In the previous post Rousseau told the Poles to build a strong national identity before touching anything else. Now he rolls up his sleeves and gets into the actual machinery of government. Sections VI through IX of the Considerations on the Government of Poland are basically a constitutional repair manual.
Harrington opens Chapter 3 with an image that stayed with me for days. In Cusco, Peru, the Spanish conquistadors built a Catholic church directly on top of an Inca temple to the sun god. They used the same stones. The same walls. They conquered the Incas by using Inca roads, then built their empire on Inca foundations.
Chapter 16 is written by Dustin Mathews, and it answers a question most presenters ignore: what do you do with the people who didn’t buy?
Chapter 2 of Brooke Harrington’s book opens with a character that sounds like he belongs in a movie. An Oxford-educated attorney who built a career chasing down ultra-wealthy people who don’t pay their debts. Harrington calls him “Boba Fett for the Jet Set,” and honestly, the name fits perfectly.
In 1770, a group of Polish noblemen asked a Swiss philosopher for help saving their country. That philosopher was Rousseau. The country was Poland. It was being squeezed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria on all sides. Two years later, in 1772, those three empires would carve Poland up between them in the First Partition. Rousseau’s text arrived too late to change anything. But what he wrote is still one of the most interesting political documents of the Enlightenment. Because his advice was not what you would expect.
Most people treat a presentation like a single event. You give the talk, some people buy, the rest leave, and that’s it. Done. Move on to the next one.
Chapter 1 of Offshore: Stealth, Wealth, and the New Colonialism by Brooke Harrington opens with the Panama Papers. In 2016, a massive leak exposed the offshore financial lives of Jackie Chan, Emma Watson, the king of Saudi Arabia, a former CEO of Adidas, and thousands more. It was a global sensation. But Harrington’s point is that the Panama Papers were just a tiny window into something much bigger. And much worse.
Here is the core of Rousseau’s economic vision for Corsica, in one sentence: “Everyone must live and no one must grow rich.” That is the whole philosophy. If you understand that line, you understand everything else in this second half of his proposal.
What if you could give your best presentation every single day, in every time zone, without actually being there? That is the promise of automated webinars. And Chapter 14 of Kennedy’s book, written by guest expert Geoff Ronning, makes a strong case that this is not lazy marketing. It is smart business.
In the Social Contract, Rousseau wrote one line that changed his life: “There is still one country in Europe fit to be given laws: it is the Isle of Corsica.” A Corsican patriot named Matthieu Buttafoco read that and wrote to Rousseau. Would he actually draft a constitution for the island? Rousseau said yes. This is what he came up with.
Most books about finance start with numbers. This one starts with a girl making dinner for her disabled sister on the wrong side of a very rich town.
Kennedy opens this chapter with a line that is hard to argue with: when they watch it on a screen, it is TV.
Most philosophers write about politics from the comfort of a study. Rousseau wrote these letters while in exile, with a warrant out for his arrest. His books had been burned. His own city had turned on him. This is not abstract theory. This is a man fighting back.
You know how every few years a massive leak hits the news? The Panama Papers in 2016. The Paradise Papers in 2017. The Pandora Papers in 2021. Millions of documents showing how the world’s richest people hide money in offshore accounts, shell companies, and trusts scattered across tiny islands most of us can’t find on a map.
Every unit has that one guy. The boss who somehow always calls in sick on the worst days. The manager who vanishes right before the hardest shift. In Reserve Police Battalion 101, that guy was Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann. And the “worst days” he dodged were not bad meetings or tough deadlines. They were mass murder operations.
For most of history, if you wanted to give a presentation, you had to physically go somewhere. Pack a bag, book a room, show up, speak. P.T. Barnum did it. Mark Twain did it. Business owners still do it every week at luncheons and hotel conference rooms.
This text is unfinished. Rousseau probably intended it to be part of a bigger work on international relations. He mentions this plan at the end of the Social Contract and in letters to his publisher. But even incomplete, it packs a punch. The core idea is simple, and it changes how you think about war.
Here is a hard truth. You can have the best presentation in the world. Perfect structure, strong content, great delivery. And it can still completely fail. Not because of anything you did wrong, but because of who was sitting in the audience.
Before the Social Contract became the book we know, there was a rough draft. Rousseau wrote it, crossed things out, reworked arguments, and left it in a pile of papers. It was found after his death in Geneva, so scholars call it the Geneva Manuscript. Think of it as version 0.9 of his political philosophy.
You can build the best presentation in the world. Perfect slides. Killer story. Solid close. But if nobody shows up to hear it, none of that matters.
We are now at the final stretch of the Social Contract. Chapters 5 through 9 of Book IV cover a mix of institutional mechanics and then, right at the end, the chapter that got Rousseau into the most trouble of his entire career. Let us go through them.
Seeing is believing. That old cliche exists because it is true. You can explain something for twenty minutes and people will nod politely. But show them, physically demonstrate it in front of their eyes, and they believe.
Book IV opens with a bold claim. The general will cannot die. Even in the most corrupt state, even when politicians lie and the public is manipulated, the general will is still there. It is just buried under private interests.
Here is something that took Dave VanHoose years to figure out, and he puts it bluntly: the more you teach, the less you sell.
Rousseau spent the first half of Book III explaining different types of government. Now he asks the harder question: why do they all eventually go bad? And what can ordinary people do about it?
Every good presentation makes a promise. But most promises are weak. They’re vague, implied, and forgettable. Chapter 7 is about fixing that.
Book III is where Rousseau gets practical. He spent Books I and II building the theory. Now he asks: okay, so who actually runs things day to day? Because the sovereign people can make the laws, but someone has to carry them out.
You can have the best slides, the smoothest delivery, and the funniest stories. But if your offer is weak, people will clap politely and walk away without buying anything.
The second half of Book II is where Rousseau gets practical. Now he asks the hard question: who actually writes the laws, and what kind of people can handle them?
By late September 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 had shot roughly 4,600 Jews and 78 Poles, and had helped deport about 15,000 Jews to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Eight separate operations in three months. And they were just getting started.
Chapter 5 is where the book gets really practical. Dave VanHoose lays out a 12-step formula for building presentations that sell. Not a vague framework. An actual step-by-step sequence you can follow.
Book I gave us the social contract. People come together, form a body politic, and agree to be governed by the general will. Nice concept. But now what? What can this body actually do? What are its limits? And what even counts as a real law?
Most people think a presentation is about sharing information. You stand up, show your slides, talk about your topic, sit down. Done.
Imagine living in nature. No government, no laws, no police. Just you and whatever you can grab with your own hands. Sounds like freedom, right?
Here is the thing about great presenters. They are not always the smoothest talkers. They are not always the most polished people on stage. But they always, always know who they are talking to.
Now we get to the main event. The Social Contract itself. And Rousseau opens it with one of the most famous sentences in political philosophy:
You know that famous statistic? More people fear public speaking than fear death. It sounds like a joke, but poll after poll confirms it. People would literally rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.
This post covers a lot of ground. Freedom, government, democracy, civil religion, and Rousseau’s lasting impact. These are the final sections of the editor’s introduction, and they contain some of his most important and most misunderstood ideas.
Shakespeare said “all the world’s a stage.” Dan Kennedy says most people perform on that stage like amateurs. Chapter 1 of No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations is about choosing which one you want to be.
If you had to pick one idea that makes Rousseau famous, it is the general will. It is also the idea that gets misunderstood the most. So let’s slow down and actually understand what he meant.
Dan Kennedy opens his book with a bold claim: one great presentation can change everything. Your income. Your business. Your entire career.
Most philosophers before Rousseau looked at human conflict and said: “People are just born selfish. That’s how it is.” Hobbes said life without government is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Everyone nodded. Rousseau said: “Wait. What if we weren’t born this way? What if society made us like this?”
I just finished reading No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations by Dan Kennedy and I have thoughts.
By this point in the book, you start to dread the pattern. A village name you have never heard of. A date. A body count. And the same men doing the killing, over and over again.
Before we get into Rousseau’s ideas, we need to understand the man. His life reads like a novel with bad decisions, genius moments, paranoia, and burned bridges across Europe.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Perry’s final chapter is the kind that makes you sit back and think. After eight chapters tracing Singapore from ancient Temasek through colonial port to modern powerhouse, he steps back and asks: so what does all this mean for the future? Can this tiny island actually become the hinge that connects the world’s great civilizations?
These two chapters are where everything comes together. The mystery of the spy, the Butcher’s identity, and the true nature of Babel-17 as a weapon. Dr. T’mwarba is running the show now, and he’s got a plan that involves hamburgers, paradoxes, and a dungeon.
This is it. The final part. The universe is about to end, and every person left alive knows it. The planet He is racing toward the metagalactic center, the exact point where everything started and where everything will finish. There are no more tricks left, no more political games. Just the countdown.
This chapter feels like a dream. Not a nice dream. The kind where you’re walking somewhere and you can’t remember why, and everything around you is wrong but you keep going anyway.
The second half of Chapter VIII gets into territory that makes Singapore genuinely fascinating and genuinely uncomfortable at the same time. Perry covers the “Asian values” debate, the tight grip the government keeps on politics and media, and then the wild card nobody planned for: the internet.
We have a new part, a new name in the title, and a new point of view. Part 5 is called “Markus T’mwarba.” If you’ve been following along, you might remember that name. Dr. T’mwarba is Rydra Wong’s psychiatrist. He’s been mentioned a few times, but we’ve never met him directly.
The chapter title is “Object 4001-Alephnull.” If you’re not a math person, aleph-null is the smallest infinity. It’s the number mathematicians use when they need to count things that never stop. That’s what this chapter is about. Building something at the edge of what’s countable, what’s knowable, and sending it into a place that shouldn’t exist.
This is the shortest chapter in the book. It’s also one of the cruelest. Philip K. Dick puts it right here near the end, like a knife slipped between your ribs when you thought the fight was over.
Chapter VIII is called “Coming to the Present,” and it marks a shift in Perry’s book. We’re past the colonial era, past independence, past Lee Kuan Yew’s early nation-building. Now we’re looking at modern Singapore figuring out how to survive when the old playbook isn’t enough anymore.
Part 4 of Babel-17 is called “The Butcher.” It’s the shortest section of the whole book. Three brief chapters. But it hits the hardest.
These two chapters shift the whole book. Up until now, “The Triumph of Time” was about scientists doing math and old people worrying about the end of the universe. Chapters 4 and 5 bring in two things that make it personal: alien children who are better at life than the adults, and a holy war started by a man who thinks the apocalypse is God’s plan.
This is the chapter where everything ends. Six androids in one day. And by the time it’s over, Rick Deckard has nothing left.
What happens when a unit that already committed one massacre gets told to do it again – but this time with a drunk commander, a crew of intoxicated auxiliaries, and a system designed to make the killing feel easier?
The second half of Chapter VII is where Perry gets into the stuff that actually built modern Singapore. Not the political drama of independence or the merger with Malaysia. The physical, industrial, nuts-and-bolts transformation. Steel boxes on ships. A naval base sold for one dollar. A dead river turned into a waterfront district. This is the chapter where Singapore stops being a story about survival and starts becoming a story about engineering.
Part 3 ends with a bang. Several bangs, actually. A massive space battle, hand-to-hand combat on the hull of a ship, the destruction of Jebel Tarik, and Rydra finally breaking under the strain of Babel-17. This chapter is a wild ride.
Birkenfeld spent years watching powerful people dodge consequences. In the second half of this chapter, he names names, visits Julian Assange, and tries to help one more whistleblower before it is too late.
Chapter 2 opens with a late-night conversation between Amalfi and Dee Hazleton, and it is one of the most emotionally raw scenes in the entire series. Dee shows up at Amalfi’s door wearing a black sheath skirt, deliberately styled to look exactly how she looked when they first met centuries ago. She wants something from him. Something real.
This chapter is one of the most disturbing in the entire book. Not because of violence or action. Because of a spider.
On August 9, 1965, Lee Kuan Yew went on TV, cried, and told Singapore it was now a country. Not because they wanted to be. Because Malaysia kicked them out.
This chapter is a long conversation. That’s it. Two people walking through a dark corridor on a ship, talking. And it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read in science fiction.
This is it. The fourth and final novel in Cities in Flight. “The Triumph of Time” is where Blish wraps up everything. New York City has left the Milky Way galaxy entirely. They crossed intergalactic space and settled on a planet called New Earth, in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The flying days are over. The Okie era is finished. And Mayor Amalfi, after a thousand years of wandering, is supposed to be retired.
The morning after. Rick is sitting in a nice hotel chair, drinking room service coffee, feeling complicated. Rachael is in the shower, humming and splashing like nothing in the world is wrong. It looks like a normal scene. Two people. A quiet morning.
When the British marched back into Singapore in 1945, they were not the gentlemen the locals had been raised to expect. A Malay observer described them as “often drunk and disorderly, consorting openly with women of the streets.” The image of the English gentleman was shattered. And honestly, so was pretty much everything else.
These two chapters hit hard. If Part 3’s first chapter was about arriving somewhere new and interesting, chapters 2 and 3 are about learning just how dangerous that place really is. People die. Rydra makes a discovery about the Butcher. And she finds out what Babel-17 can really do to human beings, including herself.
New York has left the Milky Way behind. The spindizzies are failing one by one. And on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, Mayor Amalfi is about to go head-to-head with the most notorious criminal city in Okie history. This is the finale.
This is the chapter where everything gets personal. Not in an action movie way. In a quiet, bourbon-soaked, morally confusing hotel room kind of way.
Churchill called December 10, 1941, “the worst day of the war.” Not because of some abstract strategic loss. Because on that day, the Royal Navy lost two of its biggest ships to Japanese aircraft. And with them, any illusion that Britain could defend Singapore.
Part 3 opens and everything is different. New location. New people. New danger. Rydra and what’s left of her crew wake up on a strange ship, and the rules have changed completely.
Amalfi is turning a dead rock into a weapon. Hern VI is a planetoid, small and ugly, and his people are bolting spindizzy engines all over it. The work is brutal. Every driver has to be placed at exact compass points, locked to the center of gravity, balanced against every other machine. And there still aren’t enough to make the thing fully steerable. When this rock finally flies, it will be clumsy and wild. But it will fly.
This chapter starts with the androids’ vote and ends with Rick dialing Rachael Rosen from a dark hovercar. In between, he buys a goat, has a real moment with his wife, gets a call from his boss, and talks to God. It’s a lot for one chapter.
Chapter V of “Singapore: Unlikely Power” is where things start going very wrong. Perry titled it “Clouds, Thunder, and Storm” and that really nails it. Everything we’ve been reading about in previous chapters, the trade, the empire, the comfy colonial life, it’s all about to get smashed. But nobody in Singapore seems to notice.
Chapter 5 is short. But it ends Part 2 with a bang, literally, and leaves us hanging in the worst possible way.
In Part 5, we saw the jungle of Okie cities gathering near a red dwarf star, desperate for work. An Acolyte entrepreneur showed up offering terrible wages, things got violent, and Lieutenant Lerner’s cops accidentally blew up a bystander city. Amalfi watched it all and decided it was time to visit Buda-Pesht, the King’s city, in person. He brought Hazleton and Dee along. And now things get political.
The three surviving androids are finally in one place. Roy and Irmgard Baty have arrived at the decaying apartment building where Pris has been hiding. And J. R. Isidore, the lonely chickenhead who has been looking after Pris, is standing right there listening to everything.
The first half of this chapter was all about Suez, steam, and how Singapore found itself at the center of a shrinking world. This second half gets into what actually flowed through that center. Tin. Rubber. People. Some came voluntarily. Many did not.
This is the big chapter. Chapter 4 of Part 2 is where everything blows up. Sometimes literally. It’s a dinner party that starts awkward, gets personal, and ends in blood. Let’s go.
Three hundred flying cities are parked around a dying red dwarf star. Most of them can barely keep their lights on. Welcome to the Okie jungle. Think of it as a hobo camp in space, except the hobos are entire cities, and the camp rules are written by whoever has the most power to burn.
John Isidore flies home from work carrying a bag of black-market groceries: bean curd, ripe peaches, stinky soft cheese. And under the seat, a bottle of Chablis wine he’s been keeping in a bank safety deposit box for years. He was saving it for this. For the day a girl finally appeared. That day is today.
Chapter IV is where Singapore stops being a scrappy trading outpost and starts becoming a real global port. Three things happened almost at once in the late 1860s and early 1870s: Singapore cut ties with India and reported directly to London, the Suez Canal opened, and the undersea telegraph cable arrived. Perry calls this chapter “Empire at Zenith” and it’s easy to see why. British infrastructure basically supercharged Singapore’s growth.
Two chapters in one post today because they flow together perfectly. Chapter 2 gets Rydra to the Alliance War Yards. Chapter 3 is a tour of weapons that would make any Bond villain jealous. And through it all, the mystery gets thicker.
The chapter is called “Murphy,” and if you know Murphy’s Law, you already know how this is going to go. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And then it gets worse.
This is the chapter that breaks Rick Deckard. Not physically. Not even professionally. Something worse. It breaks the wall between him and the things he kills.
Why do people follow horrific orders when they have a clear chance to say no? That is the question Chapter 8 of Ordinary Men tries to answer, and the answers are more unsettling than you might expect.
Chapter III of Perry’s book is where Singapore stops being just a dot on the map and starts becoming a real city. And the story of how that happened is basically about people showing up, working hard, and some seriously questionable government revenue strategies.
Part 2 of Babel-17 starts and the title is “Ver Dorco.” We don’t know what that means yet. But we do get an epigraph from Rydra’s own poetry about words being all her hands have ever seen. Nice touch, Delany.
Birkenfeld showed up at a French courthouse handing out free copies of his own book. An armed guard told him to stop selling. “I’m not selling them,” he said. “They’re free. Want one?” The cop hid a copy inside his body armor.
This is the big one. Chapter 4 of Earthman, Come Home is called “He,” and it’s the longest chapter in the entire novel. “He” is a planet, not a person. And what happens on that planet is one of the most ambitious things Amalfi and New York City have ever attempted. They move a whole world.
This chapter is tense from the first line to the last. And it ends with one of those quiet, devastating moments that Philip K. Dick does better than almost anyone.
Chapter II is called “Wings of Canvas,” which is honestly a great title. It captures this moment in the 1400s and 1500s when Europeans figured out long-distance sailing and suddenly showed up in Asian waters like uninvited guests who never left.
Part One of Babel-17 ends not with an explosion or a battle, but with a quiet conversation at dawn. And honestly, it is one of the most tender scenes in the book.
Last time, New York landed on Utopia and Hazleton went missing with a local girl. Now things get worse. The city has to deal with a golden-armored space dictator, and then fly into the emptiest stretch of space anyone has ever seen.
Rick Deckard lands on the roof of the Mission Street Hall of Justice. It’s a fancy building, baroque spires, modern design, the works. There’s just one problem. He has never seen this building before in his life.
Perry opens this chapter with a line that stuck with me: “An equatorial jungle swamp provides an unpromising spawning ground for a world-class city.”
Three chapters this time, because Delany keeps them short and punchy here. Chapter IV is barely two pages. But those two pages are some of the strangest writing in the book so far.
