times, which is a non-viable strategy. There always has to be some concession to economic and staffing realities… and who gets to make that decision? The argument of the book is that decision moved too far in the wrong direction, which is a management issue, perhaps exacerbated by the structure of private equity?

As for the last story about the apartment building, that seems to be the case of a specific landlord being crappy. Does that means all private equity is bad? No, it means that this particular PE firm was a bad landlord, but, again, I’m not ready to indict the entire industry over this.

There’s an inverse survivor bias at work here: these are the stories we hear about. Toys R Us was in the news because it was a storied American brand that fell apart. You don’t hear about many positive outcomes of PE acquisitions.

But they do happen. After I read the book, I went to breakfast with a friend who runs a regional PE company, managing multiple funds. He told me stories with great outcomes. For example, a small manufacturing firm could expand and grow, but the owners are older and don’t want to take the risk with their retirement. So the PE firm bought 75% of it, thus ensuring the financial safety of the owners, then invested the money to expand, and grew the company.

My friend says there are two ways to look at an acquisition:

Grow it by increasing revenue and therefore profit
Make it more profitable by cutting expenses

He likes that first one. He looks for companies that could expand. The second one is both hard from a human perspective (it almost always means layoffs – the companies are invariably described as “fat”), and it’s very hypothetical. Cutting expenses might work, or it might not.

But it works on a consulting slide, anyway, and this is usually enough to convince a bank. It’s not a coincidence that lots of PE companies also have business consulting groups attached to them.

I think PE struggles at scale, because, like anything, the further you are from something, the less important it is, and the less you consider the human costs of anything.

Additionally, the PE firms often don’t have enough at stake. They make “management fees” – 2% of the value of the investment is typical – and they load the target company up with debt (a “leveraged buyout”), so they’re not on the hook for much.

(For the life of me, I cannot figure out why banks agree to these things. Why were Bain, Vornado, and KKR not on the hook for the $5 billion they borrowed to buy Toys R Us? Is this is just lenders acting stupidly?)

In the case of my friend running the regional fund, he stays very close to the companies they buy. Between all their funds, they have maybe a half-dozen companies. He’s constantly in touch with them, visits the facilities regularly, etc. He told me of a recent decision to improve the health care benefit because (1) it would make it easier to retain and attract employees, and (2) it was just the right thing to do.

I think large-scale PE just makes it easier to “check your humanity at the door,” so to speak. When you’re running hundreds of hospitals, it makes it easier to not give a crap about a couple of them.

I do have concerns about PE in industries that are required for human survival and for which there are few alternatives. Health care and housing are two of those. No one needs Toys R Us and there are alternatives to print newspapers. But it’s hard to find alternatives to hospitals and housing. I’m not sure that rolling those up under large faceless firms is a great idea without some semblance of localized control and input.

So, it was an interesting book – it’s well-written, and the human aspect of the stories is engrossing. But I think it over-promised on the idea of proving the crappiness of an entire industry and then failed to deliver on it.

Update

Added on February 23, 2026

I found an article that reinforces the book’s claim that PE killed Toys R Us, not Amazon:

The Amazon narrative also flatters Amazon. Take Toys R Us: in 2000, the toy chain signed a 10-year exclusive deal to sell on Amazon’s platform, paying $50 million a year and effectively surrendering its own e-commerce development. By 2003, Amazon was letting competitors sell toys on the same platform. Toys R Us sued, won, and terminated the deal in 2006, but it had lost six years of e-commerce development during exactly the period when online retail was being built. The company that then got loaded with $5.3 billion in LBO debt in 2005 was already competing with one arm tied behind its back. When Toys R Us collapsed, the narrative was “Amazon killed the toy store.” And sure, Amazon helped, but it was the LBO that extracted the cash flow and actually killed the company. Amazon got the credit, which translated into a market narrative about e-commerce invincibility that has bolstered its valuation ever since.

Book Review: Air Wars: The Global Combat Between Airbus and Boeing

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “A bit tedious, written from a very low-level”

This book was written by an airline journalist, and it shows. It’s very low-level – a sometimes bewildering recitation of deals and maneuverings by the two biggest aircraft manufacturers in the world: Boeing and Airbus. It’s like if every news article ever written about them were bundled up into a book.

What’s missing is any larger context of how the aircraft business works, which is what I think I was looking for. I’m quite interested in air travel as an economic system. I think I was looking for lessons in how the business works, and that’s not what this is.

What I was struck by, however, was all the levels of influence that the air travel industry has to deal with. There are so many groups applying force:

The airframe manufacturers
The engine manufacturers (engines on planes are like tires on a car; the manufacturer buys and installs them from someone else)
The airlines, both passenger and freight
The leasing companies, which buy a lot of aircraft and lease them out
The manufacturing labor unions
The operation labor unions (pilots, flight attendants, etc.)
The airports and their legal authorities
The various regulatory agencies, for each country
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a division of the United Nations based in Montreal which provides international air travel standards
The parts manufacturers and their supply chains
The investors
The aircraft industry press
The air freight shipping customers
And, finally the air traveling public

Any decision is a process of threading the needle and trying to make everyone happy, or at least trying to anger the least number of them.

