1. Lux by Rosalía

2. Sorcery & Cecelia: Or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Possibly the most comforting comfort read I’ve ever encountered? I wish I’d known about it years ago, so I wouldn’t have had to use The Fountainhead to fall asleep.

3. On Size and Life by Thomas McMahon and John Tyler Bonner, a book on how organisms adapted at different sizes, and some of the physics that helps determine their shapes. It’s a great book, and happens to contain a description of an experiment in which kangaroos were trained to bounce on a treadmill. It also contains this helpful diagram, with the caption: “Human development, showing change in body shape with increasing age.”

   

4. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

5. Tiny Bookshop, more pure comfort.

A dispatch from under the local rock

Tensions between Denmark and the US over Greenland seem to have subsided.

On the other hand, tensions between the US and Israel on one hand, and Iran on the other, have worsened. There seems to be an active war?

But things are also not rosy in Norway, where Mette-Marin, a member of the Norwegian royal family, has become implicated in the Epstein case. Somewhat against the spirit of monarchy, a poll revealed that a large chunk of Norwegians don’t believe she ought to inherit the throne.

Beyond picking up books they’ve vaguely heard about that sound vaguely interesting or important, though, they seem unsure how to actually go about this goal.

I read a lot—somewhere between 50 and 130 books in any given year—and I’ve kept up that pace for the last 17 years, which is when I started reading adult books. And before you ask: no, I don’t have a job that requires reading, and no, I don’t count a book toward the total if I only skimmed it. (Or if it’s a re-read. Or if it’s very short. Etc.)

I don’t claim to be good at most things (or, really, anything else), but when it comes to books in particular, I consider my opinion to be above average.

But first, a reassurance.

Reading is not a moral imperative

I obviously would not read this much if I didn’t get something out of it. In fact, over the years, I’ve gotten a lot out of it. I also think long-form non-fiction in particular is unmatched for rigor of thought compared to pretty much any other medium for learning. (Yes, including Substack essays, sorry.)

But that still doesn’t mean you have to do it.

A great deal of the veneration of books and reading seems to come from status games among well-educated upper middle class types.

But here’s the thing: you do not have to play.

Maybe you don’t read as much as you wish you did not because you lack time, or because you haven’t found your niche yet, but because… you just don’t like it.

And that’s fine. A lot of people don’t actually like it. Even a lot of the ones who pretend to. Even a lot of the ones who pretend even to themselves.

And of the ones who do like reading, many (most) are not reading rigorous non-fiction or quality literature—they’re reading commercial bestsellers, which are generally entertaining and not that deep.

Which, again, is fine. I love reading for entertainment too.

But you do not need to feel bad about not joining them. A bingeable crime-thriller TV series is not meaningfully less deep than a bingeable crime-thriller book. Ditto for much fantasy, romance, chick lit, action, etc. If your preferred mode of entertainment or study isn’t books, just do something else.

In a pinch, if you still want to keep up, I recommend reading How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard and calling it a day. (I haven’t read this book, and so don’t know how to talk about it—I’m just going off the title.)

Or just admit you haven’t read whatever book people are calling necessary this week, and ask lots of questions when someone brings it up, comforted by the knowledge that there’s, like, an 80% chance it’s not actually very good.

The most important thing to get right

You need to pick the right books for you. This solves a surprising number of seemingly unrelated reasons for not reading more.

Note that this is distinct from whatever is being marketed most heavily this week, or any imposing classics you may feel you “should” read. It’s also different from whatever an interesting podcast guest or extremely well-read blogger happens to recommend.

Reading also carries an opportunity cost—both for the time spent reading instead of doing something else, and for reading one particular book instead of another. This latter cost is especially relevant the fewer books you read. At 100 books a year, I already feel I have to be picky; if you have the energy for under five books per year, you ought to be very choosy indeed.1

And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the opposite often happens. I’ve noticed that friends who read less tend to latch onto whichever book is most immediately salient or curiosity-provoking—not because it’s a good fit, but because they aren’t in the habit of seeking out books and don’t have a process for choosing them. Instead, they might be better served by actively protecting whatever limited slots they have for books that actually suit them.