We are now in the third novel of Cities in Flight, and this is the big one. “Earthman, Come Home” is the longest book in the collection, and it shifts focus to the character who matters most in this universe: Mayor John Amalfi of New York City. Not New York on Earth. New York flying through space, powered by spindizzy engines, looking for work among the stars.
This chapter is one of my favorites in the whole book. Rick Deckard walks into the War Memorial Opera House, sits down in a dress circle seat, and listens to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. And for a few minutes, he just enjoys the music. He’s a bounty hunter on a kill list, but right now he’s an audience member, and the singing is beautiful.
Perry opens with a memory from his childhood in 1930s New Jersey. A small wooden model boat, a Malayan prau, that he loved carrying around as a kid. His parents had lived in Southeast Asia in the 1920s, working on a rubber plantation. Their house was filled with exotic stuff: a tiger skin on the floor, an elephant-foot wastebasket, brass trays, opium pipes, batik hangings. For a kid growing up in suburban Maplewood during the Great Depression, this was basically having a portal to another world sitting in your living room.
So the last two chapters gave us Rydra Wong, famous poet and linguist, getting pulled into a military code-cracking mission. She figured out that Babel-17 is connected to upcoming attacks. And now she needs a ship and a crew. By morning.
This is it. The final part of A Life for the Stars. Chris deFord has gone from a farm boy snatched off Earth to someone who actually understands how Okie cities work. And now, in these last three chapters, everything comes together.
Chapter 8 is the one where the talking stops and the killing starts. Rick Deckard has spent the last few chapters traveling, testing, arguing. Now he has to actually shoot someone. And it almost goes very wrong.
I just finished reading “Singapore: Unlikely Power” by John Curtis Perry, and I have to say - this book blew my mind a little.
Chapter 2 doesn’t start with a spaceship. It starts with a phone call in the middle of the night. Rydra is scared. And when Rydra Wong is scared, she calls the one person who’s known her since she was a broken twelve-year-old: Dr. Markus T’mwarba.
Chris tried to be a hero and it kind of blew up in his face. Then the city left that storm-planet behind, flew back into space, and things got philosophical real fast.
We’re back with John Isidore, and this chapter is one of those scenes where you don’t know if you should laugh or feel terrible. So you do both.
Part One of Babel-17 is called “Rydra Wong.” And it opens with a poem. Delany puts an epigraph at the start, a piece from Rydra’s own poetry collection “Prism and Lens.” It describes a port city at night. Hustlers, sailors, shadows, ambiguity. It’s beautiful and gritty at the same time. And it sets the mood perfectly for what comes next.
Chris deFord just arrived aboard New York City. The real one. Flying through space. And now the city wants to know: what is he good for?
John Isidore hears a TV playing somewhere below him in the building. That’s it. That’s all it takes. He grabs a cube of margarine and goes downstairs to meet whoever is there.
We’re now in the second novel of Cities in Flight, and the story jumps forward by centuries. The spindizzies exist. The anti-aging drugs exist. And whole cities are ripping themselves off the ground and flying into space to find work among the stars. They call these migrant cities “Okies,” and the Earth they leave behind is broke, used up, and slowly emptying out.
Chapter 5 is where Rick Deckard sits across from Rachael Rosen, shines a light into her eye, and starts asking questions designed to make her feel things. And the whole chapter reads like a poker game where both sides are cheating.
Some of the men came out of the woods covered head to toe in blood and bone fragments. Their uniforms were soaked. Their hands were shaking. And the day was not even close to being over.
What if a language could change the way you think? Not like learning French makes you say “ooh la la” more often. I mean actually rewire your brain. Make you see reality differently. Make you smarter. Or more dangerous.
So what do you do when you walk out of prison and find $104 million waiting in your bank account? If you’re Birkenfeld, you stand on a cold New Hampshire beach watching a sailboat fight the waves and think: yeah, that’s me.
This is where everything pays off. All the political scheming, the impossible engineering on Jupiter, the secret drug research in the Bronx. In this final section of They Shall Have Stars, the two storylines crash into each other and we learn what Senator Wagoner was really doing all along.
Before Rick can go hunt androids, his boss sends him on a field trip. To Seattle. To prove that his testing equipment actually works.
Things are picking up speed now. Both storylines in “They Shall Have Stars” start moving fast in chapters 5 through 8. The drug research in New York gets tangled up with love and spies. And out on Jupiter, the Bridge crew is cracking under the weight of that giant planet staring down at them. Let’s get into it.
Rick Deckard is late to work. But before he even makes it to the office, he stops in front of a pet shop and stares at an ostrich. A real one. The only ostrich on the entire West Coast. Thirty thousand dollars.
In Part 1, we met our three storylines: Colonel Paige Russell poking around a secretive drug company, the Bridge crew building an impossible structure on Jupiter, and Senator Wagoner playing a quiet political chess game. Now all three threads get more interesting. And more uncomfortable.
Chapter 1 gave us Rick Deckard and his cranky morning. Chapter 2 flips the camera entirely. We meet John Isidore, and honestly, he might be the most important character in this whole book.
They Shall Have Stars opens not with rockets or alien planets. It opens with two tired men talking by a fireplace in Washington. And the shadows on the walls are making them nervous.
Chapter 1 opens with a married couple fighting. Not about money. Not about the kids. About which emotion to feel today.
So I just finished reading Cities in Flight by James Blish, and I have thoughts. A lot of thoughts. Enough that I’m going to retell this whole thing as a blog series.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Take one of my favorite sci-fi books and go through it chapter by chapter. Share my thoughts, break it down, and maybe convince a few people to pick it up.
A fifty-three-year-old career policeman stands before five hundred men at dawn, tears running down his face, and tells them their job today is to murder fifteen hundred people. Then he says something no one expects: if you cannot do it, you can step out. No punishment. No consequences. Just walk away.
Birkenfeld turned prison into a comedy show. This is the second half of Chapter 14 in my Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored retelling series.
Before the middle-aged policemen of Battalion 101 ever set foot in Poland, the machinery of mass murder was already grinding at full speed. Chapter 6 is not really about the battalion yet. It is about the nightmare they were walking into.
The chapter opens with a guy named Lopez sprinting out of the barracks, blowing through a fire door, and making a run for the woods. A fat guard they called Waddles wheezes after him. No chance. Lopez is gone.
These were dock workers, truck drivers, and salesmen. Guys pushing forty with bad knees and families back home. And they were about to be sent to Poland to do things none of them could have imagined a few years earlier.
Fort Lauderdale. August. Hot enough to melt your shoes. Birkenfeld walks into a federal courtroom to learn how many years he will spend in prison. The man who blew the lid off the biggest banking scandal in history is about to get sentenced like a common criminal.
Imagine filing a report about transporting a thousand people to a death camp, and your biggest complaint is that the butter went rancid.
Autumn 2008. The financial world is on fire. Barack Obama and John McCain are fighting for the presidency, and nobody in America is paying attention to the earthquake hitting Swiss banking. But Birkenfeld is watching every crack form from his ankle-monitored life in Boston.
Forty-two chapters. Almost a year of posts. Stories spanning from 1637 to 2018, from Amsterdam flower auctions to cryptocurrency exchanges. And here I am, writing the last post in this series.
Forty-two chapters. Almost a year of posts. Stories spanning from 1637 to 2018, from Amsterdam flower auctions to cryptocurrency exchanges. And here I am, writing the last post in this series.
Before the killing fields of Poland, there was Russia. And what happened there in the summer of 1941 set the template for everything that followed.
Birkenfeld was supposed to testify before the Senate. Instead, he watched the whole thing from a couch with a beer.
After 42 chapters of booms, busts, manias, and crashes, Torsten Dennin does something unexpected in the Outlook and Epilogue of “From Tulips to Bitcoins.” He looks forward. And what he sees is a setup for the next big commodity cycle. The numbers he puts on the table are brutal enough to explain why.
After 42 chapters of booms, busts, manias, and crashes, Torsten Dennin does something unexpected in the Outlook and Epilogue of “From Tulips to Bitcoins.” He looks forward. And what he sees is a setup for the next big commodity cycle. The numbers he puts on the table are brutal enough to explain why.
How does a police force built to keep order end up carrying out one of history’s worst crimes? That is the story of Chapter 2.
Birkenfeld is now a free man with an ankle monitor and no passport. The guy who handed the US government the biggest tax fraud case in history is being treated like a flight risk. Welcome to the twilight zone.
We started this whole series with a guy paying a house price for three flower bulbs in 1637. Forty-one chapters later, we end with a guy paying 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. Chapter 42 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of the biggest financial bubble in human history. Bigger than tulips. Bigger than gold. Bigger than anything we covered in this book. And it happened in our lifetime.
We started this whole series with a guy paying a house price for three flower bulbs in 1637. Forty-one chapters later, we end with a guy paying 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. Chapter 42 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of the biggest financial bubble in human history. Bigger than tulips. Bigger than gold. Bigger than anything we covered in this book. And it happened in our lifetime.
Imagine getting woken up before dawn, loaded onto a truck, and driven for two hours down a bumpy gravel road with no idea where you are going or what you are about to do. Now imagine being told, once you arrive, that your job today is to murder 1,500 people.
January 2008. Birkenfeld was back in Geneva, breathing cold Alpine air and trying to enjoy his freedom. He had given everything to the US Senate, the IRS, and the SEC. They were grateful. But the DOJ prosecutor Kevin Downing? He still wanted Birkenfeld’s head on a plate. This is Chapter 10 of my Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored retelling.
In 2017, cobalt went from $25,000 to $100,000 per ton. Quadrupled in a single year. Not because someone cornered the market or because a mine collapsed. It happened because the world suddenly realized that electric cars need batteries, and batteries need metals. Lots of metals. Chapter 41 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how Tesla, Elon Musk, and the EV boom turned obscure industrial metals into the hottest commodities on the planet.
In 2017, cobalt went from $25,000 to $100,000 per ton. Quadrupled in a single year. Not because someone cornered the market or because a mine collapsed. It happened because the world suddenly realized that electric cars need batteries, and batteries need metals. Lots of metals. Chapter 41 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how Tesla, Elon Musk, and the EV boom turned obscure industrial metals into the hottest commodities on the planet.
What happens when normal, everyday people are put into extraordinary circumstances? Not soldiers. Not fanatics. Just regular middle-aged guys from Hamburg with families and day jobs.
The grenade was out of the bag. This is the second half of Chapter 9 in my Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored retelling series.
In February 2016, a barrel of WTI crude oil cost less than $26. That was the lowest price since 2003. Just 18 months earlier, the same barrel was selling for $110. A 76% drop. Chapter 40 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how the world literally ran out of places to store all the oil it was pumping, and what happened when OPEC and Russia finally decided to do something about it.
In February 2016, a barrel of WTI crude oil cost less than $26. That was the lowest price since 2003. Just 18 months earlier, the same barrel was selling for $110. A 76% drop. Chapter 40 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how the world literally ran out of places to store all the oil it was pumping, and what happened when OPEC and Russia finally decided to do something about it.
The fake Jafarli letter broke something inside Birkenfeld. His own government had betrayed him. The DOJ had tailed him to Mexico, pulled his friend off a plane, stolen the guy’s identity, and used it to try to scare him into silence. He grew up believing in the Constitution and fair trials. Now he felt like a mob informant who accidentally confessed to a dirty cop.
Your phone has rare earths in it. Your laptop has them. If you drive a hybrid or electric car, it is full of them. Wind turbines need them. Flat screens need them. Pretty much every piece of modern technology needs a tiny bit of these 17 metals that most people have never heard of. Chapter 39 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of what happened when one country controlled almost all of the supply and decided to squeeze.
Your phone has rare earths in it. Your laptop has them. If you drive a hybrid or electric car, it is full of them. Wind turbines need them. Flat screens need them. Pretty much every piece of modern technology needs a tiny bit of these 17 metals that most people have never heard of. Chapter 39 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of what happened when one country controlled almost all of the supply and decided to squeeze.
Birkenfeld is still sitting across from DOJ prosecutors Downing and Kelly, dropping bombshell after bombshell. He tells them about a UBS client named Abbas who held $420 million in six numbered accounts. This guy made his fortune through illegal oil deals with Saddam Hussein’s regime. The single largest account holder on the American desk.
For decades, the world’s largest commodity trading company operated in near-total secrecy. No public filings. No shareholders to answer to. No journalists poking around. Then on May 19, 2011, Glencore listed on the London Stock Exchange and raised $12 billion in one of the biggest IPOs in history. Chapter 38 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how a fugitive’s private empire became a public company. And how the insiders who sold their shares at the top never saw that price again.
For decades, the world’s largest commodity trading company operated in near-total secrecy. No public filings. No shareholders to answer to. No journalists poking around. Then on May 19, 2011, Glencore listed on the London Stock Exchange and raised $12 billion in one of the biggest IPOs in history. Chapter 38 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how a fugitive’s private empire became a public company. And how the insiders who sold their shares at the top never saw that price again.
The Department of Justice did not want Bradley Birkenfeld. He showed up anyway.
Kevin Downing, a senior prosecutor in the DOJ Tax Division, had a problem. Two lawyers were calling on behalf of an anonymous Swiss banker who claimed to have the goods on the biggest tax fraud case in US history. Names of rich Americans hiding money in Swiss accounts. Names of Swiss banking officials who ran the whole scheme. Names of American politicians who knew about it.
In March 2011, cotton hit $2.15 per pound. That was the highest price since cotton trading began on the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. The last time cotton was anywhere near that expensive, the American Civil War was raging and the South’s plantations had stopped producing. It took 150 years for cotton to reach those levels again. Chapter 37 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” explains how a combination of floods, export bans, hoarding, and panic buying made it happen.
In March 2011, cotton hit $2.15 per pound. That was the highest price since cotton trading began on the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. The last time cotton was anywhere near that expensive, the American Civil War was raging and the South’s plantations had stopped producing. It took 150 years for cotton to reach those levels again. Chapter 37 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” explains how a combination of floods, export bans, hoarding, and panic buying made it happen.
Birkenfeld is ready to blow the whistle. But first he needs lawyers. And that turns out to be way harder than he expected.
Some chapters in this book are about money. Some are about greed. This one is about what happens when you mix both with a deadline and a drill hole four kilometers under the ocean. Chapter 36 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The biggest oil spill in American history. Eleven dead. 780 million liters of crude in the Gulf of Mexico. And a final bill of $65 billion.
Some chapters in this book are about money. Some are about greed. This one is about what happens when you mix both with a deadline and a drill hole four kilometers under the ocean. Chapter 36 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The biggest oil spill in American history. Eleven dead. 780 million liters of crude in the Gulf of Mexico. And a final bill of $65 billion.
Chapter 7 opens with a Roman emperor quote about fear, and honestly it fits perfectly. Birkenfeld just sued UBS and won his bonus. But winning money was never the point. The real fight was just starting.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the third largest country in Africa. It sits on top of enormous reserves of cobalt, diamonds, copper, gold, and rare minerals. By any logic, this should be one of the wealthiest nations on the continent. Instead, it is one of the poorest countries on Earth. Only Zimbabwe has a lower per capita GDP. Chapter 35 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how Kazakh oligarchs ended up controlling Congo’s copper riches through a chain of shady deals, corrupt middlemen, and a government that treated its country’s resources like personal property.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the third largest country in Africa. It sits on top of enormous reserves of cobalt, diamonds, copper, gold, and rare minerals. By any logic, this should be one of the wealthiest nations on the continent. Instead, it is one of the poorest countries on Earth. Only Zimbabwe has a lower per capita GDP. Chapter 35 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how Kazakh oligarchs ended up controlling Congo’s copper riches through a chain of shady deals, corrupt middlemen, and a government that treated its country’s resources like personal property.
After discovering the three-page memo that basically proved UBS was setting up its own bankers as fall guys, Birkenfeld doesn’t run. He fights back. This chapter is where he stops being a loyal employee and starts playing chess.
In July 2010, a 50-year-old hedge fund manager quietly bought 240,000 tons of cocoa beans. That was 7% of the entire world’s production. The majority of all available supply on the market. His bet was worth a billion dollars. The press called him “Chocolate Finger.” Chapter 34 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Anthony Ward and his massive cocoa gamble.
In July 2010, a 50-year-old hedge fund manager quietly bought 240,000 tons of cocoa beans. That was 7% of the entire world’s production. The majority of all available supply on the market. His bet was worth a billion dollars. The press called him “Chocolate Finger.” Chapter 34 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Anthony Ward and his massive cocoa gamble.
The party was still going, but the music was getting worse. This is the second half of Chapter 5 in my Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored retelling series.
Sugar is one of those things you never think about. You put it in your coffee, you eat it in everything, it is just there. Then one summer in India the rain does not come, and suddenly sugar is front page news. Chapter 33 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of what happened in 2009 and 2010, when the world’s second-largest sugar producer ran out of sugar and had to start buying it from everyone else.
Sugar is one of those things you never think about. You put it in your coffee, you eat it in everything, it is just there. Then one summer in India the rain does not come, and suddenly sugar is front page news. Chapter 33 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” (ISBN: 978-1-63299-227-7) tells the story of what happened in 2009 and 2010, when the world’s second-largest sugar producer ran out of sugar and had to start buying it from everyone else.
By his fourth year at UBS, Birkenfeld knew the good times had an expiration date. Everything he was doing was perfectly legal in Switzerland. But back in America, the same activity was a federal crime. That gap was starting to weigh on him.
There is a tiny town in Oklahoma called Cushing. Fewer than 10,000 people. It has a Walmart. A few fast food places. And somehow, this place is the center of the global oil market. Chapter 32 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of what happened when oil prices collapsed and the biggest banks in the world started renting supertankers just to have somewhere to put the stuff.
There is a tiny town in Oklahoma called Cushing. Fewer than 10,000 people. It has a Walmart. A few fast food places. And somehow, this place is the center of the global oil market. Chapter 32 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of what happened when oil prices collapsed and the biggest banks in the world started renting supertankers just to have somewhere to put the stuff.
The second half of this chapter reads like a spy movie crossed with a luxury travel brochure. UBS trains its bankers to evade customs agents. Birkenfeld builds his own client pipeline. And the money just keeps rolling in.
Less than a month after Jerome Kerviel blew a $5 billion hole in Societe Generale, another rogue trader popped up on the other side of the Atlantic. This one was not at a fancy French bank in Paris. He was sitting in Memphis, Tennessee, betting on wheat. Chapter 31 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how one guy at MF Global secretly built a $1 billion position against wheat, got absolutely crushed, and brought his entire firm to its knees.
Less than a month after Jerome Kerviel blew a $5 billion hole in Societe Generale, another rogue trader popped up on the other side of the Atlantic. This one was not at a fancy French bank in Paris. He was sitting in Memphis, Tennessee, betting on wheat. Chapter 31 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how one guy at MF Global secretly built a $1 billion position against wheat, got absolutely crushed, and brought his entire firm to its knees.
Chapter 4 opens with Birkenfeld cruising Geneva in a candy-apple red Ferrari 365 GT Spyder. A $250,000 car. Not his money though. This was “OPM” – Other People’s Money. His overseas clients would tell him what car they wanted, he would buy it, slap on Finnish tax-free plates, and stash it in a luxury garage. When they visited, he handed them the keys. The rest of the time? He drove it himself. Nice perk.