Also, in the chapter on the Airbus A380 was something for which I’ve been searching for a while: a list of why the A380 failed.

Opinions differ –

It was just a bad business decision. The plane only made sense if it could be filled, and the A380 has a lot of seats to fill. They could rarely be flown at capacity.
There are rumors that Boeing goaded Airbus into the A380. Boeing knew it was a bad decision, so they feigned interest in building a new version of the 747, which prompted Airbus to counter with the A380. When Airbus couldn’t back out, Boeing abandoned the new 747 plans, and rumors persist that it never planned to follow through on them anyway.
It was born with bad engines. Rolls Royce provided engines that required a four-engine configuration, whereas right around the corner were better engines that worked with only two of them. The 787 benefited from these better engines. The CEO of Airbus at the time remains bitter about this today – he maintains that Rolls Royce was negligent in failing to predict the evolution of the engine market.
The air travel industry was changing, or it didn’t change the way Airbus predicted. The industry that greeted the introduction of the A380 just wasn’t what was needed to sustain it.
SARS and then the 2008 financial crisis damaging the economy at a critical time in the aircraft’s introduction.

The book is a lot of “inside baseball.” The author has spent decades deep in the aircraft industry, and the altitude (no pun intended) was just a bit wrong. I needed it to be higher – I needed it to explain more clearly the forces that impact the aircraft industry. I think that’s what I really wanted.

Book Review: A Simple Guide to Retrieval Augmented Generation

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

Here’s the bizarre thing about RAG: it basically flips what you thought you understood about AI on its head, and beckons you to understand it more accurately.

LLMs are static things. They are trained at a point in time, and cannot be “updated” in the sense that you’re probably thinking. An LLM cannot be incrementally trained. If you want to give it new information, you have to re-train it, and training an LLM this takes a long time and is expensive. It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and train an LLM (see this)

So, how do you get an LLM to –

Respond (“know”) about information that happened after it was trained?
Response (“know”) anything about your particular business, especially internal information which could not have been in its training data?

You do this with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This is a method by which you take the user’s prompt, search for information that might answer it, then pass that information into the LLM with the prompt.

To be clear: RAG really has nothing to do with the LLM. The user’s prompt is used to find information – the user searches the RAG database without knowing it, then all that information is fed into the LLM. By the time the LLM starts its work, the RAG part is all done.

(See this diagram that I put together from this book. Note where the RAG parts are and where they intersect with the main flow that starts with Boromir and ends with Ron Burgundy.)

This seemed weird to me. If you can find the information in the RAG database, why not just give it to the user?

Well, you can (this book even says that you should in some cases), but LLMs are very good at generating text. They can sort through all sorts of inputs and generate something intelligent from them. So are giving the LLM the answer along with the question, and saying, do what you’re good at: make this answer…pretty.

And this helps frame what LLMs really do: they generatively predict text. That’s it. They don’t “know” anything, they just forecast and select from a bunch of probabilities. (A friend called LLMs “spicy autocomplete.”)

RAG is fundamentally about search and information retrieval – tokenization and vector storage and such. This book did a nice job of explaining the “RAG pipeline,” but I couldn’t help but think, “This is just the same search stuff we’ve been doing for years.” There are some idiosyncrasies – chunking and and overlap, for example – but mostly, you’re pushing content into a search index and producing results. You’re just not formatting or presenting the results: you’re leaning on the LLM for that.

Weirdness of RAG aside, this was good book. Like most Manning titles, it was clear and went to the depth it needed to.

Book Review: Mastering Hallucination Control in LLMs: Techniques for Verification, Grounding, and Reliable AI Responses

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Good, clear coverage of the topic”

Here’s the thing about AI: we’re putting a lot of effort into making sure it doesn’t do silly things. Most of our effort around AI seems to be put toward controlling it.

A “hallucination” is when an LLM generates text that sounds correct, but isn’t. LLMs are eager to generate text, and they will always do so unless told otherwise.

Almost hilariously, the most cost effective way to reduce hallucinations might be to simply add something like this to the prompt:

If you do not have the correct information, respond that you cannot answer.

LLMs need to be told that it’s okay not to answer (or, ironically, they need to be told how to answer when they shouldn’t answer…)

Beyond that, this book goes deep into “pipelines” of processes and guardrails that prevent LLMs from hallucinating. The options presented in this book are at the extreme, but that’s kind of point – you need to decide what your particular situation requires.

For a research project I’m doing, I created a diagram of the major concepts here.

A list of things you can do –

Redirect the prompt away from AI entirely. If someone inputs “What is the current temperature,” just redirect that to a service that provides it. Same for stock quotes. Same for simple math.
Modify the prompt with safety guidelines and instructions (as noted above)
Use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to supply correct and updated information with the prompt. This gets a little weird, because you’re essentially providing the answer via simple search, and just depending on the LLM to form the answer. The lines between an LLM and a search engine get blurry.
When using RAG, “chunking” size matters. You should experiment to see what size of chunk and what level of overlap for your content domain gives you the best results.
Use multiple LLMs to generate the answer, then use an LLM to compare them. How different are they?
Force the result into a specific output structure (a JSON schema) which can then be parsed for further verification.
Use various forms of post-answer verification. The author provides several options that I didn’t know existed, but it seems to boil down to parsing out facts and nouns and verifying them.
Instead of answering, have the LLM form a function call that you execute to get the answer in an deterministic way.
Have a “human in the loop” that reviews the answer.