But how does one discover what those books are? There are so many out there, and this can be genuinely hard to figure out—especially since the books we respond to most strongly sometimes surprise us.

Here’s how I think the process can be bootstrapped.

Know why you are reading

Say you’ve internalized that reading is not a moral demand, and that you don’t need to participate in whatever status game your friends are playing, but you want to read more anyway.

Why?

Personally, my main reasons are:

1. To see the world better. To that end, I read non-fiction that improves my ability to notice and appreciate what I already perceive.

2. To understand how people saw things in the past. Related to the above, I find it hard to locate my own assumptions without encountering very different ones. Books, both fiction and non-fiction, are especially good for this. This is also one area where books are clearly better than other media like film, or even music, simply because texts go farther back.

3. For love of beauty. Reading beautiful prose is something I find inherently rewarding.

4. For entertainment. I’m not easily gripped by other media, but for whatever reason I find books incredibly absorbing, and much more relaxing than other activities that put me in a flow state.

I realize this can be hard to articulate, so here are a few more possible reasons: to get acquainted with the canon; to learn more about a particular topic; to challenge your own ideas; to become more articulate; to improve your life in a tangible way; to learn a skill; to train your ability to focus; to have smart things to say in group discussions; to improve your vocabulary; to learn a new language; to frame a problem better; to keep up with current events; to enjoy a particular aesthetic impression or mood; to encounter other cultures and perspectives; to improve your cultural literacy. Or, of course, because you suspect there might be something out there for you in books, and you may or may not know how to find it.

This list isn’t intended to be exhaustive, but I hope it helps clarify what you want out of a book.

(One small warning, though: trying to read for everything at once—self-improvement, cultural literacy, intellectual challenge, and pure pleasure—won’t help you filter or prioritize. Try to narrow it down to the most important ones if possible.)

Beyond that, consider what themes or dilemmas you’ve been thinking about lately. For example, over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that, as a secular person, I had a very shallow understanding of religious viewpoints, and that this was severely limiting my ability to understand other cultures and historical periods. I’ve also been thinking about the phenomenology of hallucinations and delusions, both in the context of mental illness and in healthy people.

Consider which news stories reliably catch your attention, and why, or which aesthetics you’re most drawn to. Even noticing whether you tend to prefer novels of ideas, aesthetic vibes, or a gripping plot can help you avoid a lot of duds.

Troubleshooting

You choose books that are too hard

One extremely common pitfall I see in peers who want to read more is that they choose a difficulty level that’s too high before they’ve built any momentum or stamina, or accumulated a mental catalog of literary references. Their reading speed is also usually slower than it would be with more practice, and since the experience of pacing is partly subjective, this makes all books feel more boring.

Some “classics” are huge slogs. Many others require an enormous amount of prior reading to really pay off. No matter how smart you are, do not expect to enjoy these right away—even if your stated goal is to get well acquainted with the classics. This is setting yourself up for failure.

Note that this problem manifests in many ways, because “hard” can mean a lot of different things. One common version is just not finding books very absorbing. Another is systematically stalling partway through. Yet another is finding most books pretentious, because you’re unwittingly choosing ones that primarily reward a taste for enjoying prose style for its own sake—a preference many people never develop, even if they read a lot.

In all cases, the solution is broadly the same: match the books you read to your current level and interests, not to your aspirations.

Choose books that are entertaining and written to hook the reader. Choose books that feel as fun as whatever you’d normally do instead. Choose books that start paying off early, whether through plot momentum or ideas. Choose books with short chapters. Choose books you can skip around in, where putting them down for a while and picking them back up doesn’t feel like a failure (e.g., short story or essay collections, aphorisms, reference texts, etc.). Choose novellas or novelettes. Choose narrative non-fiction instead of dry treatments of the same subject. Choose books that were not considered experimental or avant-garde when they first came out.

View the first thirty or so pages of a book as a test rather than a commitment, and feel free to stop there if you can already tell you have little motivation to read the rest. If you’ve stalled on a book, stop reading it immediately, make a note of it, and come back later—once you’ve improved at reading—if you still feel it’s worth it. You can also try something shorter or more accessible by the same author, which is often a better entry point than their more famously difficult work.

And so on.