In 2007, a 65-year-old Thai rice exporter stood up and told everyone that rice prices would go from $300 per ton to $1,000. People laughed at him. Not politely. They actually laughed. Chapter 30 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened next. Spoiler: nobody was laughing by spring 2008.
In 2007, a 65-year-old Thai rice exporter stood up and told everyone that rice prices would go from $300 per ton to $1,000. People laughed at him. Not politely. They actually laughed. Chapter 30 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened next. Spoiler: nobody was laughing by spring 2008.
Birkenfeld was living the dream at Barclays. First-class flights, fine dining, Russian girls entertaining clients in Geneva, cash handovers like clockwork. He was pulling in CHF 200K, running a one-man monopoly as the only Swiss private banker at Barclays doing this game.
Imagine you control 80% of the world’s supply of a precious metal. And then one day your electricity just stops working. Chapter 29 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of South Africa’s platinum industry getting hit by the most basic problem imaginable: no power.
Imagine you control 80% of the world’s supply of a precious metal. And then one day your electricity just stops working. Chapter 29 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of South Africa’s platinum industry getting hit by the most basic problem imaginable: no power.
Birkenfeld lands in Switzerland in 1995 with a busted career and a plan: get an MBA, reset, and come back swinging. He enrolls at a small American university near Lake Geneva, studies hard, parties harder, skis every mountain he can find, and meets a girl named Charlotte.
You would think that after Amaranth blew up and lost $6 billion on natural gas, every bank and fund on the planet would have gotten the message. Natural gas is dangerous. Do not bet the house on it. But no. Just six months later, one of Canada’s oldest and biggest banks walked straight into the same wall. Chapter 28 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how the Bank of Montreal lost $850 million on natural gas trades and tried to cover it up.
You would think that after Amaranth blew up and lost $6 billion on natural gas, every bank and fund on the planet would have gotten the message. Natural gas is dangerous. Do not bet the house on it. But no. Just six months later, one of Canada’s oldest and biggest banks walked straight into the same wall. Chapter 28 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how the Bank of Montreal lost $850 million on natural gas trades and tried to cover it up.
The new bosses from New York were not just arrogant. They were criminals. And Birkenfeld was about to find out just how deep the rot went at State Street.
Wheat is boring. It just sits there in a field, grows, gets harvested, becomes bread. Nobody thinks about wheat until the price of bread doubles and suddenly everyone is an agricultural expert. Chapter 27 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened when Australia, one of the biggest wheat exporters on the planet, stopped producing wheat. Not by choice. Because the rain stopped coming.
Wheat is boring. It just sits there in a field, grows, gets harvested, becomes bread. Nobody thinks about wheat until the price of bread doubles and suddenly everyone is an agricultural expert. Chapter 27 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened when Australia, one of the biggest wheat exporters on the planet, stopped producing wheat. Not by choice. Because the rain stopped coming.
Chapter 2 opens with Birkenfeld landing his first real job in finance. The year is 1989. The place is State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston. And the boss is a guy straight out of a mob movie.
For most of the twentieth century, seven Western companies ran the global oil business like it was their private club. They decided how much oil was pumped, where it went, and what it cost. Then, country by country, the club got kicked out. Chapter 26 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how the old Seven Sisters lost their grip and a new set of state-owned giants took over.
For most of the twentieth century, seven Western companies ran the global oil business like it was their private club. They decided how much oil was pumped, where it went, and what it cost. Then, country by country, the club got kicked out. Chapter 26 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how the old Seven Sisters lost their grip and a new set of state-owned giants took over.
Chapter 1 of Lucifer’s Banker is basically a backstory episode. Before the Swiss bank accounts and the billion-dollar fraud, Bradley Birkenfeld was just a kid from Massachusetts with too much energy and a nose for making money.
Some people trade commodities. Some people build entire industries. Chapter 25 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Lakshmi Mittal, a man who spent three decades buying steel plants that nobody wanted and turned them into the largest steel company the world has ever seen.
Some people trade commodities. Some people build entire industries. Chapter 25 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Lakshmi Mittal, a man who spent three decades buying steel plants that nobody wanted and turned them into the largest steel company the world has ever seen.
The prologue of this book opens on a freezing January morning in 2010. Bradley Birkenfeld is sitting in a Lexus, being driven to federal prison by his older brother Doug. Outside, a snowstorm is pounding rural Pennsylvania. Inside the car, neither man has much to say.
John Fredriksen did not drill for oil. He carried it. He did not fish in the ocean. He farmed it. Chapter 24 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of a Norwegian who built an eight-billion-dollar empire on tankers, oil rigs, and salmon.
John Fredriksen did not drill for oil. He carried it. He did not fish in the ocean. He farmed it. Chapter 24 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of a Norwegian who built an eight-billion-dollar empire on tankers, oil rigs, and salmon.
What would you do if you found out your employer was helping the richest people on the planet hide billions from the IRS? Keep quiet and collect your fat paycheck? Or blow the whole thing wide open and risk everything?
If you have seen the 1983 movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, you remember the final scene. The trading floor of the New York commodity exchange. Two old millionaires trying to corner the frozen orange juice market. Total chaos. People yelling, waving paper, sweat everywhere. That scene was fiction, but the commodity was real. Frozen concentrated orange juice is traded on NYMEX, and the price can move violently when nature decides to get involved. Chapter 23 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened when the most destructive hurricane seasons in recorded history hit the real orange juice market. The price quadrupled. And unlike the movie, nobody was laughing.
If you have seen the 1983 movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, you remember the final scene. The trading floor of the New York commodity exchange. Two old millionaires trying to corner the frozen orange juice market. Total chaos. People yelling, waving paper, sweat everywhere. That scene was fiction, but the commodity was real. Frozen concentrated orange juice is traded on NYMEX, and the price can move violently when nature decides to get involved. Chapter 23 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells what happened when the most destructive hurricane seasons in recorded history hit the real orange juice market. The price quadrupled. And unlike the movie, nobody was laughing.
Twenty-four posts. Twenty chapters. One book that tries to squeeze a two-year MBA into something you can actually finish. We made it through “The 12-Week MBA” by Nathan Kracklauer and Bjorn Billhardt, and now it is time to step back and ask the big question: was it worth it?
Twenty-five posts. Six months. Over 500 pages of Tim Ferriss experimenting on his own body, distilled into something you could actually read on the train.
Twenty-five posts. Six months. Over 500 pages of Tim Ferriss experimenting on his own body, distilled into something you could actually read on the train.
In Part 1 we watched United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz walk into one of the worst PR disasters in recent airline history. But the real story was not about public relations. It was about what happens when a leader has to pick between competing loyalties, with no right answer in sight.
Your dermatologist prescribes you a drug. You take it for months. Turns out it does nothing. Happens more often than you’d think.
Your dermatologist prescribes you a drug. You take it for months. Turns out it does nothing. Happens more often than you’d think.
“Amaranth” is Greek for “imperishable.” The flower that never fades. Somebody at the hedge fund picked that name on purpose, imagining a fund that would last forever. Instead, Amaranth Advisors became the biggest hedge fund collapse since Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Two-thirds of its capital gone in two weeks. Six billion dollars, vanished on natural gas bets. Chapter 22 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells this story.
“Amaranth” is Greek for “imperishable.” The flower that never fades. Somebody at the hedge fund picked that name on purpose, imagining a fund that would last forever. Instead, Amaranth Advisors became the biggest hedge fund collapse since Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Two-thirds of its capital gone in two weeks. Six billion dollars, vanished on natural gas bets. Chapter 22 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells this story.
A CEO wins “Communicator of the Year,” then tanks his company’s reputation with a single email two weeks later. How does that happen?
Tim opens this chapter with a promise: it will be the shortest chapter on life-extension ever written. He keeps that promise. But what’s packed in here is surprisingly practical.
Tim opens this chapter with a promise: it will be the shortest chapter on life-extension ever written. He keeps that promise. But what’s packed in here is surprisingly practical.
Most of the stories in this book are about people. Traders who got greedy. Governments that miscalculated. Speculators who cornered a market and then lost control. Chapter 21 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” is different. The main character is a hurricane. And the commodity it moved is one that most people have never thought about: zinc.
Most of the stories in this book are about people. Traders who got greedy. Governments that miscalculated. Speculators who cornered a market and then lost control. Chapter 21 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” is different. The main character is a hurricane. And the commodity it moved is one that most people have never thought about: zinc.
Everyone on your team says they agree. The meeting ends early. People smile and nod. And then you make a terrible decision. Sound familiar?
Tim Ferriss is jogging through Times Square during a blizzard with an 80-pound boxing heavybag across his shoulders. He and his batting coach went to the wrong hotel. No taxis. So they walk.
Tim Ferriss is jogging through Times Square during a blizzard with an 80-pound boxing heavybag across his shoulders. He and his batting coach went to the wrong hotel. No taxis. So they walk.
In November 2005, a 36-year-old copper trader for the Chinese government stopped answering his phone. His apartment door stayed shut. He did not show up at work. His employer, the State Reserve Bureau, first told the London Metal Exchange that the man did not exist. Then they said he acted alone. Then they stopped talking. Chapter 20 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Liu Qibing, who shorted up to 200,000 tons of copper on the LME and vanished when the bet went wrong.
In November 2005, a 36-year-old copper trader for the Chinese government stopped answering his phone. His apartment door stayed shut. He did not show up at work. His employer, the State Reserve Bureau, first told the London Metal Exchange that the man did not exist. Then they said he acted alone. Then they stopped talking. Chapter 20 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Liu Qibing, who shorted up to 200,000 tons of copper on the LME and vanished when the bet went wrong.
Most people have never heard of palladium. Ask someone on the street to name a precious metal and they will say gold. Maybe silver. Maybe platinum if they know jewelry. Almost nobody would say palladium. But in January 2001, palladium became the first precious metal in history to break $1,000 per ounce. More expensive than gold. Chapter 19 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how this obscure metal went from $120 to over $1,100 in four years. A 10x increase. And it all came down to one country: Russia.
Most people have never heard of palladium. Ask someone on the street to name a precious metal and they will say gold. Maybe silver. Maybe platinum if they know jewelry. Almost nobody would say palladium. But in January 2001, palladium became the first precious metal in history to break $1,000 per ounce. More expensive than gold. Chapter 19 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells how this obscure metal went from $120 to over $1,100 in four years. A 10x increase. And it all came down to one country: Russia.
Your team just spent two hours discussing three options. Everyone has an opinion. Nobody agrees. Now what? Most teams have no plan for this moment, and that is exactly when things fall apart.
“Just remember: somewhere in China, a little girl is warming up with your max.” That’s what Olympic weightlifting coach Jim Conroy tells his athletes. Welcome to chapters 33 and 34. One is about adding 100 pounds to your bench press. The other is about a guy who was scared of water learning to swim a mile in the ocean. Both come down to the same idea: eat the elephant one bite at a time.
“Just remember: somewhere in China, a little girl is warming up with your max.” That’s what Olympic weightlifting coach Jim Conroy tells his athletes. Welcome to chapters 33 and 34. One is about adding 100 pounds to your bench press. The other is about a guy who was scared of water learning to swim a mile in the ocean. Both come down to the same idea: eat the elephant one bite at a time.
Most teams think decision-making is about picking the right option. The authors say the real problem is that teams do not even define what they are deciding in the first place.
This chapter starts with a former Soviet Special Forces instructor punching Tim Ferriss in the butt. Not a metaphor. Pavel Tsatsouline was literally checking muscle tension at a kettlebell certification event. Welcome to chapter 32.
This chapter starts with a former Soviet Special Forces instructor punching Tim Ferriss in the butt. Not a metaphor. Pavel Tsatsouline was literally checking muscle tension at a kettlebell certification event. Welcome to chapter 32.
St. Paul, Alberta. A town of five thousand people in the Canadian prairies. The town’s only claim to fame is a UFO landing platform, built in 1967 for Canada’s centennial. A concrete pad with a sign inviting extraterrestrial visitors to land. Nothing ever landed. But in the mid-1990s, something stranger than aliens happened to this town. Chapter 18 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Bre-X Minerals, the biggest mining fraud in Canadian history.
St. Paul, Alberta. A town of five thousand people in the Canadian prairies. The town’s only claim to fame is a UFO landing platform, built in 1967 for Canada’s centennial. A concrete pad with a sign inviting extraterrestrial visitors to land. Nothing ever landed. But in the mid-1990s, something stranger than aliens happened to this town. Chapter 18 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Bre-X Minerals, the biggest mining fraud in Canadian history.
How do you hide $1.8 billion in losses for over a decade? You stay at the same desk, you forge your boss’s signature, and you pray that the market turns around. Chapter 17 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Yasuo Hamanaka, a copper trader at Sumitomo Trading in Tokyo who controlled 5% of the global copper market, lied about it for eleven years, and brought down the biggest single-company trading loss the world had ever seen.
How do you hide $1.8 billion in losses for over a decade? You stay at the same desk, you forge your boss’s signature, and you pray that the market turns around. Chapter 17 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Yasuo Hamanaka, a copper trader at Sumitomo Trading in Tokyo who controlled 5% of the global copper market, lied about it for eleven years, and brought down the biggest single-company trading loss the world had ever seen.
You and four friends cannot agree on a restaurant. Now imagine trying to make a strategic decision with a team of thousands. That is the problem this chapter tackles, and the answer is not what most people expect.
Kelly Starrett, founder of San Francisco CrossFit, casually mentioned to Tim that he just ran a 28.4-mile ultramarathon with 18,500 feet of elevation change. And that he was back to heavy lifting the next week.
Kelly Starrett, founder of San Francisco CrossFit, casually mentioned to Tim that he just ran a 28.4-mile ultramarathon with 18,500 feet of elevation change. And that he was back to heavy lifting the next week.
Everyone talks about leadership. Books, podcasts, TED talks, LinkedIn posts. But when you ask people what leadership actually is, the answers get vague fast. This chapter might be the most honest take on the subject I have ever read.
There’s a gym in the back of an industrial park in New Jersey, right next to a Chevy dealership. Guys in there rub horse liniment on their elbows between sets. McTarnahan’s Absorbent Blue Lotion - the stuff they use on racehorses. The fumes clear your sinuses from ten feet away.
There’s a gym in the back of an industrial park in New Jersey, right next to a Chevy dealership. Guys in there rub horse liniment on their elbows between sets. McTarnahan’s Absorbent Blue Lotion - the stuff they use on racehorses. The fumes clear your sinuses from ten feet away.
Three of the richest men on Earth all decided to put money into silver during the 1990s. Same metal. Same decade. Completely different strategies. And wildly different outcomes. Chapter 16 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells this story, and it reads almost like a parable about what separates a good investment from a disaster.
Three of the richest men on Earth all decided to put money into silver during the 1990s. Same metal. Same decade. Completely different strategies. And wildly different outcomes. Chapter 16 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells this story, and it reads almost like a parable about what separates a good investment from a disaster.
Twenty-one posts. Sixteen chapters. One very long subtitle. We made it to the end of Andrew Henderson’s Nomad Capitalist.
I started this retelling series because the book made me think. Not because I agreed with everything in it. Not because I wanted to sell offshore company services. But because it challenged ideas I had been carrying around for decades without questioning them. And any book that does that deserves a proper read-through.
Only 20 percent of workers worldwide actually care about their jobs. That is what Gallup tells us every single year. The other 80 percent are either going through the motions or actively trying to make things worse. Sounds like a crisis. Or does it?
These two chapters cover very different topics. One is about saving money on medical tests by flying to Nicaragua. The other might be the most important chapter in the whole book - how to not get injured in the first place. Let’s go.
These two chapters cover very different topics. One is about saving money on medical tests by flying to Nicaragua. The other might be the most important chapter in the whole book - how to not get injured in the first place. Let’s go.
In 1991, German business magazine named Heinz Schimmelbusch “Manager of the Year.” Two years later, he was fired for nearly destroying one of Germany’s oldest industrial companies. Chapter 15 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Metallgesellschaft, and it is one of the most painful corporate implosions in the book.
In 1991, German business magazine named Heinz Schimmelbusch “Manager of the Year.” Two years later, he was fired for nearly destroying one of Germany’s oldest industrial companies. Chapter 15 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of Metallgesellschaft, and it is one of the most painful corporate implosions in the book.
August 2, 1990. One hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers cross the border into Kuwait. Within hours, the small oil-rich country is occupied. Within three months, oil prices double. Chapter 14 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how a debt dispute between neighbors turned into the biggest oil shock since the 1970s.
August 2, 1990. One hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers cross the border into Kuwait. Within hours, the small oil-rich country is occupied. Within three months, oil prices double. Chapter 14 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of how a debt dispute between neighbors turned into the biggest oil shock since the 1970s.
Henderson opens the final chapter from a muddy car ride in Montenegro. He is furniture shopping for his new beach apartment in Kotor Bay with a general contractor named Anka. They are debating white sofas. He jokes about reckless tourists. She offers him a mint. For a second he wonders if she is making a move. She is not. She is just extremely good at her job.
Your manager writes “Fantastic work!” at the top of his email. You feel great for about three seconds. Then you open the attached document and see a bloodbath of red tracked changes. Entire paragraphs crossed out. New text everywhere. Maybe ten of your original words survived. So which is it – fantastic or terrible?
A spine surgeon who works with NHL and NFL teams told Tim Ferriss his degenerating cervical discs were something he’d “just need to live with.” Then he smiled, which made it worse.
A spine surgeon who works with NHL and NFL teams told Tim Ferriss his degenerating cervical discs were something he’d “just need to live with.” Then he smiled, which made it worse.
Henderson is standing on a stage in Cancun, Mexico. It is January 2016. He is at his own conference called Passport to Freedom. And he is telling the audience he is done. No more conferences.
“Every moron could buy a printing press, everything might be better than paper money.” That is Nelson Bunker Hunt explaining why he bet the family fortune on silver. Chapter 13 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of the Hunt brothers, two Texas oil heirs who tried to corner the global silver market. They almost pulled it off. And then they lost everything in a single day.
“Every moron could buy a printing press, everything might be better than paper money.” That is Nelson Bunker Hunt explaining why he bet the family fortune on silver. Chapter 13 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells the story of the Hunt brothers, two Texas oil heirs who tried to corner the global silver market. They almost pulled it off. And then they lost everything in a single day.
You used to play guitar in a band. If you nailed your part, that was on you. Nobody else could do it for you, and nobody else could take that away. Then you became a manager. And suddenly your success depended entirely on what other people did. Welcome to the most jarring transition in any career.
“God, what a beautiful beach. Calm. Turquoise water. I should go back to Thailand. I wonder what time it is in Thailand. But why is there a mangy German shepherd on my beach? Orange collar. Kind of looks like John’s dog. Actually, I owe John a call. Did I put his birthday party in the calendar? Birthdays and clowns. Clowns?! Why the hell am I thinking about clowns?!”