The book is comprehensive. I’m not sure I’ll remember everything (and there are some very brief code snippets that didn’t do much except “prove” there are code solutions), but it emphasized to me the limits to LLMs and extent we need to go to control them.

The author apparently has considerable experience in high-stakes LLM usage: medical and legal advice, it seems.

Book Review: The Case for Christian Nationalism

Fri, 5 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “A very long inflammatory opinion that assumes your agreement”

This book was wildly controversial, for good reason. The author – Stephen Wolfe – is unapologetically pushing for a very unpopular point-of-view in the current social and political climate.

Here is his argument:

Christianity is the only true religion
Government exists to encourage citizens to live a good life
Therefore, the United States government should explicitly endorse and promote Christianity, and suppress other religions

(Note: I didn’t read this because I agree with this, or because I’m even predisposed to it. I read it to try and understand it.)

Understand that my analysis above is not an exaggeration or an interpretation. That is literally the argument.

Here are some quotes:

Christian nationalism is a Christian nation acting to secure and protect itself as a distinct Christian people… it follows that civil government can and ought to direct the people to the Christian religion

And:

[The military…] can be designated “soliders of Christ.”

And:

National uniformity in sacred ceremonies will certainly contribute to national solidarity. What better way for a people to image their Christian community than for all to worship the same way?

And:

Arch-heretics are publicly persistent in their damnable error and actively seek to convince others of this error, to subvert the established church, to denounce its ministers, or to instigate rebellion against magistrates. For these reasons, they can be justly put to death.

…whoa.

And:

Here, I will justify violent revolution…

(Believe me, by the time he gets to that, you’ve seen it coming a mile away.)

You have to give Wolfe credit: he’s not hiding anything. He’s openly arguing for a Christian theocracy in America, full stop. You could take the Taliban, switch out the beliefs, and I’m not sure there would be much difference.

Wolfe assumes a Reformed Christian position, and doesn’t quote the Bible much or make an argument for the right-ness of Christianity. He states outright that he simply assumes you share his religious position.

Now, I could write a lot about that, but it seems beside the point. Wolfe clearly wrote the book to express his point-of-view, and I quite suspect that he simply wouldn’t care much about arguments to the contrary. If someone pointed out not everyone agrees Christianity is the true religion, he’d likely respond, “Well, they are mistaken” and that’d be the end of that.

Thus, if you’re not a Christian, the book is simply a non-starter. That’s the first bar you have to get over.

If you’re a Libertarian, it’s also a non-starter. To agree with Wolfe, you have to renounce any claim to or belief in religious liberty.

If you’re a more traditional conservative, the book might put you in a difficult spot. You may believe the government is predisposed against Christianity and that maybe it should back off a little. But if you’re in favor of smaller government… well, this ain’t it. This is an argument for the ultimate form of “Big Government” (note my prior comments about the Taliban…)

In making his point, Wolfe relies on a claim that I’ve read in a couple of other books about Christian Nationalism. They claim that the Establishment Clause of the Bill of Rights –

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

– was intended to apply only to the federal government. The states are free to do what they want, and several of them had pro-Christian positions written explicitly into their Constitutions.

(See Christian Nationalism and The Boniface Option.)

This position has absolutely zero chance of surviving a court challenge, so the book is largely theoretical. He’s arguing in favor of a theory – spinning a fantasy of what he would like to happen, basically.

In some sense, I think he’s simply daring Christians to disagree? He’s purposefully taking an extreme position that he knows will alienate a lot of Christians, and he’s doing so to make them think about why they disagree.

This verse was quoted in another book:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. – Matthew 28:19-20

That book – I think it was Isker and Torba’s book – also said this (paraphrased):

A Christian who is against government promotion and enforcement of Christianity is simply a disobedient Christian.

And that’s what this book forced me to confront. I am a Christian, but in no way do I want the U.S. government endorsing or enforcing Christianity.

The question becomes… why do I feel this way?

For me, it’s a matter of authenticity. A coerced belief is worse than no belief at all. The only true value of belief is that it’s genuine.

Wolfe concedes that the person has to make a personal choice which cannot be forced, but he believes that the government and the country as a whole should make Christianity the default expectation, because this will help people make what he feels right decision. It will “orient people to Christ.”

Is this true? I don’t share that opinion, but I’m a little conflicted as to why.

I feel like faith has value for existing in spite of the world we live in, not because of it, but I also feel like there’s another argument lurking below the surface that I can’t quite put my finger on.

It might get back to the classic argument of dealing with a problem at the source, or just dealing with the symptom of that problem.