None of this is a guarantee that you’ll end up enjoying reading. But it’s a much better strategy than picking up some inscrutable tome that sounds interesting or important and hoping for the best.

(At the end of this post, I’ll provide a short, extremely non-exhaustive list of books I’d recommend avoiding if you don’t read regularly, along with a companion list of more approachable books that are still substantive.)

You choose books that are too easy

At the other end of the spectrum are people who read regularly but stick to low-ambiguity commercial fiction, especially the bingeable kind. Unlike choosing books that are too difficult, this isn’t really a problem. In my experience, people with this habit are generally happy with their choices. If that’s you, then there’s no particular reason to change.

But on the off chance that you’re a member of this group I’ve never met2—someone who reads a lot of bingeable commercial fiction and feels bored or stuck in a rut—I’d recommend perusing the classics of your preferred genres. You might also try seeking out similar books with greater syntactic difficulty, a slower pace, or that ask more of the reader in terms of thought and interpretation.

You’re stuck on the trend cycle

There is always some book that’s being well promoted. That doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

Here’s a taxonomy of some of the means of finding books that can lead to systematically reading ones that are overrated:

• Someone has an idea they want to do a publicity tour for. And they wrote a book about it! Now you and everyone else have heard of it. These books are often a digestible presentation of their subject, but they’re rarely very original, and they may not be the best treatment for you. And while we’re at it, are you even interested in the subject?

• Someone won a Nobel Prize! They’re probably a good writer. This still doesn’t mean you’ll get much out of reading them, especially if the work in question is “books for book nerds” and assumes a fair amount of context or prior reading, which is often the case.

• This work of fiction is selling lots of copies! While this is usually, but importantly not always, a guarantee of readability, it’s no guarantee of quality, and more importantly, no guarantee that it aligns with what you’re trying to get out of reading. (As a side note, if you do want to read bestsellers and English is your main reading language, the American Bookseller’s Association IndieBound Bestsellers list tends to have more varied and higher-quality picks.)

• You’re in a book club. Tastes skew politely intellectual: we want something discussable—maybe even a little edgy—but not something that will offend. We’ll probably land on something contemporary that’s marketed as “important,” or whichever classic has won this month’s relevance lottery. (Maybe it even won a Nobel Prize!)

• A new film adaptation just came out. Everyone knows the book is better, though. Why don’t you read it first? Or after? Or are you just one of those shallow people who doesn’t let a film release schedule dictate their reading preferences?

Despite my barbs, none of these are terrible ways to figure out what to read. I bring them up mostly because they’re suboptimal and encourage shallow dabbling. They also leave your taste vulnerable to being governed by whatever books publishers have recently decided to put a lot of money behind—which, to be fair, is often decent. The question is simply whether, given your limited number of reading slots, this is really the best use of them.

Depending on your media environment (read: social class), what’s trending will look different for you. But no matter what it is, I want to remind you once again that you don’t have to read it.

The next most important things to get right

Choosing what to read is the most important part. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only one. Below are a few more assorted considerations (which may or may not overlap with choosing the right books.)

Life is hard

In some cases, you may have a life situation that makes reading more, especially as a new habit, genuinely difficult. I don’t know if there’s a remedy for this, I’m afraid. If there is, it’s outside the scope of this post.

But note, too, that not being in an obviously hard life situation doesn’t mean you have a lot of unused capacity. I’ve noticed a trend where people try to reduce screen time by replacing it with non-digital “productive” hobbies. Where this often fails is in assuming that you can, in general, replace a restful activity with a more taxing one. If reading feels demanding, you can’t expect it to replace rest time.

To the extent that there are solutions to this dilemma—and there may not be, for you—the first is to rest more thoroughly. Some activities only feel restful in the moment but are actually fairly taxing, like scrolling social media feeds.

It also helps to notice that there are trade-offs in how you spend your attention, even when everything involved feels “light.” Activities like reading Twitter, Substack, or the news, or listening to podcasts, tend to draw on much of the same cognitive capacity as reading books. This took me a while to internalize, especially since many people who say they “don’t read much” are in fact consuming a huge volume of text in other formats. My personal preference is to preserve the capacity for books by avoiding these activities where possible, which partly explains why I’m able to get through more of them.