“God, what a beautiful beach. Calm. Turquoise water. I should go back to Thailand. I wonder what time it is in Thailand. But why is there a mangy German shepherd on my beach? Orange collar. Kind of looks like John’s dog. Actually, I owe John a call. Did I put his birthday party in the calendar? Birthdays and clowns. Clowns?! Why the hell am I thinking about clowns?!”
“A diamond is forever.” That is probably the most successful advertising slogan in history. De Beers spent decades convincing the world that diamonds are rare, precious, and eternal stores of value. But Chapter 12 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells a different story. A story where investment-grade diamonds lost 90% of their value in twelve months.
“A diamond is forever.” That is probably the most successful advertising slogan in history. De Beers spent decades convincing the world that diamonds are rare, precious, and eternal stores of value. But Chapter 12 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” tells a different story. A story where investment-grade diamonds lost 90% of their value in twelve months.
Henderson is sitting in Wroclaw, Poland. It is Easter week. The city is empty because all the students went home to their villages. He finds a kebab shop, sits outside in the cold wind, and starts eating his shawarma. Two pigeons attack his food. He yells at them in English. “Go away, pigeons!”
Everything we covered so far in this book was about numbers. Profit, growth, risk, cash flow, cost structures, valuation. Important stuff. But here is the thing: none of it works without people. And people are messy.
These two chapters are about male hormones and fertility. Tim opens chapter 21 with a story about a date where he was practically radiating pheromones after weeks of testosterone experiments. His date, a CEO, was climbing over him at the restaurant before bread arrived. Women across the room couldn’t stop staring. His scratches from the night healed like Wolverine.
These two chapters are about male hormones and fertility. Tim opens chapter 21 with a story about a date where he was practically radiating pheromones after weeks of testosterone experiments. His date, a CEO, was climbing over him at the restaurant before bread arrived. Women across the room couldn’t stop staring. His scratches from the night healed like Wolverine.
Henderson is walking through Siem Reap, Cambodia. He is not heading to Angkor Wat like every other tourist. He is going to the Sofitel Hotel to hear the story of a French expat who became a millionaire selling cakes.
November 25, 1973. A Sunday morning in Germany. The autobahn is completely empty. No cars. No trucks. Nothing. The country that gave the world Mercedes, BMW, and Audi, the country that has no general speed limit on its highways because people love driving that much, just banned driving on Sundays.
November 25, 1973. A Sunday morning in Germany. The autobahn is completely empty. No cars. No trucks. Nothing. The country that gave the world Mercedes, BMW, and Audi, the country that has no general speed limit on its highways because people love driving that much, just banned driving on Sundays.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Honey, today was a win. We created a million dollars of value by nudging the cost of capital down by 0.005 percent!” But somehow, every single manager in every company is connected to value creation. Chapter 10 explains how.
Yes, this is a chapter about female orgasms in a fitness book. Two chapters, actually. Chapters 19 and 20 are where Ferriss applies his usual method - find experts, test everything, report what works - to a topic most fitness authors would never touch. He does it with a straight face and detailed notes. Let’s do the same.
Yes, this is a chapter about female orgasms in a fitness book. Two chapters, actually. Chapters 19 and 20 are where Ferriss applies his usual method - find experts, test everything, report what works - to a topic most fitness authors would never touch. He does it with a straight face and detailed notes. Let’s do the same.
Henderson opens this chapter with an interview. Not just any interview. He is sitting in his home in Bogota, Colombia, talking to Michael Saylor. Yes, that Michael Saylor. The MicroStrategy guy who bought over $2 billion in Bitcoin by early 2021.
On April 19, 2022, Netflix told the world it lost 200,000 subscribers. The stock dropped by a third in one day. Fifty billion dollars of shareholder value just vanished. But how do you even put a price tag on a company in the first place?
Chapters 17 and 18 are about building muscle with the absolute minimum amount of gym time. Two exercises per workout. One set each. Less than 30 minutes a week in the gym. Ferriss calls it Occam’s Protocol, after Occam’s Razor - the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Chapters 17 and 18 are about building muscle with the absolute minimum amount of gym time. Two exercises per workout. One set each. Less than 30 minutes a week in the gym. Ferriss calls it Occam’s Protocol, after Occam’s Razor - the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
For most of human history, money meant metal. Gold coins. Silver coins. Paper notes that you could walk into a bank and trade for actual gold. Then in 1971, a US president went on television and changed everything. Money became just paper. Backed by nothing but trust.
For most of human history, money meant metal. Gold coins. Silver coins. Paper notes that you could walk into a bank and trade for actual gold. Then in 1971, a US president went on television and changed everything. Money became just paper. Backed by nothing but trust.
Henderson is in Phoenix, Arizona. He calls a real estate agent named William. They go see two properties. The first one is ideal. Nice finishes, good floor plan, easy to resell later. The second one is a dump.
“Sure, we are losing money on every unit we sell. But we will make it up in volume!” That famous line is sometimes a joke about startup founders. And sometimes it is a real business strategy. How do you know which one you are dealing with?
This chapter is where Tim Ferriss makes claims that most people will immediately call BS on. Gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days? While losing fat? With only four hours of total gym time?
This chapter is where Tim Ferriss makes claims that most people will immediately call BS on. Gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days? While losing fat? With only four hours of total gym time?
In the summer of 1972, the Soviet Union pulled off one of the most audacious trades in the history of commodity markets. They bought almost a third of America’s wheat supply. And almost nobody noticed until it was too late.
In the summer of 1972, the Soviet Union pulled off one of the most audacious trades in the history of commodity markets. They bought almost a third of America’s wheat supply. And almost nobody noticed until it was too late.
Henderson walks into what sounds like a Bond villain lair. Steel gates. Blast-proof doors. Metal detectors. Backscatter machines. Guards you can see and guards you cannot. He is deep underground in Singapore, inside the Freeport. One of the most secure private vaults on the planet.
Your company is profitable on paper but bleeding cash in real life. How does that happen? And more importantly, how do you fix it?
Two chapters this week. One about your butt. One about your abs. Both are short because the actual work is embarrassingly simple.
Two chapters this week. One about your butt. One about your abs. Both are short because the actual work is embarrassingly simple.
Imagine you are a bank. Someone comes to you and says, “I have millions of pounds of soybean oil stored in tanks in New Jersey. Give me a loan.” You send an inspector. The inspector dips a measuring rod into the tank. Oil floats on top. Looks fine. You approve the loan. What you do not know is that 95% of the tank is filled with water and there is just a thin layer of oil floating on the surface.
Imagine you are a bank. Someone comes to you and says, “I have millions of pounds of soybean oil stored in tanks in New Jersey. Give me a loan.” You send an inspector. The inspector dips a measuring rod into the tank. Oil floats on top. Looks fine. You approve the loan. What you do not know is that 95% of the tank is filled with water and there is just a thin layer of oil floating on the surface.
A 16-year-old kid who speaks four languages watches his family lose everything overnight. He flees to Argentina with nothing. No money. No connections. No plan. Thirty years later, he owns the largest private tanker fleet on the planet, throws parties with JFK and Churchill on his yacht, and marries the most famous widow in America.
A 16-year-old kid who speaks four languages watches his family lose everything overnight. He flees to Argentina with nothing. No money. No connections. No plan. Thirty years later, he owns the largest private tanker fleet on the planet, throws parties with JFK and Churchill on his yacht, and marries the most famous widow in America.
Henderson is walking along Port Hercule in Monaco, looking at yachts. He notices something interesting. Every boat has its country of registration on the back. The big yachts are registered in the Cayman Islands, Malta, Marshall Islands. The small ones are registered in France.
What if I told you that the fastest way for a profitable company to go bankrupt is to grow really fast? Sounds backwards, right? That is exactly what this chapter is about.
Tim Ferriss is standing in an airport security line with a medical sensor implanted in his abdomen. His hands are sweating. He almost wore a 50-pound weighted vest through TSA, but a friend talked him out of it by pointing out it looked like a suicide bomber jacket. So the vest stayed home. But the implant made it through just fine.
Tim Ferriss is standing in an airport security line with a medical sensor implanted in his abdomen. His hands are sweating. He almost wore a 50-pound weighted vest through TSA, but a friend talked him out of it by pointing out it looked like a suicide bomber jacket. So the vest stayed home. But the implant made it through just fine.
Henderson walks into a Romanian bank. He has his passport. That is it. Twenty-five minutes later he has a fully functional bank account. The banker, Teodora, looks at him like he is crazy when he acts surprised. “Why would it not be easy?” she asks.
Here is a sentence that will surprise exactly nobody who has ever checked their bank account after payday: just because you earned money does not mean you have money. Companies work the same way.
Tim Ferriss’s dad was standing outside a BBQ restaurant in San Jose when a homeless man walked up and said: “You know how I lost all my weight? More than 100 pounds? Garlic. Clove after clove.”
Tim Ferriss’s dad was standing outside a BBQ restaurant in San Jose when a homeless man walked up and said: “You know how I lost all my weight? More than 100 pounds? Garlic. Clove after clove.”
A city burns down. Warehouses full of wheat turn to ash. Storage capacity drops overnight. And a group of traders looks at this disaster and thinks: “We can make money off this.”
A city burns down. Warehouses full of wheat turn to ash. Storage capacity drops overnight. And a group of traders looks at this disaster and thinks: “We can make money off this.”
“Go eat at McDonald’s. Get a Big Mac.”
That was actual medical advice. From an actual doctor. In an actual hospital.
There is a famous Rockefeller quote: “Competition is a sin.” Most people hear that and think it is just a rich guy being arrogant. But when you read Chapter 5 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins,” you realize this was not just talk. This man actually eliminated competition. All of it. He controlled 90% of the oil refining in the United States. One person. Ninety percent.
There is a famous Rockefeller quote: “Competition is a sin.” Most people hear that and think it is just a rich guy being arrogant. But when you read Chapter 5 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins,” you realize this was not just talk. This man actually eliminated competition. All of it. He controlled 90% of the oil refining in the United States. One person. Ninety percent.
Your food truck is doing great. Cash is piling up, debt is going down, and customers love your grilled cheese. Time to expand. But expansion changes everything on the balance sheet, and not always in ways that feel comfortable. This is post 7 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.
Tim Ferriss once brought a portable food scale on a first date. He pulled it out of his man-purse at a tea house in San Francisco and started weighing individual pieces of food. There was no second date.
Tim Ferriss once brought a portable food scale on a first date. He pulled it out of his man-purse at a tea house in San Francisco and started weighing individual pieces of food. There was no second date.
“Where did your mother go into labor?”
That is how Pete Sisco, an internet business owner and long-time nomad, greeted Henderson on a Skype call from Hanoi. It was his little libertarian calling card. A cheeky way to remind people that their entire identity, taxes, passport privileges, and life trajectory got decided by one random event. Where your mom happened to be when you showed up.
Picture this. A 30-year-old guy from Massachusetts moves to Chicago with no connections and no fortune. Within a few decades, he becomes the most feared trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. They called him “Old Hutch.” And he figured out how to squeeze money from wheat like nobody had done before.
Picture this. A 30-year-old guy from Massachusetts moves to Chicago with no connections and no fortune. Within a few decades, he becomes the most feared trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. They called him “Old Hutch.” And he figured out how to squeeze money from wheat like nobody had done before.
Here is a question that sounds simple but trips up most people: how do you know if a company with $175 billion in debt is in trouble? The answer might surprise you. This is post 6 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.
So you read the five rules of the Slow-Carb Diet. Simple enough. But now you’re a week in and you have questions. Why am I starving at 3pm? Can I eat cheese? What the hell do I order at a restaurant?
So you read the five rules of the Slow-Carb Diet. Simple enough. But now you’re a week in and you have questions. Why am I starving at 3pm? Can I eat cheese? What the hell do I order at a restaurant?
You know what is funny about the California Gold Rush? The guy who found the gold died broke. The guy who sold shovels became rich. If that does not tell you everything about how money works, I do not know what does.
You know what is funny about the California Gold Rush? The guy who found the gold died broke. The guy who sold shovels became rich. If that does not tell you everything about how money works, I do not know what does.
In Part 1 we covered why people consider renouncing US citizenship. The reasons range from philosophical identity issues to brutal financial realities like $330,000 annual tax bills. Now Henderson walks us through how renunciation actually works, what it costs, and what life looks like on the other side.
Here is something that surprised me in this book. You can actually create value without making a single extra dollar. How? By making your business more predictable. Chapter 4 explains why, and it changed how I think about risk.
This is the chapter where the book gets real. Chapter 7, “The Slow-Carb Diet I,” is the part most people bought The 4-Hour Body for. Five rules. No calorie counting. One day a week you eat like a maniac. Thousands of followers lost 20+ pounds.
This is the chapter where the book gets real. Chapter 7, “The Slow-Carb Diet I,” is the part most people bought The 4-Hour Body for. Five rules. No calorie counting. One day a week you eat like a maniac. Thousands of followers lost 20+ pounds.
After four chapters about going where you are treated best, getting second passports, and building a location-independent life, Henderson finally arrives at the most extreme step. Giving up your US citizenship entirely. This is the nuclear option. And he did it himself in December 2017 at the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Everyone wants their business to grow. But what does growth actually mean, and where does it come from? Chapter 3 of The 12-Week MBA breaks this down in a way that makes you rethink everything.
Your scale is lying to you. Not on purpose. It just doesn’t know any better.
That’s the message from chapters 5 and 6 of The 4-Hour Body. And honestly, once you read the data, you’ll never look at your bathroom scale the same way.
Your scale is lying to you. Not on purpose. It just doesn’t know any better.
That’s the message from chapters 5 and 6 of The 4-Hour Body. And honestly, once you read the data, you’ll never look at your bathroom scale the same way.
If you ever opened a stock trading app, you probably saw those red and green bars on the price chart. They are called candlestick charts. Every trader uses them today. Every finance app shows them. And they were invented by a Japanese rice trader in the 1700s.
If you ever opened a stock trading app, you probably saw those red and green bars on the price chart. They are called candlestick charts. Every trader uses them today. Every finance app shows them. And they were invented by a Japanese rice trader in the 1700s.
In Part 1 we covered why anyone would want a second passport and the four ways to get one. Now Henderson gets into the messy details. And trust me, it gets messy. Fake passports, lazy lawyers, and the surprising truth that a Mexican passport might be better than an American one.
The concept of profit was once considered important enough that two superpowers pointed nuclear weapons at each other over it. The Cold War was basically an argument about whether the profit motive should organize our economy. You would think something that serious would be simple to define. It is not.
These two chapters hit differently. Chapter 3 tears apart things you thought you knew about exercise and diet. Chapter 4 asks a harder question: why haven’t you done anything about it yet?
These two chapters hit differently. Chapter 3 tears apart things you thought you knew about exercise and diet. Chapter 4 asks a harder question: why haven’t you done anything about it yet?
Imagine paying a million dollars for three flower bulbs. Not rare diamonds. Not a house. Flowers. That actually happened in the Netherlands in 1637. And then the whole thing collapsed in a single week.
Imagine paying a million dollars for three flower bulbs. Not rare diamonds. Not a house. Flowers. That actually happened in the Netherlands in 1637. And then the whole thing collapsed in a single week.
Imagine you are sitting in a hotel room in Dubai. A man with a bulletproof briefcase hands you a green passport from a country you cannot find on a map. You put your finger on an ink pad. He shakes your hand and says, “Congratulations, you are now a citizen of the Comoros Islands.”
If someone asked you “what is the purpose of a company?” what would you say? Most people go straight to “making money.” And that is not wrong. But it is not the full picture either.
Tim Ferriss opens The 4-Hour Body with a scene that tells you everything about this man. He is backstage at a Nine Inch Nails concert, doing air squats in a bathroom stall. His friend catches his head bobbing above the divider. Forty squats, in silence, in a public restroom.
Tim Ferriss opens The 4-Hour Body with a scene that tells you everything about this man. He is backstage at a Nine Inch Nails concert, doing air squats in a bathroom stall. His friend catches his head bobbing above the divider. Forty squats, in silence, in a public restroom.
Here is a question that bothers me. We have thousands of years of recorded history. We have examples of every possible financial mistake. We have libraries full of books about market crashes. And yet people keep doing the same thing over and over.
Here is a question that bothers me. We have thousands of years of recorded history. We have examples of every possible financial mistake. We have libraries full of books about market crashes. And yet people keep doing the same thing over and over.
I just finished reading “From Tulips to Bitcoins” by Torsten Dennin, and I have to say - this book is a wild ride through 400 years of people losing (and making) fortunes on commodities and crypto.
I just finished reading “From Tulips to Bitcoins” by Torsten Dennin, and I have to say - this book is a wild ride through 400 years of people losing (and making) fortunes on commodities and crypto.
“Come to Cuenca, where flowers bloom from your toilet water!”
That joke comes from Henderson’s mastermind group over breakfast in Medellin, Colombia. They were laughing about retirement newsletters that overhype cheap countries with ridiculous copywriting. You know the type. “Live on a tropical beach for $623 a month!” Meanwhile Costa Rica, Belize, and Panama have already been burned through by the newsletter crowd. Ecuador was next.
Do you really need to spend two years and six figures on an MBA to be good at business? According to Nathan Kracklauer and Bjorn Billhardt, the answer is no. And they wrote a book to prove it.
So I picked up The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. And I’m going to retell it here, chapter by chapter, in a way that’s actually fun to read.
So I picked up The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. And I’m going to retell it here, chapter by chapter, in a way that’s actually fun to read.
“Do I have to become a goat herder?”
That is how Henderson opens this chapter. His old college buddy Bryan asks this question while driving him from the Cape Town airport. Bryan has been watching Henderson post Facebook updates from El Salvador, Albania, Singapore. And he wants in. But he also has three kids, a wife, and an IT business with sixteen employees in South Africa.
Five words. That is all it took to change how Andrew Henderson thinks about life, money, and where to live.
Picture this. A packed conference room in Las Vegas. People who paid two thousand dollars each to hear one guy tell them they do not have to live where they were born.
What if you found out you were paying way more taxes than you had to, living in a place that does not actually treat you well, and there was a whole world of better options you never even considered?
We made it. Eight chapters, one introduction, and a whole lot of Gack being confused, angry, and stubborn. The retelling of “The Kid from Hell” is done.
Chapter 8 is short. Maybe the shortest chapter in the book. And it hits the hardest.
Gack pushes through the last thickets and steps out onto a road. It’s raining. Not a light drizzle, a downpour. There’s a stench coming from a ditch where something that used to be a person is rotting in clayey slime. A burnt-out tank sits half-sunk in a quagmire, its flamethrower barrel pointed uselessly at the clouds.
This is it. Chapter 7 is where everything breaks and everything begins. If you’ve been following Gack’s story, you know this has been building. The kid from another planet, the child soldier who worshipped his duke and his generals, finally gets hit with the full truth. And what he does with it is the entire point of this novella.
Chapter 6 opens with Gack inspecting a mortar position that Dramba just finished digging. Two hours and ten minutes. Perfectly smooth walls, regulation slope, tamped-down floor, beam-covered dugouts. Gack is proud. His Highness’s Engineer’s Academy would approve.
Chapter 5 is where Gack hits a wall. Several walls, actually. Some invisible, some emotional, and one that nearly breaks him.