I think about gun control laws, for example. The classic conservative opinion is that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” meaning that gun control is just an attempt to wallpaper over larger societal issues. However, when it comes to abortion, someone who is pro-life is quite ready to make it illegal rather than say “abortions don’t kill babies; mothers kill babies” and deal with the deeper societal problems that cause mothers to want abortions in the first place.

So, which is it? Do we deal with the underlying reasons why people don’t want to turn their lives toward Christ, or do we simply implement force and coercion in an attempt to get them there?

In countering my fear of potential hypocrisy, Wolfe makes a startling claim: you might want to murder someone, but you don’t because it’s illegal. Doesn’t that also make you a hypocrite? If only a law prevents you from doing something, then you’re a hypocrite in the sense that you would do the thing if there was no law. You’re just pretending to be a law-abiding person. So how is the inverse any different?

(Back to the prior example: do gun control laws make us hypocrites? How about restricting abortion?)

…I don’t know. I don’t have a refined enough opinion of that, but I’ll give him credit that it’s an argument I’ve never heard before.

Along the way, Wolfe makes a handful of other claims –

Christians are capitulating to their own persecution, rather than fighting. In some cases, Christians get a “persecution fetish” (my words, but there’s also a subreddit for it) where hostility to Christianity is viewed as a good thing, perhaps in some parallel to how Jesus was treated.
“Particularity” is good. We should be oriented towards our own people, and prefer them to others. Cultural diversity causes conflict, and weakens cultural expectations. (In saying this, I don’t get the feeling that Wolfe is explicitly racist. He’s fine with other races, so long as they stay where they’re at. …of course, he might be assuming something about the racial makeup and “default race” of the United States, I suppose.)
Men have been feminized and a “gynocracy” runs the country. Even if woman aren’t actually running the country, the men who are have compromised their leadership in a concession to maternal influence about nurturing and conflict resolution. (He succumbs a bit to the “alpha male” thing here…)
The nation needs to embrace (or return to) “cultural Christianity,” meaning that Christianity should be considered the default societal expectation, and other religions (or no religion at all) should be ostracized (basically, you can believe what you want, but if it’s not Christianity, you don’t discuss it). He references Renn’s claim to a “Negative World” for Christianity (which I agree with).
If Christian Nationalism is not an option, Christians should self-segregate, try to only do business with other like-minded Christians, and concentrate on things like homesteading, “martial” (note: not marital – martial, like violence; stay in shape and learn to fight) skills, and self-sufficiency

I get particularly annoyed at that last one. How is that helpful? How is hiding in the woods going to help us “make disciples of all nations”? (Isker and Torba were big on “parallel societies” as well.)

The book is well-written. Wolfe states his case unapologetically and calmly backs it up, regardless of whether or not you believe any of it. Only at the end (in an epilogue entitled “Now What?”) does he retreat into well-worn Right-wing tropes and name-calling (“coastal elites,” and such).

I don’t agree with the book. But it did make me think.

I have a (very) grudging respect for how unapologetic and open Wolfe is. He doesn’t beat around the bush – he simply assumes you agree with his religious position and moves on. And he doesn’t ease you into his argument. He’s completely upfront about everything, and that was refreshing from a rhetorical perspective.

In saying the quiet part out loud and daring the reader to disagree, Wolfe put me in a position to examine my own beliefs critically. I feel like I haven’t done this to near the degree I need to, and the book is going to bounce around in my head for a while.

For that, if nothing else, I am (maybe) a little grateful.

Book Review: The Horse and His Boy

Mon, 1 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Mildly entertaining”

This is the third book in Narnia series (by intention, not by publication date – the ordering of this series has always been disputed).

This is set in the world of Narnia, but doesn’t directly continue the prior book. It’s an entirely different story, starting with different characters, but then “crosses over” into the world of the prior book when some of those characters make an appearance.

It concerns the journey of a runaway on a talking horse and the adventures he has in escaping his abusive adoptive father. There are some waring kingdoms, an unwanted suitor, royal drama, etc. Aslan makes an appearance, as does Edmund and Lucy from the prior book, as adults.

I enjoyed it. Not particularly compelling, but it was a fun diversion.

Book Review: How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Unique presentation; unsure of its practicality”

I’m not totally sure what to make of this book. I’ll probably let it sit for a few weeks then read it again.

Although, “read” is an odd word to describe it, because the presentation is non-traditional. There are seven chapters, but each page is its own self-contained thought with its own heading. No thought spans more than one page, and no page would take you more than 30 seconds or so to read.

I liked this format. It’s super-approachable.

(It kind of reminded me of Why you need a content team and how to build one.)

The seven chapters are (emphasis from the author):

Identify the Mess
State Your Intent
Face Reality
Choose a Direction
Measure the Distance
Play with Structure
Prepare to Adjust

I like the flow, but this is not a practical, how-to guide. It’s very… Gestalt about the subject?. Like, the author is trying to give you the overall vibe of the process, not specific nuts and bolts. It’s not pretentious at all, but it doesn’t get down into the nitty-gritty details of anything either.