Another possible solution is, once again, to choose more suitable books. Pick books that are entertaining or restful. Pick books of aphorisms or short poems that you can read in five-minute chunks throughout the day. Above all, pick something you enjoy.

If you can’t focus more generally

Maybe your difficulty focusing extends beyond books and into other areas of your life.

To be honest, I’ve never struggled much with this myself, so I don’t have a lot of firsthand insight. My impression is that in some cases it’s about habit formation; in others, about lowering expectations for how much sustained productivity you can squeeze out of a day; and in a minority of cases about conditions like ADHD, which may benefit from medical intervention.

I did once have an acquaintance who dealt with mental drift by listening to the audiobook of a text while reading it, which struck me as a clever workaround. Moving your phone or other smart devices to another room might also help.

And finally—yes, you guessed it—pick different books. Two avenues I’d especially recommend if you struggle to focus in general are flash fiction and aphorisms. And, of course, there are self-help books aimed specifically at this problem. I haven’t read any, because, as I said, it’s not my particular issue, but you might try Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman or Atomic Habits by James Clear, both of which look promising.

If you read slowly

Reading slowly makes reading less fun.

Unfortunately, some of this depends on cognitive architecture and isn’t really subject to change. Fortunately, you can usually still improve within your own limits.

The single biggest factor is practice: the more you read, the easier reading will feel. This, in turn, opens the door to slower-paced and more syntactically challenging books, which is part of the reason I recommend leaving those for after you’ve established a regular reading habit.

There are also a few techniques that can speed things along. Tracking the words you read with a finger is helpful for some people. Avoiding vocalization in your head as you go will also increase speed, though I wouldn’t recommend it if it comes at the cost of enjoyment. Reading also becomes more fluent if you chunk words: that is, read one or several words at a time instead of going letter by letter.

Selective skimming can work well, especially for non-fiction. If I’m reading a book that’s partly within my existing knowledge and partly new, I’ll often skip the remainder of a paragraph (or, in more extreme cases, an entire section) once it’s clear the opening is covering familiar ground. Of course, I may miss something by doing this, but I’ve tried it both ways and, for me, the benefit usually outweighs the cost.

I’d also recommend getting an e-reader, regardless of your reading speed. The first book you read this way may feel slower, but over time it tends to speed things up—partly because you can control font size and backlighting, and partly because it keeps text formatting consistent from book to book. It also lets you carry your book with you regardless of length.3

If you don’t get much out of what you do read

Often this problem is solved by choosing more suitable books, especially ones that more clearly engage with themes or problems you’re already interested in. I’d also recommend books that foreground their own ideas or questions, like much speculative fiction.

That said, many books also become more rewarding once you start getting a bit more out of them. One useful shift is to treat details differently than you might in other media. While details can be incidental in film, they’re rarely incidental in a book.4 In addition to having a plot, many books are also exploring open-ended themes through that plot, as well as through their choices of voice, structure, and style. If you haven’t already, it can be worth asking what those themes might be for any book you’ve enjoyed. This can also make it easier to locate other books that are likely to resonate in similar ways.

It can help to talk about what you’re reading, ideally with someone else who’s read it. If that’s not an option, a podcast episode about the book can serve a similar function.5 (I still wouldn’t recommend reading along with all of a podcast’s picks, for all the reasons discussed above.)

Discussing a book with your favorite LLM can also be useful, not to be told what to think, but to help clarify what you think. I’ve gotten the most out of this with books I don’t like but that many other people do: trying to articulate what doesn’t work for me, and what might have worked better, has often sharpened my sense of taste.

Miscellaneous tips

Below are a few bits and pieces that didn’t fit cleanly into any of the above.

• Try audiobooks. Yes, this does count as reading—though no, it won’t make it easier to get through whatever dense piece of pretension you feel you should read. Consider that a feature rather than a bug.

• Sometimes you’ll get more out of reading a summary or commentary on someone’s work than the work itself. This is especially true for philosophers or social scientists writing long ago, and doubly so if they’re famous enough to have generated a large secondary literature.

• On the other hand, if you’ve already done this and decided you find a particular thinker interesting, I’d encourage you to follow up with some of their actual work. It may contain details that didn’t make it into the summary, and the devil is often in those.