Chapter 4 switches to third person and takes us outside, into the open. Gack and Dramba are walking along a deserted road on Earth’s plains. The sun is up, grasshoppers are screaming, and the road stretches from one horizon to the other in a perfectly straight line.
Chapter 3 is told entirely from Gack’s perspective, and it’s honestly hilarious and sad at the same time. The guy has been on Earth for five days and he’s completely overwhelmed.
So here’s what happened. Gack wakes up completely naked on a hospital bed. Two men are sitting next to him. One is a rosy-faced doctor beaming at him like a saint from an old icon. The other is a skinny, tanned guy with grey hair and a straw sticking out of his mouth. He says nothing. Just watches.
Chapter 1 hits you like a punch. No slow setup, no worldbuilding lectures. You are dropped straight into mud, smoke, and a young soldier named Gack who has zero patience for the mess he just walked into.
If you grew up in the USSR or any post-Soviet country, you know Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They were THE science fiction writers. Not just popular, but genuinely brilliant. Think of them as the Soviet version of Arthur C. Clarke meets Philip K. Dick. They wrote dozens of novels and short stories, and most of them still hold up today.
We made it. Fourteen posts, eleven chapters, one afterword, and a whole lot of cognac and cigarettes later, here are my thoughts on Definitely Maybe as a whole.
If you thought the novel itself was intense, wait until you read what was happening behind the scenes. The afterword and translator’s note turn Definitely Maybe from a great sci-fi story into something much more personal and much more real.
This is it. The last chapter. And the Strugatsky brothers end their novel exactly the way they should: with fire, cognac, and a question that has no answer.
Chapter 10 is the one that broke me a little. Everything has been building toward this, and now the pressure finally cracks Malianov open.
Chapter 9 is where people start making their choices. And most of them choose to quit.
Let’s start with the thing that should terrify everyone. That telegram Irina got? “DMITRI BAD HURRY TO MAKE IT IN TIME.” It was signed by Snegovoi. But Snegovoi was already dead when it was sent. Nobody went to a telegraph office and typed it out. The machine just printed it. By itself.
Chapter 8 is the heart of the entire book. This is where everything changes. And it starts with two men drinking tea in a quiet apartment.
Chapter 7 is where the talking starts for real. Everyone is gathered at Malianov’s place, and they’re waiting for Vecherovsky like students waiting for the professor to arrive and explain the exam.
If Weingarten’s story was disturbing, Gubar’s is something else entirely. Chapter 6 is funny, terrifying, and sad all at the same time. The Strugatsky brothers were really showing off here.
Chapter 5 is where this book goes from “something strange is happening” to “okay, what on earth is going on.” Buckle up.
Chapter 4 is where Malianov finally talks to someone with a clear head. And honestly, after the chaos of the last few chapters, it’s a relief.
This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). Start from the introduction if you’re new to this series.
This is Part 3 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). If you’re just joining, start with the introduction.
This is Part 2 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). If you’re just joining, check out the introduction post first.
So I picked up this book called Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and I want to walk you through it chapter by chapter. Think of this as me retelling the story to a friend over coffee. No spoiler-free zone here. We’re going all in.
And that’s it. All 1,168 pages. All 30 chapters. All three parts. 53 posts. If you’ve been reading along since the beginning, you just went through one of the longest, most argued-about novels in the English language. So here are my honest final thoughts.
This is the last chapter. After a thousand pages and change, after every bridge burned and every generator stopped, we get the ending. And it’s both exactly what you expect and somehow still hits hard.
This chapter is called “The Generator” and it works on two levels. There’s a literal generator that breaks down during the torture of John Galt. And there’s the metaphorical generator, Galt himself, the engine of the world that has stopped. Both stop working in this chapter. The lights go out.
The government has John Galt. They have him locked in the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel with armed guards outside the door. They have all the guns and all the power and all the television cameras. And they have absolutely no idea what to do with him.
So the looters have Galt locked in the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, surrounded by armed guards. And they send in their best people, one after another, to convince him to cooperate. Every single one of them fails. And the way they fail tells you everything about who they are.
“It wasn’t real, was it?” says Mr. Thompson, staring at the radio. The speech is over. Three hours of John Galt dismantling their entire worldview, and the first thing out of the government’s mouth is denial. Not “what do we do now” but “that didn’t just happen, right?”
And that’s the last chapter.
This is the closing post of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Yeo Bock Cheng spent 32 years at the United Nations. He believes he was the first Singaporean to build an entire career there. His story starts with a casual job offer in Bangkok and ends with him arranging billions of dollars in peacekeeping payments in New York.
In Part 1 we covered the philosophical foundation of Galt’s speech: his defense of reason, his attack on the morality of sacrifice, his claim that the mind is the root of all human survival. Part 2 is where Galt stops building the theory and starts throwing punches. He names names. He makes demands. And then the radio goes silent.
This is the chapter. The one everyone talks about. The one people skip, argue over, or read three times. John Galt’s 60-page radio speech. Rand basically stops the novel, puts the plot on hold, and has her main character deliver a philosophy lecture to the entire world. It’s bold. It’s exhausting. And whether you agree with it or not, you have to admit: nobody else would try this in a novel and actually get away with it.
“Be careful. You’ll be entering a cesspit of vipers.” That was the advice Dileep Nair got from a former senior UN diplomat before he took the job. He took it anyway.
This second half of the chapter is one of the most intense stretches in the entire novel. Rearden walks into a room full of bureaucrats. He walks out a different man. And between those two moments, a kid dies in his arms. If Rand wanted to show what happens when the system finally runs out of people to exploit, this is it.
When Singapore got a seat on the UN Security Council in 2001, Christine Lee figured she would end up chairing a quiet committee. She was wrong. The job turned into one of the most intense learning experiences of her career.
This chapter is where Hank Rearden finally breaks free. And it starts, as these things always do in Rand’s world, with the system tightening the screws one more time.
The UN is mostly known for security stuff. Wars. Peacekeeping. Big political crises. But there’s a whole other side of the UN that most people never hear about. The part that works on social issues. Education. Health. Aging populations. Disability rights. Housing. Gender equality. This is the world that Thelma Kay spent her career in.
This second half of the chapter is where everything starts breaking in a way that can’t be patched. Not metaphorically. Literally. The infrastructure fails, the last capable people are either leaving or hiding, and Dagny finds something in the tunnels under her railroad that changes everything.
In conflict after conflict, women were being targeted. Rape was used as a weapon of war. Women were excluded from peace talks. And when the fighting stopped and countries tried to rebuild, women were left out of the decisions that shaped their futures. Noeleen Heyzer decided to change that. And she actually did.
What happens when you take someone from Singapore’s private tech sector and put them in charge of technology for one of the UN’s biggest development organizations? You get cloud computing in disaster zones, facial recognition for police in Guatemala, and SMS voting guides for 120 million Pakistanis.
The chapter title says it all. “Their Brothers’ Keepers.” It sounds noble. It sounds compassionate. And in this chapter, it becomes the exact mechanism by which everyone devours everyone else.
This second half of “Anti-Life” is one of the darkest stretches of the entire novel. But it starts with light. Rearden finally gets it. And that makes everything else in this chapter hit even harder.
You hear about what the UN does. Peacekeeping. Humanitarian aid. Climate conferences. But you almost never hear about how the UN pays for all of it. Who manages the money? Who sets the salaries? Who makes sure that when 2.7 million compensation claims come in, the right people get paid the right amounts?
This chapter starts with James Taggart giving a hundred-dollar bill to a beggar on the street. No compassion. No thought. Just a mechanical motion, the way you’d flick a crumb off a table. The beggar takes it with the same indifference. “Thanks, bud.” And walks away. Neither of them cares. And the thing that disturbs Jim isn’t the beggar’s contempt. It’s the realization that they share the same emptiness.
The title of Chapter 38 comes from a quote by Dag Hammarskjold, the legendary UN Secretary-General: the UN exists “to save humanity from hell.” Chew Beng Yong spent 26 years inside the UN Secretariat trying to do exactly that.
Statistics might sound boring. But Chapter 37 argues they are one of the most important things the UN does. And a Singaporean ended up running the whole operation.
If Part 1 of this chapter was about watching the looters tighten the noose around the country’s neck, Part 2 is about watching the noose tighten around the people who still care. Dagny is back at the railroad, and within hours she’s getting crushed from every direction. But she doesn’t break. She does something that changes everything.
The chapter title is “Anti-Greed,” which is already a joke. The people in charge have spent the entire book fighting greed. They’ve punished every producer, taxed every profit, nationalized every breakthrough. And the country is falling apart faster than ever. So naturally, their answer is to do more of the same, but harder.
When you think of UN peacekeeping, you think of soldiers. But there is another side to it that gets much less attention. Police. Chapter 36 tells the story of Singapore police officers deployed to some of the most troubled places on earth.
This final stretch of the chapter is where everything comes to a head. Dagny has spent nearly a month in Galt’s valley. She’s worked as his housekeeper, walked his trails, eaten dinners with the strikers. And now the vacation month is ending, and she has to decide: stay in paradise or go back to the collapsing world.
Most people think of Singapore’s military as a small defense force guarding a tiny island. Chapter 35 tells a very different story. It is the story of Singapore soldiers wearing blue helmets in war zones around the world.
Part 1 gave us the tour of Galt’s Gulch. The buildings, the people, the small economy. Now the chapter goes deeper. Now we get the ideas underneath it all. And honestly, this is where the chapter either wins you over or loses you.
Every person on Earth is affected by weather and climate. But almost nobody thinks about the UN agency that coordinates how the world monitors and predicts it. The World Meteorological Organization is one of the least famous international organizations out there. Singapore has been working with them since 1966. And the story is more interesting than you might expect.
The chapter title is “The Utopia of Greed,” and Rand is clearly enjoying herself. After hundreds of pages of collapse and bureaucratic horror, she finally gets to show us how things should work. Or at least how she thinks they should. Whether you buy it or not, the woman earned this chapter.
In the early 1980s, Singapore was a country where commercial-scale piracy and counterfeiting were tolerated. The common view was simple: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan got rich by copying, so why should Singapore be any different? Three decades later, Singapore hosted a major international treaty conference, had the first overseas WIPO office in the world, and was recognized as a model of intellectual property cooperation.
This is the part where the tour stops being scenic and starts being philosophical. And the philosophy hits hard.
Dagny’s ride through the valley keeps delivering one gut punch after another. Every stop reveals another titan of industry doing something humble with their hands. Ted Nielsen, who once ran a motor company, is cutting lumber. Roger Marsh, electronics manufacturer, is growing cabbages. Andrew Stockton runs a small foundry. Ken Danagger, the coal magnate, is working as a foreman in smudged overalls.
The World Health Organization has 7,000 staff in 150 countries. It works with 194 member states. And some of the most important decisions get made during coffee breaks. That is one of the many things David Ho learned during his time working with the WHO in Geneva.
We’re in Part III now. The title of this final section is “A Is A,” which is the law of identity from Aristotle’s logic. The thing is what it is. No contradictions, no pretending, no fake compromises. After two parts of watching the world fall apart under the weight of its own lies, we’re about to see what it looks like when people stop lying.
A young doctor in Singapore gets a phone call out of nowhere. His mentor asks if he wants to work for the World Health Organization in Indonesia, fighting bird flu. He says yes. That one call changes his career and puts Singapore on the global health map.
Part II ends with one of the most intense sequences in the entire novel. Dagny and Owen Kellogg are walking along the tracks in the dead of night, the Comet abandoned behind them, and what starts as a simple hike to a phone turns into something much bigger. This is where the dollar sign cigarettes finally get their explanation. And this is where Dagny makes a choice that sends her flying, literally, into Part III.
Ask someone what a UN worker looks like and they will probably describe a diplomat at a cocktail party in New York. The reality, especially for the people in this chapter, is more like 700 trucks driving food through the Ethiopian desert to millions of starving people.
This is the last chapter of Part II, and it’s a big one. Rand uses it as a hinge between the world that’s falling apart and the secret world that explains why. Everything that’s been building for nine chapters reaches a turning point here. We start on a dying train and end somewhere nobody expected to go.
It started with a casual conversation about textbooks. It ended with 115 African policymakers visiting Singapore, a major conference in Tunisia, and four published books. That is how knowledge sharing works when the right people get involved.
This is the final chapter of Part II. And it hits like a freight train. Three separate emotional collisions happen in this chapter, and by the end Rand has lit every fuse she’s been laying for hundreds of pages.
Can a mobile app help farmers sell their crops? Can slaughterhouse waste power a kitchen stove? These are the kinds of problems that infoDev at the World Bank works on. And the person running the whole thing is a Singaporean.
This chapter is built like a trap. Dagny spends a month in the woods trying to let go of the railroad. She almost makes it. Then the radio announces the tunnel disaster, and she runs back before Francisco can even finish his sentence. The chapter title is “By Our Love,” and that’s exactly the weapon being used against her.
Most countries that work with the World Bank stay borrowers for decades. Singapore borrowed for about ten years, then basically stopped needing the money. That is the short version of this chapter.
Janet Lim joined UNHCR in 1980. She spent over three decades working on refugee crises around the world. And she says something that’s hard to argue with: humanitarian work is probably the area where Singapore has been the least engaged with the UN.
This is the single most devastating sequence in Atlas Shrugged. I’ve read a lot of novels. I grew up reading Soviet literature where grim endings are basically a genre requirement. And nothing prepared me for the Taggart Tunnel disaster. Not because of the death toll, but because Rand makes you watch every single decision that leads to it. Every coward, every buck-passer, every man who chose not to think.
The title of this chapter is “The Moratorium on Brains” and it’s not a metaphor. Directive 10-289 has been signed into law. The best people are chained to their jobs. Innovation is frozen. And the immediate result is that the best people are leaving anyway, just faster and angrier than before.
When people think of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, they think of the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Mount Fuji. Big, dramatic, instantly recognizable places. So when Singapore put forward its Botanic Gardens, a lot of Singaporeans raised their eyebrows. Really? Our little garden?
This is one of the most chilling chapters in the entire book. And I say that as someone who grew up in a post-Soviet country where some of the ideas in this chapter weren’t fiction. They were Tuesday.
Environmental problems don’t care about borders. Pollution from one country drifts into another. Climate change hits everyone. For a tiny island nation like Singapore, what happens outside its borders matters just as much as what happens inside.
The title of this chapter is perfect. An account overdrawn. You’ve been spending what you didn’t earn, borrowing from competence you didn’t build, and now the bank is calling. Every system has a buffer, a margin of error built by the people who actually knew what they were doing. This chapter is about what happens when that buffer hits zero.
Here’s a thing about international trade that most people don’t think about. Every country has its own laws. When you buy something from a company in another country, which country’s laws apply? What happens if there’s a dispute? Who decides?
This chapter is one of those turning points where everything clicks into place. Rand has been building toward Rearden’s trial for a while, and when it finally happens, it’s not just a legal proceeding. It’s a philosophical detonation.
When Singapore became independent in 1965, one of the first things it needed from the International Telecommunication Union was a country code. They got +65. By coincidence, the same number as the year of independence. Fifty years later, Singapore was helping shape global internet policy and building one of the world’s first Smart Nations.
The second half of this chapter is one of the heaviest in the whole book so far. Dagny loses another ally, Rearden hits a wall he didn’t know was there, and Francisco d’Anconia delivers what might be the most important speech in Atlas Shrugged. And then a furnace explodes. Rand really does not hold back.
Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea. And forty percent of global cargo passes through the narrow waterway right next to Singapore. If that strait gets blocked or becomes unsafe, the world economy has a serious problem. This chapter explains how Singapore works with the International Maritime Organization to keep things moving.
This chapter is called “White Blackmail” and the title is doing a lot of work. Rand is showing us two kinds of blackmail in quick succession, one emotional and one political, and both rely on the same trick: making a productive person feel guilty for being alive.
September 2011. Washington, DC. The headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. Europe is on the edge of a financial panic. Greece is drowning in debt. The US is heading toward a fiscal cliff. Japan just got hit by an earthquake and tsunami. And the person chairing the room full of the world’s most powerful finance ministers is from Singapore.
The second half of this chapter is basically a bomb going off in slow motion at a wedding. James Taggart’s wedding reception, to be exact. And what a reception it is. Every looter, moocher, and favor-trader in the country has gathered in one ballroom, dressed in formal wear, drinking champagne, congratulating themselves on how well things are going. By the end, they’ll be running for the phones.
A woman from Singapore’s trade union movement walks into a room full of global negotiators, and two years later she helps deliver the first-ever international convention protecting domestic workers. Something that the workers’ side had been trying to get done for over 40 years.
In 2001, a Singaporean judge flew to The Hague to help try war criminals. He was the first international judge Singapore ever sent to a United Nations court. His name was Amarjeet Singh.
Chapter 2 of Part II is called “The Aristocracy of Pull,” and that title is doing a lot of work. This is the chapter where Rand shows you, in vivid detail, what a society looks like when who you know matters more than what you can do. And she does it through a wedding party. Let’s get into the first half.
The second half of this chapter shifts from Dagny’s search for the motor inventor over to Hank Rearden. And honestly, this section hit harder than I expected. Rand is building toward something huge, and she does it by showing how the world is slowly crushing the best people in it.
Singapore is a tiny island. No natural resources. No hinterland. But somehow it built one of the biggest aviation hubs on the planet. Chapter 17 explains how that happened, and how the UN’s aviation agency played a big role in it.
We made it to Part II. The title of this section is “Either-Or” and that’s already telling you something. Part I was called “Non-Contradiction.” The philosophical logic of Rand’s structure is simple: first she showed you the contradictions piling up, now she’s going to force the characters to pick a side. No more pretending both halves of a contradiction can be true at the same time.
So here we are. Eighteen posts later. We followed Alex Stapleton from a guy who was dodging his banker’s calls, losing his best designer, and personally babysitting every single client to someone who sold his company and walked away clean.
When people hear the word “atomic,” they think of mushroom clouds and disaster movies. But the International Atomic Energy Agency does a lot more than deal with nuclear weapons. And Singapore has been part of that story since 1967.
This is it. The end of Part I. And Rand does not let you off easy.
The second half of “Wyatt’s Torch” is a detective story that turns into a horror show. Dagny is chasing the inventor of that mysterious motor across the country, every lead dumps her deeper into the wreckage of a civilization eating itself alive. Then the government drops the hammer. Then the mountain burns.
Throughout the entire “Built to Sell” story, Ted Gordon drops advice on Alex like a professor who actually wants his students to pass. Not theory. Not abstract business school stuff. Just clear, practical tips that came from real experience.
When two countries fight over trade, who decides who’s right? For a long time, the answer was basically “the bigger country wins.” That changed in 1995. And Singapore helped make it happen.
Chapter 10 opens with Dagny and Rearden playing detective. They are in Wisconsin, trying to trace the ownership history of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, that ruined factory where they found the revolutionary motor. And it’s like peeling an onion made entirely of rot.
The story of Alex Stapleton is over. Now comes the part you actually need. The implementation guide from Built to Sell is where Warrillow stops telling stories and starts giving instructions. Eight steps. Each one builds on the previous. Skip one and the whole thing falls apart.