I also found interesting the variability of the term “mess.” I got the feeling that the book – which is ostensibly about information architecture – could be applied to other things, like service and process design, a speaking session to explain a topic, and perhaps even forensics and event reconstruction. There are a lot of “messes” in the world, meaning things that are hard to figure out. What constitutes a “mess” that you need to make sense of is left up to you.

There’s a very good glossary at the back (referred to as an “indexed lexicon”). Also, it introduced me to the word heterarchical which I love. It means things which are networked (at the same level, linking to each other – like Wikipedia, for example), or otherwise not possible of being represented by a strict hierarchy, or perhaps by _many hierarchies.

At one point in the first chapter, she offers some definitions of the Unholy Trinity of IA Terms: data, content, and information. She comes to some complete opposite conclusions that I did in my first book, but to be fair, I came to some opposite opinions from others. I’m not sure we’ll ever agree on how those concepts are defined or inter-relate.

Again, I’m not totally sold on the book, but apparently the author uses it as a textbook for a class she teaches, so who am I to argue with that? I feel like it’s kind of a reference-style book that you jump around in over time. I’ll keep it in my reading space for a few weeks, then run through it again.

Update

Added on December 3, 2025

I decided to apply the principles herein to a drawer in my office which has been a dumping ground for lots of stuff. Here goes –

Identify the Mess: It’s everything in this one drawer
State your Intent: While I do need a place to dump random stuff, there are some sentimental things in here (cards and notes) which should be more easily accessible, and lots of things that have no utility or relevance anything; I basically need to prune it
Face Reality: I have shamefully used this drawer to avoid dealing with things
Choose a Direction: I’m going to extract all the sentimental cards and notes from this drawer – and other places, I have decided – and move them to a photo box, or some other, better repository
Measure the Distance: Well, first I need the photo box, which I don’t have. I measured some of the cards in the drawer to figure out the right size, and the biggest task will be going out and buying that box
Play with Structure: Sne structure will be the serialized box of cards; another one will be the garbage can where I throw things I don’t want or need anymore
Prepare to Adjust: I realize this is a temporary, repeatable process; my “adjustment” will be the next time I do this

Book Review: I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Oddling compelling”

I cannot figure out why I liked this book, or why I kept reading it for 300 pages.

It’s a memoir of a Chinese guy and the 19 different jobs he holds over a decade or so. As the title would suggest, none of these jobs are notable or glamorous. None are his “passion” and only one or two promise any kind of future. Mostly, they’re all just jobs, and many of them are gig work that he has to string together on his own.

Delivering parcels is only one of them. He works as a bicycle salesman, a gas station jockey, he opens a clothes store and a deli, etc. None of the jobs make him happy, though some are fleetingly pleasant. Mostly they’re all a grind while he tries to scratch out a living.

Although China is the most well-known “communist” nation on Earth, the author tells a story of unbridled capitalism. Far from a state-run Utopia, China is apparently just as selfish and cutthroat as the capitalist world, as lots of people try to get rich off the backs of people lower than them. The problems of a worker in China seem identical to the problems of a worker in the United States.

The prose is simple, humble, and matter-of-fact (credit to the translator; the author doesn’t speak or write English), and is notable for not being particularly… well, notable. It’s just a memoir of work, with a few passages about the philosophy of being alive and trying to make a living.

That’s it. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t put it down.

And neither could a lot of other people – the book has sold 2 million copies in China, and has elevated the author to international status. In the book, he talks of how he loved writing and wished he could do it full time.

That is a lovely irony.

Book Review: The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Practical guidance, well-presented”

I read Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain some time ago, and I remember it being a little underwhelming. It might have been because it was an entire trade-length book about a very simple concept.

This book is better, because it’s much shorter and concentrates on a very basic method. It claims we should organize our stuff in four buckets:

Projects: stuff we’re doing that has a destination
Areas: stuff we need to keep track of on an ongoing basis for a program or some other responsibility we manage
Resources: stuff we might need to refer to at some point in the future
Archives: stuff that no longer fits one of the above categories

Hence: “PARA”: projects, areas, resources, archives.

I haven’t implemented it, so I can’t say if it works or not, but it seems logical. It’s essentially a decreasing order of specificity. Projects are very focused, areas less so, resources even less so, and archives is a big bucket. In fact, later in the book he explicitly labels them “most actionable” (projects), “occasionally actionable” (areas), “actionable when needed” (resources), and “least actionable” (archives).

Forte does a good job of helping people distinguish between projects and areas. Basically: does it have a defined end or goal? If it does, then it’s a project. If it doesn’t – meaning, it’s just something to have maintain some level of performance area, forever – then it’s an area.

Also, he stresses the need for a “Project List.” Most people can’t produce this. We have to do lists, which are tasks we need to get done. But few people have a list of projects that involve the completion of multiple tasks toward an end goal.

I’m absolutely guilty of not having this, and I often thing it’s because the idea of it scares me. If I were to write down everything I need to do over time, the stress would be remarkable. It’s like people who are in debt that avoid knowing what their balances are – you know that debt is out there, and you know it’s bad, but you don’t want to know the specifics, because that would make you feel worse.