• Choose translations carefully. Often there’s one obvious pick, but especially for older classics there may be many to choose from. I’d urge you to pick a translation that aims to create a good reading experience, even if it isn’t the most literal. If it’s a play, it’s also worth seeking out a translation that’s actually been performed.6 If you find the book worth rereading, that’s when switching to a more literal translation can pay off.

• Reread things. If you feel like rereading something, it’s probably a good idea, especially if it’s been more than a year. You’ll remember more, read faster, and often get more out of it. Some books are meant to be returned to, the way you return to a favorite song.7

• If you do want to understand Western literature better, the single highest value-for-effort thing you can do is to read Genesis—especially if you’re secular. Most biblical references are from this one book, and as a bonus, it’s a lot weirder and funnier than you might think. The King James translation was particularly influential, though it’s not the easiest to read.

How to pick them

So you know what you’re looking to get out of reading. Maybe there’s even a particular topic you want to learn about, or an aesthetic you’d like more of. And you know which hurdles to watch out for.

Now what?

So far, I’ve offered a lot of advice about how to choose books in principle, and very little about how to actually find them and sift through the options in practice.

If you happen to have someone in your life who’s both very well-read and aware that their own taste is not right for everyone, asking them is a great place to start.8 (Note that the second criterion is much more important than the first.)

But say you’re not so lucky. What then?

Online sources

There are a couple of online sources I like to use. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is Wikipedia, which hosts lists of books by genre, period, setting, or theme. This works best if you already have some sense of what you’re looking for, since the lists themselves are usually broad rather than curatorial.

My favorite site for this purpose, though, is Five Books. It hosts interviews in which authors or other specialists recommend five books on a given topic, along with their reasoning. Some of the picks are niche, but that’s part of the appeal. I’d recommend searching for books you already know you like and seeing whether they show up on any lists; otherwise, browsing the archive can be a good way to stumble onto new directions.

One thing I’d caution against is relying too heavily on recommendation algorithms on sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph. These tend to lean heavily on surface-level similarities rather than shared themes or underlying structure. For example, I love The Great Gatsby, and as a result I might get recommended other books that are superficially similar (rich people in the Roaring Twenties) rather than books with a comparable architecture, like classical tragedies.

LLMs

LLMs can be a useful tool to find books, especially if you already have a decent sense of what you want to get out of reading.9 I’ve gotten the most value from them when I had a very specific topic or question in mind and was struggling to locate the right book, or when I wanted to build a small, custom reading list around a philosophical issue I’d been thinking about for a while.

Last year, for example, I noticed that many history books I’d read contained some version of a “witch hunt” motif: a majority turns on a minority group, often with the aim of protecting children, convinced that it’s acting morally. These episodes tend to age badly, but at the time they feel righteous and obvious. What I wanted to understand wasn’t just that this happens, but what it feels like from the inside, and how it emerges from ordinary social behavior. I had trouble even knowing what search terms to use, because so many books explain the phenomenon through higher-order abstractions like “bigotry” or “outgroup hostility,” which isn’t what I wanted at all. After some iteration with ChatGPT, during which I first had to clarify my own thinking, I was pointed toward Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory by Randall Collins. From the blurb alone, I could tell it was exactly what I’d been looking for. It ended up being my favorite of the 130 books I read in 2025, and one of my all-time favorite works of non-fiction.

Another useful application of LLMs is ruling books out. After giving a model a few examples of books I like and dislike—and, more importantly, explaining why—I can ask it to quickly flag books that are unlikely to work for me. For instance, I’m particularly allergic to historical fiction where characters have an entirely contemporary moral or psychological lens, and I tend to prefer books with a strong, distinctive narrative voice. This is especially helpful if you, like me, want to read more books than you’re able to and need to triage.

That said, I’ve noticed LLMs work best if you ask them to reason only from their own knowledge of a book or its author. If you let them look online, they lean too heavily on marketing blurbs or reviews and get confused (just like I do.) They also produce false positives, so I still screen recommendations afterward by reading excerpts—which I recommend doing regardless of how you find books.

One final caveat: different models have their own idiosyncrasies in what they over- or under-recommend.10 It can therefore be worth comparing across models.