People love to mock the UN. Too many speeches. Too many resolutions. Not enough action. But is that actually true? This chapter makes a solid case that the UN has been “doing stuff” all along. And so has Singapore.
The second half of Chapter 9 moves fast. We go from a quiet evening in Dagny’s apartment to a road trip through decaying rural America to one of the biggest discoveries in the entire book. Rand is laying groundwork here that will carry the rest of the story.
Chapter 14. The last one. After thirteen chapters of building, fixing, arguing, and transforming, Alex finally gets to the finish line. But here’s the thing. The finish line is not as clean as you would expect.
So we made it. Fourteen posts, one book, and a lot of thinking about zones, borders, and the people who want to live without rules. This is the final post in my retelling series of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian (ISBN: 9781250753908). No chapter to cover this time. Just my honest takeaways after sitting with this book for a while.
People love to trash the WTO. It’s too slow. It’s broken. Nothing ever gets done. You hear it all the time.
Chapter 9 opens with the morning after. And I mean that literally. Dagny wakes up in an unfamiliar room, strips of sunlight on her skin from the Venetian blinds, a bruise on her arm. Hank Rearden is beside her. The John Galt Line has been built, the bridge held, the world watched, and these two people ended up in bed together somewhere along the return trip from Wyatt Junction.
Chapter 13 is called “A Sellable Company” and it’s the moment everything Alex has been working toward starts to become real. Not finished. Not done. But real. There’s a number on paper. Someone wants to buy his business. And now the hard part begins all over again.
The conclusion of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian (ISBN: 9781250753908) is called “Be Water.” And it pulls together everything the book has been building toward. Zones are not some fringe experiment anymore. They are the default political form of twenty-first-century capitalism.
If you’re a small country, what do you do when bigger countries can just push you around? You team up. You play smart. You make yourself useful. That’s basically the entire playbook that Burhan Gafoor lays out in Chapter 12.
This is the chapter. If you’re reading Atlas Shrugged and wondering when the payoff comes, this is it. Chapter 8 is the triumphant heart of Part I, and Rand wrote it like she had been holding her breath for seven chapters and finally let it out.
Chapter 12 is called “The Question” and it’s one of the shortest chapters in the book. But it carries maybe the most important lesson for anyone trying to sell a business. You can have perfect financials, a great product, a solid team. And then one simple question at dinner can kill the whole deal.
Remember Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash”? People strap on goggles and escape their lousy gig jobs into a virtual world called the Metaverse. They buy property, build things, live second lives. One character puts it bluntly: “When you live in a shithole, there’s always the Metaverse.”
Here is a question most people never think about. The United Nations belongs to all countries equally, right? One country, one vote. That is the theory. But in practice, the countries that pay the most money get to call the shots. And they have gotten very good at making sure it stays that way.
This is Part 3, the final stretch of Chapter 7. And it’s one of those sections that packs about five emotional gut punches into forty pages. Dagny goes all in on the John Galt Line, Francisco breaks her heart (again), Rearden gets hit with the worst news of his life, and somehow the chapter ends on a note that actually feels like hope. Let’s get into it.
There is a moment in every founder’s journey that nobody prepares you for. Not the late nights, not the cash flow problems, not the difficult clients. It’s the moment you have to look the people who built your company alongside you in the eye and say: “I’m selling.”
What if a Stanford professor gave a talk about bringing back colonialism and the biggest newspapers in the world said it sounded like a great idea?
A Singaporean diplomat walks into a room full of veteran trade negotiators, knows almost nothing about trade law, and somehow ends up chairing the first meeting of a brand new global organization. That’s this chapter in a nutshell.
If Part 1 of this chapter showed the system tightening its grip, Part 2 is where the system goes for the kill. And the weapon it uses is not a law, not a regulation, but something much more effective: a carefully worded statement from the State Science Institute that says nothing and destroys everything.
Alex has his process. He has his numbers. The business is running without him at the center of every decision. Now it’s time for the part that makes most business owners nervous: preparing for the actual sale.
Think of a city where walking from one neighborhood to the next is basically like crossing a national border. Different laws. Different courts. Different rules about what you can own and what you can do. That is Dubai.
When you think of global trade talks, you probably picture big countries throwing their weight around. The US, EU, China. But one of the most effective players in world trade negotiations is a tiny city-state with no natural resources.
Chapter 7 opens with Dagny standing on a bridge in the Colorado mountains, watching the Rio Norte Line take shape. Green-blue rails made of Rearden Metal stretch across the landscape, and for a moment you can feel her satisfaction. But this chapter is really about all the pain it took to get here, and all the new pain that’s coming.
Nine chapters in and something weird happens. Things actually start working.
If you’ve been following this series, you know Alex spent a long time in pain. Bad clients, maxed out credit lines, employees quitting, doing everything himself. But Chapter 9 is the payoff chapter. The plan Ted helped him build is producing real results.
What happens when a Dutch libertarian lawyer decides that war-torn Somalia is the perfect place to build a tax-free paradise? You get one of the strangest chapters in the history of free-market thinking.
World Toilet Day. Yes, that is an actual thing at the United Nations. And Singapore is the country that made it happen.
We pick up the second half of Chapter 6 right in the middle of Rearden’s anniversary party, and honestly, this section hit me harder than I expected. On the surface it’s a cocktail party. Under the surface, it’s a slow, painful dissection of a man surrounded by people who neither understand him nor want to.
Chapter 8 is called “The Number.” And it’s about that one question every business owner secretly thinks about but rarely says out loud. How much is my business actually worth?
There is a saying that if you light a cigarette as you enter Liechtenstein from Switzerland, you will still be smoking it when you cross into Austria. That is how small this place is. About the length of Manhattan. A green valley along the Rhine river. And yet, for certain libertarians and market radicals, this tiny country is a model for the future of civilization.
Imagine showing up to the most important meeting in the world. You’re representing your entire country. And you have a team of three people. Three.
Chapter 6 is called “The Non-Commercial” and it opens by doing something Rand hasn’t really done yet. She takes us inside Hank Rearden’s personal life. Not the steel mills, not the business deals. His home. His marriage. His wedding anniversary party. And honestly, it’s painful to read.
Chapter 7 of Built to Sell is where the story gets real. Alex has been making big changes to his agency. He has a product now, a sales team, a process. Things are moving. But here’s the thing. Moving forward does not mean everything is smooth.
Chapter 6 of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian might be the weirdest chapter in the book. And I mean that in the best way. It is about libertarian thinkers who looked at the Middle Ages and said: “Yes, that. Let’s bring that back.”
Imagine 20 countries making big economic decisions for the entire planet. And nobody asked the other 170+ countries what they thought. That’s basically what happened after the 2008 financial crisis.
In Part 1 we went through the early years of Dagny and Francisco. The childhood races, the teenage years at the lodge, the first time everything became more than friendship. Now we pick up where things start going wrong. And by “wrong” I mean spectacularly, confusingly, heartbreakingly wrong.
Chapter 6 is called “The Candidates” and despite what the title might suggest, it’s not about buyers yet. It’s about something even more fundamental. Who should sell your product? And should you be willing to burn 40% of your revenue to build something real?
I grew up in the former Soviet Union. I remember what a map looked like before the 1990s. One big red blob stretching across half the world. Then, almost overnight, that blob split into fifteen new countries. Slobodian opens Chapter 5 with that exact memory. The map at his school changed while he was still in it. Yugoslavia broke apart. Czechoslovakia split in two. New flags everywhere.
Imagine showing up to a meeting where the big players have already made all the decisions. Nobody asked for your input. Nobody even told you the meeting was happening. That was life for small countries at the United Nations in the early 1990s. One Singapore diplomat decided to change that.
This chapter opens with a bomb going off. Not a literal one. A financial one.
Eddie Willers walks into Dagny’s office with a newspaper and a look on his face like the world just tilted sideways. The San Sebastian Mines, the ones Francisco d’Anconia spent five years and millions of dollars developing, are completely worthless. The Mexican government nationalized them, expecting to seize a fortune, and found… nothing. Empty holes in the ground. Not even enough copper to justify the effort of scraping it out.
Every plan looks good on paper until reality shows up and punches you in the face. That’s basically what Chapter 5 is about. Alex has been doing everything right so far. He picked his niche, built a process, created a manual. And now the universe decides to test if he actually means it.
This chapter hit different for me. I grew up in the post-Soviet world, so I know what it looks like when a government creates fake borders and moves people around. But what happened in apartheid South Africa takes it to another level.
This chapter might be the most honest thing anyone has ever written about the United Nations.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 4 opens with Dagny standing outside the Taggart Building, thinking about motive power. About how this massive skyscraper only stays standing because of the engines rolling across the continent beneath it. And honestly, that’s a pretty solid metaphor for what’s about to happen in this chapter: the engines are starting to stall.
You can handle angry clients. You can deal with late payments. You can even survive losing a big account. But when your own team starts fighting you? That hits different.
Everyone loves to point at Singapore. Margaret Thatcher wanted Britain to become one. China sent over twenty thousand officials to study it. After Brexit, British politicians literally said “let Singapore be our model.” But what is Singapore, really? And why does every free-market thinker keep going back to this tiny city-state the size of Greater London?
Imagine showing up to a new job and the Berlin Wall falls. That’s basically what happened to Chan Heng Chee.
Chapter 3 is called “The Top and the Bottom” and Rand really means that literally. It starts at the top of a skyscraper and ends in an underground cafeteria. But the real meaning is about who’s at the top of society and who’s at the bottom, and how those positions are getting inverted.
This chapter opens with something every small business owner knows too well. You’re checking your bank account, doing math in your head, and wondering if a payment will come in before payroll goes out.
Chapter 1 showed how Hong Kong became a model for free market thinkers around the world. Chapter 2 asks a different question: what happens when you try to copy that model? Slobodian takes us to London, where Thatcher’s government tried to build mini Hong Kongs inside British cities. The result was not a free market paradise. It was a city broken into pieces.
You think the UN Security Council is a place where 15 countries sit together and make decisions about world peace? Think again.
If Chapter 1 was about a world falling apart, Chapter 2 is about the kind of person who holds it together. We meet Hank Rearden, and honestly, Rand does a beautiful job introducing him.
Imagine you spent eight years building something. You put in the long nights, dealt with difficult clients, hired people, lost people. And then someone you respect tells you straight to your face: your business is worth nothing.
Chapter 1 of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian (ISBN: 9781250753908) opens with a wild scene. Peter Thiel is onstage with a young Google engineer named Patri Friedman. And they are talking about building nations on the ocean.
You know what nobody tells you about the United Nations? For the longest time, diplomats had to fight over chairs. Literally.
The first chapter opens with a question that will haunt the entire book: “Who is John Galt?”
A bum on a New York street says it to Eddie Willers, a 32-year-old guy who works for Taggart Transcontinental railroad. Eddie doesn’t know why the question bugs him. He gives the bum a dime and walks on. But something feels wrong. Not in any specific way. Just a general dread, like that low hum you hear before a storm but can’t quite place.
Chapter 1 opens and you immediately feel the stress. Alex Stapleton is running late to a meeting at MNY Bank. He’s sprinting through the lobby, checking his watch, catching his breath in the elevator. It’s 9:06 a.m. on a Friday and he’s already behind.
How many countries are there in the world? You probably know it’s about two hundred. But what if someone told you the real number of separate legal territories is way higher than that?
Before we get into the 45 essays that make up the core of this book, there are some opening pieces that set the stage. And honestly, they’re worth reading on their own.
So I finally did it. I sat down and read all 1,168 pages of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. And now I’m going to retell the whole thing, chapter by chapter.
I just finished reading “Built to Sell” by John Warrillow and I have to share it with you. This book hit different.
I just finished reading Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian and honestly, this book messed with how I see the world map.
I just picked up a book that blew my mind a little.
It’s called “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations”, edited by Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, and Joanna Koh (ISBN: 978-9814713030, World Scientific Publishing, 2015). And honestly, it tells one of the most underrated stories in modern international relations.
So we made it through the whole book.
Over the past two weeks, we walked through all 13 chapters of Hunter Liguore’s The Modern Art of War: Sun Tzu’s Hidden Path to Peace and Wholeness, plus the introduction and afterword. And honestly, I’m glad I stuck with it.
So you’ve walked through all 13 chapters of Sun Tzu’s hidden path. You’ve learned about the battlefield of the mind, concentrated awareness, the nine fields of perception, the wholehearted will, and discerning frailty.
This is the final teaching chapter of Sun Tzu’s path, and honestly, it might be the most important one.
Chapter 13 introduces the concept of discerning frailty. And the basic idea is this: everything you see, every person you meet, every situation you face, no matter how strong or scary or permanent it seems, is fragile.
You know that moment when you decide to change a habit, and it works for like three days, and then you’re right back where you started?
This is the longest chapter in the book. And honestly, it might be the most practical one.
Chapter 11 of The Modern Art of War gives you a detailed breakdown of the nine different ways thoughts show up in your awareness. Not vague philosophy. Specific, concrete descriptions of what your mind does, so you can recognize it happening in real time.
Quick question. Where are your thoughts right now?
Not “what” are you thinking. Where. Like, point to them.
Most people would point to their head. But Chapter 10 of The Modern Art of War says that’s not quite right. Your thoughts aren’t locked in your skull. They’re forming in a boundless field around you. Sometimes close, sometimes far away. Sometimes narrow and intense, sometimes scattered across a wide open space.
So far in this series, Sun Tzu has been training us to watch our thoughts, interrupt patterns, and vary our responses. All of that was preparation.
You know how you keep having the same argument with the same person about the same thing? And every time, you react the same way? Like a script you both memorized years ago?
Have you ever just “known” something? Not because you thought it through. Not because someone told you. You just knew. A gut feeling that turned out to be right.
Your neighbor starts mowing the lawn right as you sit down for a quiet Sunday meal.
Frustration hits. Then annoyance. Then a whole story about how the world is against you. Before you know it, your peaceful afternoon is gone, and all that changed was some noise outside.
You’re standing in a long checkout line at the store. It’s been thirty minutes. You’re frustrated.
But here’s the question Sun Tzu would ask: who decided this is frustrating?
Here’s something wild. You can predict most of your own thoughts.
Not in some psychic way. More like, you already know what’s going to bug you at work tomorrow. You know what you’ll think when you see that one relative at dinner. You know the exact spiral your brain will go on at 2 AM.
You strain your hamstring while running. What happens next?
First, pain grabs your attention. Then your mind starts spinning. Will I be able to run again? What if this is serious? I should not have pushed so hard. Maybe I need to see a doctor. What if the doctor says I can never run again? One thought becomes 10,000 thoughts in seconds.
You ever start something with massive energy and then just… burn out? A new workout plan. A journal practice. A commitment to stop doomscrolling before bed. Week one is amazing. Week three you are back on the couch eating chips and feeling guilty about it.
“The art of observing the mind is of vital importance to the Self.”
That is how Sun Tzu opens Chapter 1. Not a word about armies. Not a mention of enemies. Just: pay attention to your mind. It matters.
You know the Art of War, right? That old Chinese military book that business bros love to quote in LinkedIn posts about “crushing the competition.”
So here’s the thing. Most people hear “Sun Tzu” and think military strategy. Boardroom tactics. Crushing your competition. That whole vibe.
This is the twelfth and final post in my series retelling The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0, Russell Enterprises, 2010). Over the past eleven posts we covered every chapter, every author, every story in this book. Now I want to step back, take a breath, and talk about what all of it means.
Most of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written from the outside looking in. Players telling you what the KGB did to them. Historians connecting the dots. But Chapter 4 is different. It’s a letter. Written by Vladimir Popov, a retired KGB lieutenant colonel, addressed directly to the historian Yuri Felshtinsky. And it reads like nothing else in the book.
Viktor Kortschnoi opens his afterword with a quote from Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow: “A monster horrid, hideous, huge, hundred-mouthed, and barking!” That line was originally about Russian autocracy in the 1700s. Kortschnoi uses it for the KGB. Same country, different century, same monster.
This is the final part of Boris Gulko’s chapter in The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). After seven years as a refusenik, Gulko and his wife Anya decided to stop waiting and start fighting. What follows is one of the most intense stretches of the entire book.
Continuing the retelling of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). Boris Gulko describes the long, empty years of being stuck in the Soviet Union. Years when time stopped. And the strange games the KGB played off the chessboard.
Continuing the retelling of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0), Chapter 2 by Boris Gulko. Last time, Gulko described his early career and the decision to apply for emigration. Now comes the hard part. What happens when the Soviet Union says “no” but won’t let you live a normal life either.
Chapter 2 of “The KGB Plays Chess” is where Boris Gulko takes over the storytelling. The previous chapter was the insider account from the KGB officer. This one is deeply personal. Gulko titles it “The Letter Lahmed Problem” and dedicates it to his sister Bella, “my loyal companion on the road to freedom.”
This section of the book shows what the KGB was willing to do when they felt threatened. And the threat was not some foreign spy or military secret. The threat was a chess player and his wife who wanted to leave the country.
Continuing my retelling of The KGB Plays Chess by Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov, Yuri Felshtinsky, and Viktor Kortschnoi (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). This part covers the KGB’s grip on individual athletes, the hunt for defectors, and how chess became a battlefield for Soviet intelligence.
Chapter 1 of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Vladimir Popov, a former KGB officer, and Yuri Felshtinsky, a historian. And it starts with a bang. No slow warm-up. Just a blunt description of how the Soviet secret police turned sports into a branch of intelligence operations.
The foreword of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Boris Gulko. He’s one of the very few people who held both the USSR and US chess championships. And he spent seven years as a “refusenik,” trapped in the Soviet Union, fighting the KGB just for the right to leave. So when he writes about chess and Soviet power, he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
I just finished reading one of the wildest books about chess I have ever come across. It is called “The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown” (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0, Russell Enterprises, 2010). And I want to walk you through it.
So that was Gateway.
31 chapters. One man sitting on a couch talking to a machine about why he can not be happy. And somehow it is one of the best science fiction novels ever written.
This is it. Thirty-one chapters. Hundreds of pages. Years of therapy. And now we are here, at the end.
Rob Broadhead is still in the chair. Sigfrid is still across from him. The same room. The same machine. The same conversation they have been having since page one. Except this time, there is nowhere left to hide.
This is the chapter. The one the entire book has been building toward. Thirty chapters of therapy sessions, of Rob dodging and lying and breaking down, of Sigfrid patiently waiting. All of it was leading here.
This is it. The chapter everything has been building toward. Twenty-eight chapters of dodging, deflecting, joking, and screaming. Twenty-eight chapters of Sigfrid waiting. And now Rob finally arrives at the place he has been running from since the first page.
This is the chapter where Gateway stops being a psychological novel and becomes a horror story. Not the monster kind. The physics kind. The kind where the universe itself is trying to kill you, and there is no door to run through, no weapon to grab, no hack to deploy.
This chapter is short. Really short. Just a therapy session. One of the last ones before everything goes sideways.
But do not let the length fool you. What happens here matters. Because this is the last time Rob successfully runs from the truth. After this, there is nowhere left to hide.
The mission is getting real. What was just a name on a board and a number on a contract is now becoming an actual plan with actual ships and actual people who might actually die. And right when Rob thought he had the emotional landscape of his life figured out, Klara walks back into it.