The book is… casual. Forte provides lots of ways that you might modify the system, and he presents PARA as non-exacting. He just wants you to do something, rather than stay disorganized all the time. At points in the point, he’s just trying to drill things down to the absolute most simple thing you could possibly do.

This is demonstrated in the “three habits” he claims are critical to maintaining a PARA system:

Organize according to outcomes
Organize just in time
Keep things informal

And later on, he gives the ultimate casual advice: “When in doubt, just start over.”

I liked it. The format is good too – it’s kind of artistic little book, with very short chapters, large font, two-colors, pull quotes on entire pages, etc. That makes it approachable, which is half the challenge with these things.

I am going to take a run at PARA, in some form. I like the segregation of it. It feels reasonable.

Book Review: IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Comprehensive but tedious”

This is a very long history of IBM, which is exactly what it promised to be. I’m not sure what I was expecting.

IBM was around for most of the 20th century. It got its started with scales and calculating machines – back in the early part of the 20th century, calculating stuff was complicated, hard work.

From there it moved into punchcards, and it owned that market for decades. It basically held a monopoly over it.

Then it moved into computers, and quickly became dominant with the sale of the System/360 which became the “mainframe of record” for businesses. From mainframes, it went into the personal computer market, but never did great at it. “PC Jr.” was a disaster, and the PC business just never really took off. IBM sold the consumer PC to Lenovo in 2005; then sold its server busines to them in 2014.

(I remember selling computers at Best Buy in 1998. The IBM home computers were also-rans. We would only have them in stock sporadically, and for whatever reason, they didn’t sell. Compaq and Hewlett-Packard were the big sellers back then. Gateway 2000 was selling well outside of Best Buy, and Dell would come along to beat everyone some time after that. The exception to this was the Thinkpad line of laptops – we didn’t sell many laptops at Best Buy, but the Thinkpad has always had a cult phenomenon behind it.)

Critically, IBM never got copyrights over MS-DOS. It paid Microsoft to develop it, and then licensed it from them, but Microsoft retained the rights to also license it to other companies. And they did. This became known as the era of “PC clones” and the “IBM-compatible PC.” This gave everyone else a foothold in the market, and it goes ranks as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the technology business.

IBM almost went bankrupt in the early 90s. The failure of their PC business (and of OS2/Warp – another attempt at an OS) was killing them. They posted the biggest loss in corporate history (to that point) in 1993 and laid off 100,000 people.

A guy named Lou Gerstner came in to save it (he wrote a book about that effort in 2003: Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance). They shifted to a mainly services and consulting model. Today they make about 20% from their mainframe business, which continues to do quite well with the z/Architecture series (it basically monopolizes this market). The rest comes from services and cloud computing.

The book was written by a 17-year employee, and spends a lot of time on the IBM culture and how it changed over the years. IBM was famous for lifetime employment and treating their employees very well. But as business norms changed, IBM changed with it, instituting layoffs, offshoring, and implementing an employee ranking system that lots of employees found demoralizing.

Regardless of its current status, IBM was a 20th century business icon. A lot of great research was done there, and a shocking number of tech luminaries cut their teeth there. The author even makes the claim that the children of former IBMers over-achieved more than normal, just because they watched their parents work hard for the company.

The book is a tough read. I don’t know anyone who would genuinely read it for pleasure (which raises the question of why I read it…). You would have to really love IBM to get into this.

Book Review: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Good history and explainer of Islam’s relationship with the West”

This book was written in 2003, but that doesn’t matter because the events it talks about have happened over a millennia or so.

This is a discussion of the “problems” that Islam has with the West: why terrorism and anger toward the West are on the rise all over the world. In the end, the list wasn’t that surprising to me:

Historically, the Crusades are a pretty big reason. There’s just this looming history of Christendom riding into Muslim lands and trying to take them away. Many Muslims view imperialism and the U.S. presence in the Middle East simply as a continuation of The Crusades by another name (note that, right up until this death, Osama Bin Laden referred to his enemies as “The Crusaders”). (However, the author argues that the Crusades themselves were really just an attempt to take back what had been taken from Judaism and Christendon as Islam spread northward into Europe.)
Islam has no separation of church and state. Religion and government are the same thing. If religions are at war, then so are countries.
“Jihad” is called for in the Quran, though opinions differ on whether it refers to general religious struggle, or more explicitly, to war and violence.
Several prominent Muslims throughout history have framed the United States as a degenerate, self-indulgent culture that separates people from God.
The United States has supported Israel and other anti-Muslim regimes. The author claims this is partially due to a desire to prevent Soviet influence (the Soviets had a tendency to cozy up to Muslim leaders, up until they invaded Afghanistan) and prevent a hegemony over Middle Eastern oil (having no one in charge is more economically advantageous than the alternative).
Significant negative influence flowed in from Europe and the Soviet Union. At varying times, Muslim nations have been on good terms with those regions, and they have both been critical of the United States.
The Muslim world is relatively impoverished, and it’s easy to stoke the anger of the poor.

