Book Review: Too Like the Lightning
Ada Palmer's novel made me study the French enlightenment, sympathize with Trump voters, and write my first book review.
View ArticleBook Reviews: Zoolitude and the Void
How to deal with a world gone crazy? Triple book review of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Zoo City, and The Mark and the Void.
View ArticleScientist Fiction
Annihilation and Three-Body Problem are two novels that focus on scientist characters, but give radically different answers to "what makes a scientist?" One fictional scientist made me frustrated, and...
View ArticleSex, Lies, and Dexamethasone
A review of Galileo's Middle Finger: a flawed book, a fascinating memoir, and an important manual on defense against the Dark Arts.
View ArticleThe State of Affairs
A book about rethinking infidelity offers an opportunity to rethink modern marriage and the paradox at the heart of it.
View ArticlePlayStation Odysseys
Three millennia apart, the greatest works of narrative art are dominated by the character of the antihero father. Why are Odysseuses so compelling?
View ArticleThe Player Character
Video games are a massively popular story art form, but there is little good writing about them online. Well, here's some writing about video games and the stories they tell.
View ArticleThe Origin of Consciousness Reading Companion Part 1
Summary of the book club discussion and my many thoughts on the first part of Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind".
View ArticleLessWrong Best of 2018 – Epistemology
Review of the LessWrong 2018 essay collection on epistemology, from how it smells to what it says about the state of the Rationality community in 2020.
View ArticleWhat’s Not Our Problem
A review of what is in Tim Urban's book on politics, and what very conspicuously isn't.
View ArticleSeth Explains Consciousness
Philosophers have long explained why science could never explain consciousness. Thankfully, science didn't listen.
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