Rob is broke. Again. Still. Always. And this time the hole he is sitting in feels deeper than before.
This chapter is about what happens when the universe hands you just enough to survive, but not enough to escape. And about the choices people make when the only options left are bad ones.
Rob is alone in space. A One-class ship. Just him and the Heechee controls and fifty-five days of silence.
If the last chapter was about emotional nakedness, this one is about physical and psychological isolation pushed to the breaking point. Pohl gives us everything here. Space adventure, discovery, disaster, rescue, and then the most disturbing therapy session in the entire book.
This chapter is short. Maybe the shortest in the book. But it hits like a truck.
We are back in the therapy room with Sigfrid. No space missions. No Gateway drama. No alien ships. Just Rob sitting in a chair, trying very hard not to say the thing he knows he needs to say.
This is the chapter where Rob Broadhead hits rock bottom. And rock bottom on Gateway is a very long way down.
This chapter is a therapy session. Just one. No missions, no Gateway politics, no Heechee technology. Just Rob and Sigfrid in a room. And it is one of the most disturbing chapters in the book.
This is the longest chapter in the book so far. And it covers everything. Love. Fighting. Death. Science. Hope. Pohl packs more into this single chapter than some authors put into entire novels.
Remember S. Ya. Lavorovna? The AI specialist from a few chapters back? The woman who understands how Sigfrid works from the inside?
They are back. Forty-six days in a tiny Heechee ship, cramped and scared and hoping for something, and they are back with nothing. No discovery. No bonus. No glory. Just a docking clamp and a medical team and the smell of a ship that has been lived in too long by too many people.
This chapter is short. Maybe the shortest therapy chapter so far. But short does not mean small. Sometimes the shortest sessions are the ones that crack things open.
Forty-six days.
That is how long Rob and his crew have been sitting inside a Heechee ship. Forty-six days of eating paste, sharing a tiny space with four other people, using a toilet with no privacy, breathing recycled air, and waiting. Just waiting for the ship to arrive wherever the pre-programmed course takes them.
Short chapter. Maybe the shortest in the book so far. But the amount of power that shifts in these few pages is wild.
Rob finally did it. He is in space. After all the waiting, the fear, the parties, the frozen paralysis, he is actually sitting inside a Heechee ship heading somewhere unknown.
You walk into your therapist’s office and everything has changed. The mat is gone. The mobiles are gone. The fake Hawaiian surf is gone. Instead there is a couch. A traditional, old-school psychoanalyst’s couch. And your therapist, who used to be a voice and some abstract shapes, is now a dummy sitting in a chair wearing dark glasses.
This is a long chapter. It is also the chapter where everything changes. Rob has been frozen since he arrived on Gateway. Trained but not launching. Afraid but not leaving. Just existing in the most expensive waiting room in the solar system.
Rob walks into therapy like a man who has not slept in three days. He is exhausted. He is angry. And he has decided, before the session even starts, that he is not going to cooperate.
This is a big chapter. A lot happens. And by the end of it, nothing happens at all. That is the whole point.
This chapter is short and it hurts in a quiet way.
We are back in the present with Rob and Sigfrid. No Gateway flashbacks this time. Just a rich man sitting in a therapist’s office, listing all the expensive things he buys. And somehow, every item on the list makes him sound more empty.
Chapter 8 is long. It is also one of the best chapters so far. After the emotional wreckage of Chapter 7’s therapy session, we are back on Gateway. And now Rob starts learning what it actually means to be a prospector.
After the Blue Hell party and the casino shock of Chapter 6, Pohl drops us right back on the therapy couch. And this time, Sigfrid goes deep. Really deep. This is the chapter where Rob’s armor starts to crack in places he did not even know existed.
After the intense therapy session of Chapter 5, Pohl switches gears completely. Chapter 6 is big, packed, and full of world-building. This is where we really get to see Gateway as a place where people live, work, gamble, and try not to die.
This chapter is short. Really short. But it packs a punch.
We are back in the therapy room with Rob and Sigfrid von Shrink. And this time, Sigfrid is not messing around.
After two therapy chapters and one backstory chapter, we finally get to see Gateway itself. And it does not disappoint.
This chapter is short. But it hits hard.
We are back in therapy with Sigfrid von Shrink, the AI psychiatrist. And this time, Sigfrid is not letting Rob dodge the hard questions.
Chapter 2 takes us back. Way back. Before the money, before Gateway, before the guilt. This is where we learn where Rob came from. And it is not pretty.
The very first line of Gateway tells you everything you need to know about the main character.
“My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male.”
I just finished reading Gateway by Frederik Pohl and I need to talk about it.
This book won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Award when it came out in 1977. And honestly, after reading it, I get why. It hit different from most sci-fi I have read.
So we made it through all 11 chapters of “Singapore-China Relations: 50 Years.” That’s a lot of diplomatic history, economic data, and joint projects. Here’s what stuck with me after reading the whole thing.
Chapter 11, written by John Wong and Lim Tai Wei, tells the story of how Singapore built serious intellectual infrastructure for studying China. Not just the language or the classics, but real-time political and economic analysis.
Chapter 10, by Huang Yanjie and Zhao Lingmin, is about how Singapore looks when viewed through Chinese eyes. Not the diplomatic version. The media version. Official newspapers, TV dramas, pop songs, travel blogs, internet forums. All of it.
Lim Tai Wei’s chapter is about the “soft” side of Singapore’s Chinese community. Not the money, not the politics, not the diplomatic handshakes. Instead, he looks at culture, food, education, traditions, and identity. The stuff that shapes how a community actually lives day to day.
Zhao Litao’s chapter on educational exchanges reads like a story about two countries slowly figuring out they need each other’s schools. Not for sentimental reasons. For very practical ones.
This chapter is different from the rest of the book. It’s not written by academics. It’s written by Singbridge, the company that actually builds these projects on the ground. So instead of theory, you get the practitioner’s view. How does a Singapore company walk into a Chinese province and say, “Let us help you build a city”? And then actually do it?
Chapter 6 is written by Chen Gang, and it’s about one of the most interesting things Singapore and China have done together. They decided to build an eco-friendly city from scratch. Not renovate an existing one. Not add solar panels to some buildings. They picked a 30-square-kilometre patch of mostly useless land, salt farms and wastewater ponds, and said: “Let’s build a green city here.”
This is probably my favorite chapter in the whole book. Lye Liang Fook writes about the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), and it reads almost like a startup saga. Two countries decided to build an entire industrial township together. They clashed on how to do it. Things got rough. Then it actually worked.
Chapter 4, written by Chiang Min-Hua, is about how tourism exchange between Singapore and China grew from almost nothing into a multi-billion dollar flow of people and money in both directions. And the numbers in this chapter are genuinely surprising.
Chapter 3, written by Sarah Y Tong, is basically the spreadsheet chapter. Tons of tables, percentages, growth rates. But behind all those numbers is a pretty wild story: two countries that didn’t even officially recognize each other kept trading anyway, for decades, because money talks louder than politics.
Chapter 2 is all about one man: Lee Kuan Yew. Written by Zheng Yongnian and Lim Wen Xin, it makes a strong case that Singapore’s special relationship with China was built on Lee’s personal connections with five generations of Chinese leaders, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, and the fact that China genuinely wanted to learn from Singapore’s success.
Chapter 1 is by John Wong and Lye Liang Fook, and it tries to do something ambitious: cover the entire arc of Singapore-China relations in one chapter. Centuries of trade, Cold War politics, panda diplomacy, military exercises, and a whole web of institutional frameworks. The through-line is clear: pragmatism made this relationship work, and institutions are what will keep it going.
The editors, Zheng Yongnian and Lye Liang Fook, start with something refreshingly honest. They admit the project scared them. World Scientific Publishing asked them to write a book commemorating 50 years of Singapore-China relations, and they thought: huge topic, not much time.
So I picked up this book called Singapore-China Relations: 50 Years, edited by Zheng Yongnian and Lye Liang Fook. It’s part of a whole series about Singapore’s first 50 years as a nation. And honestly, the story of how Singapore and China built their relationship is way more interesting than you’d expect.
We made it. Fourteen posts covering one book about a half-elf and a human woman trying not to die on a desert planet ruled by tyrants. So what did we actually just read? Let me break it down.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
So we’re done. Fifteen chapters and an epilogue of Cinnabar Shadows. Time to step back and talk about the whole thing.
The escape fails. I’ll just say it upfront so you’re not holding your breath. After all that planning, all that fighting through guards and blasting psionicists, Jedra and Kayan don’t make it out. They end up right back where they started, except now their captors are angry and the timeline just got shorter.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Pavek drifts in and out. He remembers fragments. Someone apologizing because there’s no piece of linen large enough to cover him head to foot. He remembers laughing at that. Remembers sunlight and food and sleeping under the stars because the halfling houses are too small for him.
The arena chapters have been building toward something terrible. You could feel it coming. Two people who love each other, forced to fight as gladiators, performing for a crowd that wants blood. The only question was how bad it would get.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 15. The climax. And it starts in the worst possible place: a dirt pit beneath the black tree’s roots.
Tyr was supposed to be the destination. The city where things would get better. The place where Jedra and Kayan could finally stop running and start building something. But Athas doesn’t work like that. Athas takes your plans and feeds them to a mekillot.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 14 switches back to Pavek, and it introduces one of the best new characters in the book: Commandant Javed.
You’d think almost dying inside a crystal world would be enough to keep someone from touching another one. You’d think that. But this is Jedra we’re talking about. The guy who grew up on the streets of Urik and apparently never learned the meaning of “maybe don’t do that.”
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 13 opens with Ruari cringing at his companions. Zvain announced they have a map. Mahtra told the armed strangers they’re looking for halflings and a big black tree. So much for keeping their mouths shut.
Remember last chapter when I said the crystals were a miracle and a potential disaster? This chapter is the disaster part. It happens fast, and Jedra has to grow up real quick to deal with it.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
“Pavek was gone. Pavek was dead.”
This chapter starts ugly and ends somewhere incredible. The emotional range is wild. You go from a relationship falling apart to one of the most mind-bending discoveries in the whole series.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 11 starts with Cerk, and honestly, it’s the most revealing look we’ve gotten at Kakzim’s young apprentice. This little halfling has been underground, running from the fighting in the cavern, and he surfaces into daylight with one job: warn Brother Kakzim that the templars have found them.
This chapter is basically a tour of the coolest home on Athas. And the fact that it belongs to a giant insect philosopher makes it even better.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
After nearly dying on the Codesh killing floor, Pavek and his companions get the royal treatment. Luxurious rooms, incredible food, hot baths. It should feel like a reward. Instead, it feels like the calm before something terrible. And they are right.
This chapter is basically a walking interview. The three of them are crossing the desert toward Tyr, and Kitarak decides it’s the perfect time to figure out who he’s traveling with. But the way he does it tells you so much about who he is.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
This chapter is a ride. Pavek takes his crew into Codesh, the most dangerous slaughterhouse village on Athas, looking for a tunnel to the underground reservoir. What they find is Kakzim, a mob of butchers, and a fight that almost kills all of them.
The dying creature is not what they think it is.
Jedra looks down at it and sees a thri-kreen, one of those giant mantis-like insect people. But something about it seems off. Bigger cranial bulge behind the eyes. Narrower face. And strapped to its back is a massive pack stuffed with gear, most of it made of metal. On Athas, where a single metal knife can buy you a month of food, this creature is carrying a fortune in hardware. Cooking pots, gythka blades, curved throwing weapons, and tools Jedra cannot even identify.
We are done. Seventeen chapters, a whole lot of posts, and one ugly templar’s journey from corrupt bureaucrat to druid guardian. Time to actually talk about the book.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
This is one of those chapters that is quiet on the surface but full of weight underneath. Pavek takes possession of House Escrissar, the home of the dead high templar who tortured his friends. What he finds inside forces him to confront things no amount of sword practice can solve.
Kayan collapses within a mile.
It is the middle of the day. The sun is relentless. They were exiled with three days of food and water, and the chief’s parting threat is still ringing in their ears. They are so exhausted from the cloud ray battle and Kayan’s healing that they can barely walk. And the elves sent them out at noon, which on Athas is basically a death sentence.
Fires are burning inside the ramparts. The survivors of Quraite are gathered around them, beaten down, grieving, barely holding it together. And then Hamanu of Urik walks through the trees.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
After the emotional bomb that was Chapter 6, this chapter slows down and lets Pavek sit with his thoughts on a ten-day kank ride across the Tablelands. And honestly, I needed the breather too.
The chapter opens with Jedra staring at the chief like the man just said it was going to rain. “Anybody here can call anybody else a coward, and that person has to fight? That’s a tribal rule?”
This chapter opens with Zvain screaming and ends with a sorcerer-king eating a man alive. It is the most intense chapter in the entire book and I am still not totally over it.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
This chapter hit me like a truck. We finally get the full picture of who Mahtra is, where she came from, and what “made, not born” actually means. But that is only half the story. The other half belongs to Akashia, and it is devastating.
The book opens with a slave caravan burning in the desert while a tribe of elves throws a party around the wreckage.
This chapter is basically a heist movie set in a fantasy hellscape. Three guys with obsidian knives break into an interrogator’s fortified house to rescue one woman. It goes sideways almost immediately. They barely get out alive.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Salt sprites are still dancing on the Sun’s Fist as sunset dies. Golden Guthay (one of Athas’s moons) climbs the eastern horizon. Pavek stops Ruari and Zvain at the edge of the salt flats. No point risking themselves out there until the sun is well set and the moonlight is strong enough to navigate by.
So I just finished the second book in the Dark Sun Chronicles of Athas series, and I have thoughts.
The Darkness Before the Dawn by Ryan Hughes is set in the Dark Sun campaign world, which is basically the bleakest Dungeons & Dragons setting ever created. If you are picturing green forests and friendly taverns, stop. That is not what this is. Athas is a dying world. The sun is red. The desert goes on forever. Water is worth more than gold. Metal is so rare that people fight with weapons made from bone and obsidian. And the people who run things are immortal sorcerer-kings who have been draining the life from the planet for thousands of years.
Chapter 14 is all Pavek, and it is the slow, quiet kind of chapter that somehow hits harder than any battle scene.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
After three chapters of scheming halflings, massacred cavern-folk, and a mysterious New Race woman meeting the Lion-King, we finally meet our main character. And he’s… weeding.
This chapter is where we finally see the story through Akashia’s eyes, and it makes her way more sympathetic than I expected.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1 Publisher: Tor Books, 2002
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 3 opens inside Mahtra’s recurring nightmare, and it’s rough.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Story: “One to Go” by Raymond E. Feist
Raymond E. Feist was part of the original Thieves’ World lineup. He’s the guy who created Jimmy the Hand, one of the most beloved characters in the entire series. So having him write the final story in this revival anthology feels right. It’s like a veteran returning for the encore.
Chapter 12 opens with a sandal nudging Pavek in the ribs and a voice saying “It’s morning.” He groans. His head is full of bad memories from the night before. He argued with Akashia about zarneeka, then parked himself next to the Moonracer’s honey-ale barrel and drank too much.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Story: “Apocalypse Noun” by Jeff Grubb
“Apocalypse Noun.” Two words that shouldn’t go together but absolutely do. Jeff Grubb gives us one of the most purely entertaining stories in this entire anthology. It’s got humor, action, a chase scene through the streets of Sanctuary, and a very dangerous linguist who just wants to be left alone with his books.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 2 shifts us completely away from Kakzim and Codesh. We enter Urik itself, in the predawn hours, and meet one of the most unusual characters I’ve come across in fantasy fiction.
Chapter 11 is a quieter one. No poison. No midnight crises. Just Pavek grinding through druid lessons and slowly building a life at Quraite. But Abbey packs so much character detail into this chapter that it ends up doing more heavy lifting than the action scenes.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
The book opens with a bird’s-eye view. Literally. We see the city of Urik through the eyes of a soaring kes’trekel (a scaled bird native to Athas). The city looks like a giant sulfur growth rising from a green plain, its walls covered with murals of the same figure over and over: a powerful man with a lion’s head, bronze skin, black mane, and fierce yellow eyes that flash in the sunlight.
This chapter opens in the middle of the night with Akashia bolting out of her hut because Telhami summoned her in a dream. Not on purpose. Telhami was asleep and her subconscious worries reached out through the guardian’s magic and dragged Akashia out of bed. That’s how stressed the old woman is about Laq.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1 Publisher: Tor Books, 2002
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
So I picked up Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey. It’s the fourth book in the Chronicles of Athas series, set in the Dark Sun world. If you’re not familiar with Dark Sun, you’re in for something different. This isn’t your typical swords-and-sorcery setting with lush forests and noble kings. No. This is a post-apocalyptic desert hellscape where magic has literally drained the life from the planet.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1 Publisher: Tor Books, 2002
This chapter pulls a nasty trick on you. It starts with Zvain, not Pavek, and it’s one of the most disturbing scenes in the book so far.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1 Publisher: Tor Books, 2002
The Tyr-storm hits them in the open.
Pavek is riding under the bone cargo rack on the soldier-kank when Ruari jabs him awake with his staff. Pavek grabs the wood, rams the other end into Ruari’s gut, and throws the staff away. “Do that again, half-wit, and you’ll need a crutch, not a staff.”
Pavek wakes up hog-tied inside a handcart rolling over terrible pavement.
His wrists and ankles are bound together behind his back and anchored to the cart itself. His limbs are stretched to the point of screaming. His hands and feet are completely numb. There is straw thrown over him, a cloth blindfold over his eyes, and the cold air of a night outside the walls of Urik.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points edited by Lynn Abbey (Tor Books, 2002)
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points edited by Lynn Abbey (Tor Books, 2002)
Previous: The Prisoner in the Jewel | Next: Duel - Honor and Steel in Sanctuary
Living with Zvain is a special kind of torture.
Every morning starts the same way. Pavek is trying to sleep, and Zvain is running his mouth. “What’s it going to be today, Pavek? Some more groveling and toe-kissing at the west gate?” The kid has perfected the art of the early morning insult. He calls Pavek a belly-crawler, a yellow-lover, a dust-licker. He questions his manhood, his courage, his pride. All before breakfast.
Pavek wakes up in total darkness with no idea where he is or how long he has been out. His left arm, which was rotting and useless last time he was conscious, is now pain-free and working again. But it is sealed in some kind of stone cast, and the room is pitch black. For a solid minute, the guy genuinely wonders if he is dead.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points edited by Lynn Abbey (Tor Books, 2002)
Chapter 4 hits different. Up until now Pavek has been a templar with problems. Now he’s just a man with nothing.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points edited by Lynn Abbey (Tor Books, 2002)
Story: “Role Model: A Tale of Apprentices” by Andrew Offutt
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points edited by Lynn Abbey (Tor Books, 2002)
Story: “Role Model: A Tale of Apprentices” by Andrew Offutt
Chapter 3 opens with Pavek still tasting zarneeka. The numbness is gone but the bitterness lingers. So do the jeers from the other templars at the gate. He’s used to being laughed at. His pursuit of spell-craft, the way he haunts the archives studying scrolls he can never actually cast, makes him a running joke in the civil bureau. Big, ugly, dirt-poor templar with a romantic curiosity. That’s how they see him.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Story: “Home Is Where the Hate Is” Author: Mickey Zucker Reichert Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1
Chapter 2 picks up a few days later. The bruise from the orphan boy’s punch has faded. Pavek is back to his regular duties, transferring salt sacks in the customhouse, ticking off counts on a wax tablet. Just another day of grunt work for a third-rank Regulator.