More viscerally and simplistically, the author relays a seven-point list of demands published by Hamas on September 13, 2001 (just two days post-9/11). In the letter, Hamas explains what they want the United States to do (these are paraphrased):

Embrace Islam
Stop oppressing other countries
Admit to having to no principles or morals
Stop supporting anti-Muslim nations like Israel
Leave all Muslim countries
Stop supporting corrupt dictators in Muslim countries
Deal fairly with Muslims in the future

Again, none of this was particularly surprising to me.

That said, the book is well-researched and well-written.

(Note that I was cautiously looking for some evidence of bias. Given when the book was written, I was concerned it was part of an anti-Muslim publishing spike. I didn’t detect anything – it seemed quit neutral and factual – but it’s worth mentioning that the author was born into a Jewish family, and has been considered anti-Muslim by some.)

Book Review: From Workout to Last Call: A Practical Guide to Networking, Increasing Social Capital and Succeeding at Events, Trade Shows, and Conferences

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Perfect for the right reader”

This a book about trade shows and conferences, and how to leverage them for your company and yourself.

The first half is about organizing a presence at the event – this didn’t apply to me at all.

The second half, however, is about networking at an event, and there’s some good advice here. I’ve attended a lot of conferences, so I can’t say I learned anything Earth-shaking, but if you’re new to the conference circuit, this is a helpful guide.

It talks about networking in both a macro and micro sense. Macro in terms of how “social capital” is helpful, and very, very micro – he has advice for how to enter a conversation with a group people, how to extract yourself from such a conversation, how to position yourself at the hotel bar to maximize your chance to talk to people, what notes to tale, how to follow up with people, etc.

(I remember some similar advice from a sales book that had the word “rainmaker” in its title. I went looking for it, to provide a link, but it’s been 20 years and it turns out a lot of books about sales have that word in the title.)

The book intoduced me to the term proxemics. Turns out there’s a whole field of study around how humans use and think about their personal space.

It’s a very practical guide. For the right person, this would be genuinely helpful.

(I did take away one really good tip: when you get your nametag lanyard, tie a knot in it so it rides higher on your torso. That’s a handy one.)

Book Review: Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Well-researched, kinda interesting, but pretty tedious”

This book has one purpose: to persuade you that Vienna is responsible for a shocking amount of the world’s progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors make a case that a lot of the most influential figures came from Vienna.

There are too many names in the book to keep track of, so I asked AI to make me a list of what it considered the top 10:

That’s fair, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface (where is Hedy Lamarr?).

As I noted in the verdict, the book gets tedious. It’s just a long recitation of history, and it kind of all blurs together after a while. The book covers such a breadth of disciplines, that there’s no way anyone would have enough perspective on everything to understand it all.

(Also, weirdly, the book had really long chapters. Like, 50+ pages each.)

I don’t regret reading it, but I feel like it could have been shorter.

Book Review: The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “An amazing work of art”

I backed this project on InideGoGo for about four years until it finally got delivered. It’s a massive book, gorgeously illustrated, and purports to explain everything we would need to know to restart society in the event of an apocalypse.

Actually, that’s a little dark. It’s really just a celebration of technology and societal progression. It’s divided up into chapters: energy, flight, food, the human body, etc. Each two-page spread is gorgeously illustrated with drawings about how things work. Some are realistic, but some have a really cool steampunk-ish vibe to them.

I didn’t “read” this book, because I don’t think you could. It’s really mean to be browsed or admired. The content is quite good, but the illustrations and the workmanship are what really what shine through.

The paper is a gorgeous parchment-style, and the book is shockingly light – it just weights about a third of what you think it should based on its size. It’s bound with a cloth cover.

I love this book. I’ll probably keep it open, maybe reading a “chapter” a day (again, really just a two-page spread). I don’t know that I’ll absorb anything in particular, but I just want to celebrate the workmanship that went into compiling, illustrating, and producing it.

Book Review: 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Fun and browsable”

This book started as an email newsletter that I subscribed to. I then backed a Kickstarter-ish project to get it published.

It’s exactly what it claims to be: a comprehensive history of text adventure games – the games were you make specific decisions, usually in a branch narrative, often by typing things like “GO NORTH” or “TAKE NECKLACE” or something.

I always loved these, but I’m bad at them and that makes me sad. They’re always full of puzzles, and I’m somehow terrible at solving the puzzles. I get impatient and quit. I never did finish Zork.

(A recent attempt to solve Blue Prince has similarly failed. It’s not a text game, but has that same vibe.)

There are lots of those games in there, but there are some other genres as well. He covers The Cave of Time, which is the first of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books – so, a text game, just on paper instead of on a screen. Also, there are some text-ish games, like Super Star Trek and Hunt the Wumpus, which are not branching narratives, but more like real-time strategy from the command line.

I did not read the entire book, because in many places it was talking about games for which I had no context. But I did browse it, and read many chapters about games that I specifically remember.

It’s very well-researched. The author has done a lovely job of talking about the game mechanics along with discussion the societal and technological environment and trends that existed at the time the game was produced. In some senses, it’s a history of computing itself, from a specific angle.

