Retelling Rousseau: A Modern Guide to the Social Contract
You ever wonder why your government gets to tell you what to do? Like, who decided that? And why do you go along with it?
Latest published articles
Ordinary Men Chapter 10: Deportations to Treblinka
The men of Battalion 101 discovered something about themselves in August 1942: it was a lot easier to load people onto trains than to shoot them in the face. And that discovery changed the entire nature of their participation in the Holocaust.
Lucifer's Banker Uncensored: Final Thoughts on the Biggest Whistleblower Story Ever
One guy walked into the Department of Justice with proof that UBS was helping 19,000 Americans hide over $20 billion from the IRS. The government used his evidence to collect billions in fines and back taxes. Then they put him in prison for 40 months.
Babel-17 Retelling Complete: What a 1966 Sci-Fi Novel Taught Me About Language, Identity, and Thinking
Nineteen posts. One book. A whole lot of thinking about how words shape who we are.
We’re done. The retelling of Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany is complete. And now I want to step back from the chapter-by-chapter breakdown and talk about the book as a whole. What it’s about. What it made me think. And whether you should read it yourself.
Cities in Flight Retelling: Final Thoughts on Blish's Masterwork
Twenty-three posts. Four novels. A timeline that starts with Cold War paranoia in Washington and ends with the literal birth of new universes. We’re done.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Final Thoughts on What Makes Us Human
So we made it. Twenty-two chapters. One of the strangest and most important sci-fi books ever written. And I still think about it weeks after putting it down.
Singapore Unlikely Power - Final Thoughts on This Amazing Book
And just like that, we’re done. Over the past two weeks, we’ve walked through the entire story of Singapore - from ancient sea traders to a modern global powerhouse. Here are my final thoughts on John Curtis Perry’s “Singapore: Unlikely Power.”
Babel-17 Part 5, Ch 5-6: The Finale
After all the revelations, the identity reveals, and the explanations of how Babel-17 works as a weapon, you might expect the final chapters to be long and dramatic. They’re not. They’re short, funny, and surprisingly hopeful. And they end the book on exactly the right note.
Cities in Flight Retelling: The Afterword - Spengler and the Okie Universe
If you made it through all four novels, you might have noticed something. Characters keep dropping the name “Spengler.” Chris gets force-fed Spenglerian philosophy. Cultural morphologists show up and claim they can predict how entire civilizations will behave. Mayor Amalfi makes decisions based on this stuff.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 22: The Electric Toad
This is the last chapter of the book. And it ends not with a bang, not with a chase, not with a dramatic revelation. It ends with a man going to sleep and his wife ordering artificial flies from a catalog.