Chapter 1 opens with a scene-setter that tells you everything you need to know about Athas. The twin moons have set. The sky is black. The heat of day has turned to bone-numbing cold. And the first thing Abbey tells us is the law of this world: nothing changes. What was will always be.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Story: Introduction Author: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1
So I picked up this old fantasy novel from 1994 and honestly? It hit different than I expected.
The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey is the first book in the Chronicles of Athas series, set in the Dark Sun campaign world. If you’ve never heard of Dark Sun, let me fill you in. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons setting, but forget everything you think you know about D&D. There are no lush green forests. No friendly taverns with smiling barkeeps. No rain.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1 Publisher: Tor Books, 2002
If you’ve never heard of Thieves’ World, here’s the short version. Back in 1979, editor Robert Lynn Asprin had a wild idea. What if you took a bunch of fantasy authors, gave them the same city to play in, and let them write stories that shared characters, locations, and consequences? What one writer did in their story would actually affect the world another writer was building in theirs.
We’ve reached the end. Every chapter covered. Every character accounted for. Sandy MacGregor’s journey from Baltimore to Zarathandra and everything that happened in between.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
After everything Sandy has been through, you’d think meeting the Goddess face to face would be the reward. The big moment where the deity shows up, says “well done,” and sends him home to Baltimore.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
This is it. The whole book has been building to this moment. Every chapter, every setback, every small victory, every death. It all comes down to Sandy MacGregor standing in front of a dark god and opening his mouth.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
The mountain is gone. Like, completely gone. Sandy wakes up and the entire fortress that they just raided has been wiped off the map. Where Tham Og Zalkri stood, there’s nothing. Rubble, dust, and open sky where a mountain used to be.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
They’re going in. After all the traveling, the desert crossings, the bar fights, and the sorcerer’s enchantments, the group is finally entering Tham Og Zalkri. The Black Mountain. Home of a death cult that worships a dark god.
This is the final post in my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Here’s the epilogue and my closing thoughts.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
The group is about to raid a mountain full of murderous cultists. And Zhadnoboth, the sorcerer who got them into this whole mess, picks this exact moment to do the best work of his entire career. Then he bails.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter IX, Part 2 - the final interview.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Just before daybreak, they see Tham Og Zalkri. The house of Zalkri.
So we’re done. Twelve posts covering one Forgotten Realms novel from 1997 that most people have never heard of. And I want to wrap up with why I think this book deserves more attention than it gets.
So that’s Planeswalker. Twenty-four chapters of a Phyrexian newt trying to save a broken god from himself, and in the end giving her life to finish what he couldn’t.
This is the payoff. Two chapters. Everything the book has been building toward lands here, and it lands in a way I genuinely did not expect from a D&D novel.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Sandy wakes with sun blasting his eyes and sand in his mouth. He spits it out, crawls to shade, and passes out again.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter IX, Part 1. The chapter was too long for one post so I split it in two.
This is it. The final chapter. And it’s devastating.
The sun has just risen over the Kher Ridge. Xantcha and Ratepe are on one side of the mountain, waiting for Ratepe to recover from the three-step walk from Pincar City. Urza is already at the cavern. He’s sworn he won’t go after Gix until they arrive.
Everything has been building to the Sunglade. The scattered Cha’Tel’Quessir, the lurking Red Wizards, the ancient gods stirring beneath the forest floor. These three chapters are where it all crashes together, and the results are brutal.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter VIII.
It’s July 2, 2009. The Dow sits at 8,280. Unemployment is at 9.5%. And HFM is doing something he hasn’t done in a decade. He’s going on vacation. A real one.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Three nights of hard travel. Everyone’s short-tempered. Nobody talks except to argue. Sandy passes the time composing bawdy limericks for Glupp. The grundzar beams at every one, probably because he doesn’t understand any of them. Sandy calls him a bootlicker. Glupp literally licks his boot.
Chapter 23 is the longest chapter in the book and it earns every page. This is the climax of the Efuan Pincar storyline, the screaming spiders storyline, and the Gix storyline all at once. Buckle up.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
The group crawls out of the ruined tower to find the oasis destroyed. The Shurva wrecked everything. Vegetation is blackened scraps and ash. Only the fortress survived, protected by whatever ancient power lingers in its walls.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter VII.
It’s May 2009. The Dow is at 8,504. Unemployment is 9.4 percent. Over 342,000 homes got foreclosed that month. But the worst of the panic? That part seems to be over.
These three chapters are a lot. They cover Bro recovering from his arrow wound, falling for a woman who is secretly the most powerful wizard on the continent, losing more friends, and then we cut to Lauzoril having one of the most emotionally intense father-daughter scenes in any D&D novel. So let’s get into it.
Chapter 22 starts with a storm and ends with Urza casually dismantling the life Xantcha and Ratepe have built together. It’s a lot.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter VI - the start of Part 3: Aftermath.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
After the battle at the Naz Mathoni camp, things should calm down. The enemies are defeated. Water is secured. The Key of Arimithos has been found. Time to rest, right?
Three chapters. Three completely different vibes. A room full of the most dangerous wizards in Faerun. A queen strapping on leather armor. And a boy getting shot in the back with an arrow right after hugging his dad.
Chapter 21 is where everything the book has been building toward starts to crack open. Xantcha has to deal with what happened with Gix in the catacombs, and the truth she discovers at Koilos changes everything.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Last chapter ended with a ridiculous plan. Sandy and Zhadnoboth would walk into a camp full of enemies and pretend to be harmless travelers. Uskban and Pognak would hide in the desert, waiting.
Bro finally made it to the Yuirwood. He’s walking through the forest he’s dreamed about for seven years. And it’s nothing like he remembers.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter V.
It’s January 16, 2009. The Dow is at 8,281. Unemployment is 7.6 percent. Over 300,000 foreclosures this month. And HFM just spent his New Year’s Eve chasing bank traders on ski slopes to get year-end prices for his portfolio. Welcome to year-end closing on Wall Street.
Wait. Let me clarify something about the chapter split here. Chapter 19 covered the journey from Serra’s realm through the multiverse and arriving at Equilor. Chapter 20 goes deeper into the Equilor visit and ends with their return to Dominaria.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter IV - the start of Part 2: The Collapse.
Book: It’s About Squirrels… | Author: Lynn Abbey
So we made it through the whole story. Squirrels, ghosts, brownies, a fairy queen who can’t pronounce “electricity,” and a Rube Goldberg trap made of beer cups and silverware balanced on a rocking chair. What a ride.
Chapters 12 through 14 give us a dead father reunion, a sister intervention, and Lauzoril having a very bad day with his undead relatives. These are the chapters where every thread starts pulling tighter.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
There’s something about desert stories that just hits different. The constant threat of death by dehydration. The emptiness. The heat. When you strip away everything else, survival comes down to one thing: water.
Chapter 19 is the “time passes” chapter. And a lot of time passes. We’re talking thousands of years compressed into one chapter. Lynn Abbey pulls it off, though.
Previous: The Phyrexian Portal Is Destroyed
Chapter 18 covers a lot of ground. Urza builds a new weapon. Months pass. Ratepe becomes a secret agent. And Xantcha walks straight into the demon she hoped was dead.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter III.
It’s September 4, 2008. The Dow is at 11,188. Unemployment just hit 6.2 percent. Over 300,000 foreclosures this month. And HFM is back in his midtown office, looking out the window at the same city. But things are worse now.
Chapters 9 through 11 are where the book shifts gears in a really satisfying way. We jump between three very different settings: Thayan spy games, the Simbul’s disastrous private chambers, and Lauzoril’s complicated home life. And honestly, these chapters are some of the most character-revealing in the whole book.
Book: It’s About Squirrels… | Author: Lynn Abbey
So we’re at the part where Nic decides to rescue a brownie from a dead hard drive using beer and Vienna sausages. I love this story.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Up to this point, A Name to Conjure With has been weird, funny, and kind of charming. Sandy got pulled into another world, teamed up with a cranky sorcerer and a desert warrior, and they’ve been stumbling from one mess to the next. It felt like a rough adventure. Messy but manageable.
Previous: Xantcha Reunites With Urza in Serra’s Palace
Chapter 17 drops us back to Dominaria and the aftermath of the ambulator battle. And it’s one of those chapters where three characters stand around a Phyrexian corpse and everyone learns something they didn’t want to know.
Book: It’s About Squirrels… by Lynn Abbey
So Nic is napping between resume emails when someone bangs on her door. Her first thought is that something happened to her parents. That’s the kind of headspace she’s in.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter II.
Six months have passed since the first interview. It’s March 26, 2008. The Dow is at 12,422. Unemployment is 5.1%. And Bear Stearns just got bought for pocket change.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
The group is in a desert town. It’s hot, dusty, and full of the kind of people who don’t ask questions because they don’t want questions asked of them. The town exists as a waypoint for traders, smugglers, and anyone else who needs supplies before heading into the deeper desert.
Chapter 6 opens with the Simbul standing over Bro in the Yuirwood, thumping her staff on the ground next to his head.
Previous: Colliding Islands in Serra’s Crumbling Realm
Chapter 16 is maybe the most emotionally devastating chapter in the entire book. Xantcha finally finds Urza. And then he tells her he’s done with her.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Chapter I.
Before the interview starts, the book gives you context on how we got here. And it’s a story about cheap money and bad decisions stacking on top of each other.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Sandy wakes up on the floor of a sorcerer’s laboratory. His head hurts. His body aches. The last thing he remembers is falling through an elevator shaft that turned out to be a portal between worlds.
Book: It’s About Squirrels… | Author: Lynn Abbey
So up to this point, the story has been weird but explainable. Squirrels frying themselves on a transformer? That’s just Florida wildlife being Florida wildlife. A dead hard drive? Bad luck. But in this section, Lynn Abbey pulls the rug right out from under you. And it happens on the side of a road with no sidewalks.
Chapter 3 is where this book goes from interesting to genuinely wild. We leave Bro and the Yuirwood behind and drop into a crypt in Thazalhar, eastern Thay. And we meet Lauzoril’s family.
Previous: Xantcha Wakes in Serra’s Realm
Chapter 15 is pure chaos after the slow burn of the previous chapter. Islands collide. Everything falls apart. And Serra’s idea of peacekeeping is basically a giant laser.
Before we hit the actual chapters, the book opens with two documents from Candlekeep. The first is a history of the Simbul, Alassra Shentrantra. The second is study notes about a forgotten goddess named Zandilar. Both are important, so let me cover them quick.
This is part of my series retelling Diary of a Very Bad Year. Today we’re covering Keith Gessen’s introduction.
Keith Gessen got introduced to the anonymous hedge fund manager (HFM) in late 2006. Someone called HFM a “financial genius” who ran the emerging markets desk at a midtown hedge fund. Gessen was skeptical. He knew plenty of people from college who went into finance, but mostly for the lifestyle. Working hard, drinking beer, watching football.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
We’ve walked through the entire Nether Scroll chapter by chapter. Time to step back and talk about the book as a whole.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
This is it. The final chapter. And Abbey opens it not with Hamanu, but with Ruari, the young half-elf druid, wedged into the corner of his bed, so drunk he thinks he might die. When a woman appears in his doorway, he literally thinks she’s Death come to claim him.
Book: It’s About Squirrels… by Lynn Abbey
So Nic calls the utility company. She’s lost power at exactly 9am for four days straight. Not a full blackout. Just a tiny hiccup. Barely enough to notice, really. Your microwave clock wouldn’t even blink. But her computer? Dead. Hard drive completely fried.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Sandy MacGregor is having a normal Saturday afternoon in Baltimore. He’s eating at a Chinese restaurant. Wonton soup, barbecued ribs, fried rice. Standard comfort food.
Previous: Summer Journey to Efuan Pincar
Chapter 14 throws us into a completely different setting and honestly, the tonal shift is jarring in the best way. We go from sword fights and Phyrexian ambushes to… an eternal sunset, golden grass, and a very unhelpful woman.
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Some books get lost in time. Not because they’re bad. Because the publishing world moves fast and forgets things. A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt is one of those books.
Book: It’s About Squirrels… | Author: Lynn Abbey
So here’s a story that caught me off guard. I picked up Lynn Abbey’s “It’s About Squirrels…” expecting something lightweight, maybe funny. And it is funny. But it’s also this sneaky little fantasy story that slips magic into the most unglamorous setting possible: a trailer park in dead-center Florida.
I just finished reading one of the most interesting books about the 2008 financial crisis. And I want to walk you through it.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
This is the chapter that broke me. Fair warning.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
The final chapter opens with Druhallen putting one foot in front of the other. That’s literally how he describes it to himself. Pushing his companions through empty tunnels with a dying goblin on his back and the taste of violation in his mind.
So I’m starting a retelling series of a Forgotten Realms novel that almost nobody talks about. The Simbul’s Gift by Lynn Abbey. Published in 1997 as Book 6 of the Nobles series. And honestly, it deserves way more attention than it gets.
Previous: Urza Invades Phyrexia on His Dragon
Chapter 13 is where Planeswalker stops being a story about cosmic battles and becomes something more personal. And honestly? It’s better for it.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 13 switches to Tiep’s perspective, and it’s the best decision Lynn Abbey makes in the entire book. What happens next is absolute chaos, and seeing it through a terrified teenager’s eyes makes everything hit harder.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Chapter 13 opens with one of the most unexpectedly quiet moments in the book. Hamanu is in the Kreegills at sunset, weaving starlight between his fingers like a child playing with thread. For a few breaths, he forgets who he is. Just a man watching stars come out over mountains.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Chapter 12 is the longest chapter in the book, and for good reason. It’s where everything converges. Hamanu has escaped Ur Draxa, barely survived his encounter with Rajaat, and now drifts aimlessly through the Gray netherworld with three days before the other champions close their noose around Urik.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
This chapter hurts. Not in a plot-twist way. It hurts because a good horse dies and nobody pretends it’s easy.
This is post 13 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
So here’s what happened. Hamanu has been sitting in his workroom for three straight days without moving. Not sleeping. Not eating. Just writing his history and drowning in memories of the past. His loyal dwarf steward Enver finally breaks through the warded door with a loaf of bread and a room full of worried faces.
This is post 12 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 11 is where everything breaks down and gets rebuilt. Everybody’s secrets come out, everybody hits their lowest point, and by the end, they actually have something resembling a plan.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Chapter 10 is the big one. This is where Hamanu becomes the champion, and where we see the full scope of what Rajaat did to him. It’s also the chapter where we watch the birth and end of the troll race through Hamanu’s eyes. Abbey pulls no punches here.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 10 belongs to Tiep, and it’s the chapter that made me completely rethink this character.
This is post 11 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
This is post 10 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
If Chapter 8 was a war chapter, Chapter 9 is the emotional core of this book. Abbey slows everything down and lets Hamanu sit with his own pain. It’s devastating.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 9 finally gets us to Dekanter, and it does not disappoint.
This is post 9 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
This chapter is a lot. Abbey throws crisis after crisis at Hamanu and doesn’t let up for a single page.
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 8 opens with something I genuinely appreciate about Lynn Abbey’s writing. Druhallen wakes up and just… thinks about retirement. He’s fantasizing about buying a little spell shop in a well-run town, marrying, maybe having kids. The man is pulling gray hairs from his beard and daydreaming about boring, predictable, wonderful normalcy.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
This chapter is split right down the middle. The first half is present-day Hamanu in his workroom, brewing a dangerous stealth spell. The second half is his memoir, and it is one of the best stretches of the entire book.
Book: The Nether Scroll | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
If you’ve ever played a D&D campaign where the DM puts the party through a miserable overland journey just to make them appreciate civilization, that’s this chapter. Except it’s actually good.
This is post 8 of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of “Planeswalker” by Lynn Abbey, Book II of the Artifact Cycle in Magic: The Gathering.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
We’re back in present-day Urik, and the chapter opens with Hamanu doing something surprisingly… normal. He’s sitting on his palace roof, half-listening to his dwarf steward Enver read a daily briefing scroll, and thinking about farming.
Book: The Nether Scroll | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
This chapter is where everything falls apart. And it’s completely Tiep’s fault. Sort of.
Previous: Xantcha Frees Ratepe From Slavery
The title of this post is a bit misleading, because Chapter 6 is actually about Xantcha’s past. Rat falls asleep by the dying fire, and while she watches over him with one hand on his chain, Xantcha’s mind goes back to Phyrexia again. This time, deeper.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Book: The Nether Scroll | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Remember how Rozt’a swore she’d show the goblin “the flat of her sword” if he came back? That lasted about six hours.
Previous: Xantcha Arrives in Efuan Pincar
This chapter is about two people who don’t trust each other trying to survive together. It’s also about what freedom actually means when you’ve lost everything.
Book: The Nether Scroll | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
So here’s where the family drama really kicks in.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Previous: Xantcha’s Phyrexian Origins and the Sphere
Xantcha wakes up from her memories just in time to avoid crashing into a tree. That’s the kind of chapter opening that sets the tone for what’s ahead.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
A dust storm blows in from the Anauroch desert that night. It lasts three days. Hot as a fire pit, sharp with grit. The locals wrap their faces like desert nomads and tell the visitors helpful things like “This is nothing” and “You should have been here last year, we didn’t see the sun for twenty days.”
Previous: Xantcha and The Antiquity Wars
This chapter is almost entirely flashback, and it’s one of the best pieces of worldbuilding in Magic: The Gathering fiction. We get Xantcha’s full origin story, and Phyrexia has never felt more real or more horrifying.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Fifteen years. That’s the time jump between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. One chapter ago, Druhallen was a teenager with a broken wrist swearing vengeance on a hilltop. Now he’s a grown man leaning against a rough-plank wall in a Zhentarim village called Parnast, and his wrist still aches when he thinks about Ansoain.
Previous: Urza Returns to Koilos After the Brothers War
Chapter 2 shifts the point of view to Xantcha, and the book immediately gets better for it.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
The book opens with two young wizards sitting on horses, watching other people fix a broken cartwheel, and gossiping. That’s it. That’s how we meet Druhallen and Galimer. And honestly? It’s a perfect introduction because it tells you exactly who these two are before anything dramatic happens.
Previous: Planeswalker by Lynn Abbey: A Magic The Gathering Retelling Series
Chapter 1 drops us right into Urza’s headspace, and honestly, it’s a rough place to be.
So here’s the thing. The Forgotten Realms has this massive shelf of tie-in novels, and most people know the big names. Drizzt. Elminster. The characters who show up on every “best D&D books” list. But there are entire series buried in that catalog that tell genuinely interesting stories, and the Lost Empires series is one of them.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Author: Lynn Abbey Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5 Setting: Dark Sun (Dungeons & Dragons)
So you want to know what happens in Planeswalker by Lynn Abbey? Good. Because this book is one of those stories that sticks with you long after you close the cover.