Book Review: Further Explorations: 50 Years of Text Games

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Fun explorations of alternative styles”

This is an “overflow” book from 50 Years of Text Games. That book looked at specific games, where this book covers some outlying genres. You get the feeling that the author just had a bunch more material that he didn’t know what to do with, so he published another book.

This one is much smaller, and he covers some odd and interesting genres, like games that use an invented language you have to decipher, games that take place in a single “room,” games that only give you one opportunity to make a command, etc.

It was fun. Much faster read that the original book, and I liked the emphasis on styles and genres rather than specific games.

Book Review: Jesus: A Pilgrimage

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Lovely, personal story of a trip to the Holy Land”

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a travelogue by a Jesuit priest of a trip he took to the Holy Land with a friend. In it, he travels to different locations associated with Jesus’s ministry to follow in the footsteps of the Messiah.

He writes so well. It just flows very naturally, and he captured the tension between holy sites and commercialism. He and his friend get scammed a couple of times, and they fall into tourist traps, but they genuinely see some lively things.

One of the problems, it seems, with visiting the Holy Land, is figuring out where things happened. Lots of locations are disputed, and different people claim different things, depending on what can make them money. Additionally, there are places where Jesus might have actually visited, and then there are places that only became notable in the years since the Crucifixion – lots of sites from the early church and from the second millennium.

In each chapter, he details their visit to a site, and the reflects what that moment or story from the Gospels means in the context of Jesus and his ministry. He tries to put a very human spin on it – like, what would it be like for people who were actually there at the time.

I loved the book, and this surprised me because it’s very similar in subject and format to Walking the Bible, and I really didn’t enjoy that. I feel like maybe I should revisit it.

I may read this again in the near future. It feels like a book I should meditate on a little

Reread

Added on December 20, 2025

I went right back through this, with a highlighter and a pencil. In particular was interested in cataloging all of the spritiual places they visited. I have a sudden interest in the physicality of Jesus.

Here’s a list of where they visited or mentioned, in the order they appeared in the book. AI helped me link most all of them to their corresponding Wikipedia page.

Many of the locations are disputed, and the author notes that some of them are clearly not in the location they claim to be. Yet others have become tourist traps run by businesspeople to which the location holds no religious or historical significance.

Galilee
Nazareth
Caesarea Philippi, now called Banias
Tiberias
Bethlehem
Jordan River
Capernaum
Galilee
Basilica of the Annunciation, or The Church of the Annunciation (note that another site claims to be the correct location of the Annunication)
Mount of Olives
Shepherd’s Field
Church of the Nativity, The Nativity Grotto, and The Door of Humility
Milk Grotto
Mary’s Well
Judea
Sepphoris
Garden of Gethsemane
Bethany, also called El-Aizariya
West Bank
Jerusalem
Sea of Galilee, also called Lake Gennesaret and the location of the Bay of Parables
Stone of the Hemorrhaging Woman
Aroma Cave
Mount Precipice
Tabgha Springs
Bethsaida
Magdala
Mount of Beatitudes and the church there
Gerasa
Kursi
Tabgha
Church of the Multiplication
Bethesda
Pool of Bethesda
Old City of Jerusalem
Church of Saint Anne
Jericho
Herodium
Valley of the Shadow of Death
Wadi Qelt
The Tree of Zacchaeus
Damascus Gate
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also the location of The Chapel of the Finding of the True Cross
Al-Eizariya
Tomb of Lazarus
Jaffa Gate
Golgotha, also called Calvary or The Place of the Skull
Cenacle, also called TheUpper Room
Tomb of David
Tyre
Sidon
Room of the Washing of the Feet
Lions’ Gate
Kidron Valley
Basilica of Gethsemane, also called The Church of All Nations
Stone of Anointing
Tomb of Christ
Church of the Flagellation
Mount Zion
Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu
Aedicule
Emmaus
Latrun Monastery
Abu Ghosh
Chapel of the Dismissal
Road to Emmaus
Church of the Primacy of Saint Peter
Mensa Christi
Church of Dominus Flevit
Church of Saint Mark
Via Dolorosa

Here is a list of events the book covers or refers to. In some cases, the author visited the associated location, and in other places, he analyzed or even just referred to the event.

The events are in rough order in which they occured, historically. The book was organized that way, though I’m not sure if the trip was strictly chronologically scheduled.

The book as a whole is a remarkable look into the physical life of Jesus, where he lived and ministered.

Book Review: The Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel The Main Thing

Wed, 5 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Short and focused with a clear point”

I enjoyed this book. It’s very short, and has a very focused point: in the entirety of our spiritual lives, there’s nothing more important than the sacrifice Christ made at the cross, and this is something we need to think about and acknowledge every single day.

The book talks about three related topics:

The crucifixion takes away any legalistic need to earn salvation
The crucifixion takes away any condemnation or shame about our past
The crucifixion stands alone, regardless of how we feel

The book finishes with some practical advice for concentrating on these things during the day – the “cross-centered day.”

It’s a nicely-done book. Well-focused, good message. Doesn’t say too much or too little.

(And when I say the book is small, I mean it’s both short and very small. It’s a tiny little hardcover.)