The Plague of Climate Change
I just finished Camus’s compelling read, The Plague. It’s a parable provoked by the Nazi Occupation, but also about general occupation, oppression, and isolation. It’s about resistance to incomprehensible evil…
books
Selected Documents from the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades
Last year saw the 40th anniversary of the 1978 Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse, or BR), a month-long offensive against the Italian state initiated by the kidnapping…
Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Or maybe we’d recognize Nietzsche’s last man as ourselves: “Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is…
Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells’s book The Uninhabitable Earth starts out with a repetition of facts that won’t be news to anyone paying attention, but he has a lovely way with words. Four…
Seligman’s Hope Circuit
Martin Seligman is famous for a learned helplessness study I wrote about a few years back: In a famous experiment, dogs were put in a compartment and trained to jump…
Seven Days of Books in One #nlpoli
The seven books from my part of the book challenge, with each described by the respective publisher’s blurb: 1. The myth of the strong leader by Archie Brown. Archie Brown…
On Hari’s Lost Connections
“There’s violence to knowing the world isn’t what you thought. . . . Sometimes the world doesn’t make a lot of sense, but how we get through it is, we…
The Fatness is live!
My fourth novel is available as of today! It’s a satire about concentration camps for fat people and bureaucracy gone mad. (Don’t worry, it’s a love story.) This crazy book…
Dissolving Clouds
Came across this and began to wonder… If I could do it too… So today I dissolved some clouds using only the powers of my mind. It took longer than…
On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism
This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities.…
On Wasting Time
I had a brief Facebook conversation with Massimo Pigliucci about my decision to fritter away a morning watching the rain and petting my cat. He said, “It’s up to you…
Heretics and Believers
Peter Marshall’s Heretics and believers: a history of the English Reformation from Yale University Press (2017) arrived as a belated birthday present on Friday past. It’s proven to be well…
2016 in books #nlpoli
1. Brand Command by Alex Marland. The book that political marketing and communications academics will be quoting for a while to come. 2. Observing the outports by Jeff Webb. An…
On Being Useful: a Necessary Shift in Radicalism
“Oh, what can we do in a case like that? Nothing to do but sit on your hat, or your toothbrush, or your grandmother, or anything else that’s useless.“ Those…
Late Summer Reading #nlpoli
From the University of Toronto Press:"The years after Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada were ones of rapid social and economic change, as provincial resettlement and industrialization initiatives attempted to transform the…
Late Summer Reading #nlpoli
From the University of Toronto Press:"The years after Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada were ones of rapid social and economic change, as provincial resettlement and industrialization initiatives attempted to transform the…
labradore’s Labrador #nlpoli
For your summer reading enjoyment, here are five books on Labrador, courtesy of the always helpful Wallace McLean at labradore:Elizabeth Goudie, Woman of LabradorOriginally published in 1973, Woman of Labrador…
More Newfoundland books you should read #nlpoli
Yesterday you got Jerry Bannister's five books on Newfoundland.Today you get an eclectic list from your humble e-scribbler:1. Jeff Webb, The Voice of Newfoundland: A Social History of the Broadcasting…
The ":new" Newfoundland #nlpoli
Every once in a while, SRBP has featured a list of suggested books either for summer enjoyment or as in April 2006, for anyone interested in reading about Newfoundland and…