Books about books

Some books set out to help you choose what to read. In practice, this mostly just moves the dilemma one level higher: which book about books should you choose?

I don’t rely on this method much, but there are a couple I’m familiar with. For the general reader, I’d recommend The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin. It’s fun to flip through, offers some personalization, and the recommendations are broad-ranging enough that you’re almost guaranteed to run into something you haven’t heard of before.

If you specifically wish you could appreciate classic literature (which, to reiterate, is not a moral imperative), I’d recommend Literary Taste: How to Form It by Arnold Bennett, with the caveat that his version of the Western canon is considered idiosyncratic.

Classics to avoid (for now)

Repeat after me: my life will probably be better if I don’t force my way through War and Peace.

Here are some more examples of books to defer:11

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (more readable than War and Peace, but still long and dense. I’d recommend Madame Bovary first.)

• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (no, your friends haven’t finished it either.)

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (historically important, but there are many better entrance points.)

• Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (I’m not sure this one even counts as being in English.)

• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

• Das Kapital by Karl Marx (of immense historical importance, but not the best contemporary entrance point into Marxist economics.)

• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

• The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson

• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (it’s not even finished.)

• Middlemarch by George Eliot (Victorian diction isn’t for everyone—especially not in a book this long, where the whole point is that nothing all that dramatic happens.)

• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (to quote Wikipedia: “More than a quarter of the novel—by one count 955 of 2,783 pages—is devoted to essays that argue a moral point or display Hugo’s encyclopedic knowledge but do not advance the plot, nor even a subplot.”)

• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (unless you specifically prefer your fiction to include long digressions about clam chowder.)

• The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity is a much more concise option, as are the many works by later feminist thinkers who explain or build on it.)

• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

• Ulysses by James Joyce (lots of arcane references—and besides, it’s a sequel.)

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (duh)

(The astute reader will notice that most of the above authors have works that are shorter and/or lighter—and in many cases, also better.)

Books that seem like they shouldn’t be as hard as they are

The list above consists mostly of works that are infamous for being hard.

But some books are trickier than that. Lots of people have read them, they’re widely loved, and they’re often talked about as if they’re broadly accessible. And yet they’re harder to get through than they appear, often because they demand a lot of patience up front, or because they’re dense with historical, cultural, or literary references that sail past many readers.

This is more pernicious than the previous category, because these books really seem like they should be easy to read. As a result, people tend to stick with them far longer than they should, or—worse—take failing to finish them as evidence that books just aren’t for them.

If you do want to read any of these, I’d recommend starting with lighter or more tightly plotted books in the same genre or by the same author, and saving them for a time when you’re in the mood to really sit with something.

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Dune by Frank Herbert (it hits you with a lot of world-building jargon right at the start.)

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (demands a lot of attention for a thesis that many specialists now consider overstated or disputed.)

• If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino

• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (often recommended as “short” and “about everyday life,” but modernist interiority doesn’t go down easy if you’re not used to it.)

• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (a similar issue to Dune: the payoff is great, but the beginning is slow.)

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (it takes over a hundred pages to introduce its main protagonist.)

• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (it baffles me how well this sold—I assume because the blurb makes it sound like an elevated thriller rather than a compendium of historical references.)

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (think of it more like a readable textbook. Also, the replication crisis has not been kind to some of the studies it leans on, even if the overarching ideas largely hold up.)

• The Trial by Franz Kafka

Starter classics

I’ve tried to emphasize throughout this post that you really don’t have to read books that bore you just because other people like them.

But what if you have no idea what you like yet? What if you want to expand your horizons, but don’t want to get stuck on something that’s secretly far denser than it looks?

Below are a few classics that are genuinely fun to read and think about. I’ve tried to sample across genres, but stuck to fiction only. I’ve also limited myself to one book per author, even though many of these writers have other works that are just as readable.12 And to be clear, this isn’t meant as a reading list—just a set of reasonable entry points if you’re not sure where to start.

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

• Animal Farm by George Orwell

• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (try it for style and vibes even if you don’t think you like crime fiction.)

• Choke by Chuck Palahnuik (if you’re under the misconception that “literary” books are always dry or pretentious.)

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (if you love long TV arcs and revenge plots, but assume old books must be slow.)

• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (if you want big political ideas without being lectured at.)

• Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (try it for mood and pacing, even if you don’t think you like dystopian fiction.)

• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (if you want something long but very gripping and can tolerate (or critically read past) unfashionable politics.)

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (if you feel like symbolism or themes usually go over your head—and even if you were assigned it in school.)

• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (if you’ve never read a play before and/or you like comedies.)

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

• New Hampshire by Robert Frost (if you’re curious about poetry and want an entry point you can skip around in.)

• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (if you’re under the impression that older classics are boring, or if you just want a good drama.)

• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

• The Painted Veil by William Somerset Maugham

• Passing by Nella Larsen (if you assume older novels have archaic diction, and/or want a tight, dramatic plot.)

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (even many people who don’t normally like romance enjoy this one for the satirical wit.)

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (if you love suspense and atmosphere but don’t usually read “literary” fiction.)

• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

• The Stranger by Albert Camus (if you’re curious about philosophy but want it embedded in a story that’s blunt and spare.)

Happy reading!

1. How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Roots to Leaves by Tristan Gooley, a really wonderful pop science book.

2. The Wikipedia page of Kim Dotcom, AKA Kim Tim Jim Vester, founder of Megaupload, criminal, maker of dubious electronica music, and guy who really seems like he should have a Darknet Diaries episode but doesn’t. And I thought I had a good domain name…

   

3. This snippet by a German pamphleteer on controversies surrounding the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the 1580s (H/T Futility Closet):

   The old calendar must be the right one for the animals still use it. The stork flies away according to it, the bear comes out of his hole on the Candlemas day of the old calendar and not of the Pope’s, and the cattle stand up in their stalls to honor the birth of the Lord on the Christmas night of the old and not of the new calendar. They also recognize in this work diabolical wickedness. The Pope was afraid the last day would come too quickly. He has made his new calendar so that Christ will get confused and not know when to come for the last judgment, and the Pope will be able to continue his knavery still longer. May Gott him punish.

4. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a charming novel about a spoiled young woman who moves to a rural farm to live with her relatives, and proceeds to fix all their silly problems using pragmatic good sense.

5. Who’s the Clown by Audrey Hobert

6. Bonus horse link: Pretty Derby, the video game where the horse girls are very literal.

   

A dispatch from under the local rock

The CIA captured Maduro.

In national news that also seems international, Danes are really really mad at Trump for talking so much about taking Greenland and threatening to put tariffs on Denmark in particular. The Red-Green Alliance and Conservative People’s Party agree that Denmark should station troops in Greenland to deter Trump. (I know it isn’t my place to comment on politics, but I think they may be suffering from some delusions about Danish military might.) Danish veterans from the war in Afghanistan have protested by the US embassy in Copenhagen after Trump (or someone else in his administration) made belittling comments about the Danish contribution to that conflict.

In national news that’s still international but doesn’t involve the US so it’s somehow less international, Denmark and Italy have announced a collaboration. They plan to reinterpret EU law such that you can be deported for crimes even if you have family legally residing in the country.

In miscellaneous news, there is a new governing coalition in the Netherlands, and the world’s first retirement home for people in their 20s/30s has opened in Malaysia.

1. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I am not sure why, but I associated this book with Oprah’s book club for many years, and thus held off on reading it. But it’s not at all conventional issues-fiction, and it is excellent.

   “It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.”

   Read it if you haven’t already.

2. The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik, which are the second and third books in the Scholomance trilogy.

3. The album Metamorphosis Complete by Infinity Song, of which the stand-out track is Sinking Boat:

4. Bad Man by Fightmaster:

   Amazingly, that is their real surname.

5. Scratchboard art by Douglas Smith (H/T Lines and Colors), e.g.,

   

6. Bonus horse link: Michel de Montaigne on how good horses are.

A dispatch from under the local rock

It appears that Israel and Lebanon will go to war.

It also appears that Donald Trump intends to give each U.S. citizen $2,000 from tariff earnings.

In local news, Denmark has decided to use part of their budgetary surplus on reducing the VAT on books.

And the Copenhagen mayoral election has resulted in a Green Left mayor, Sisse Marie Welling, whereas previous mayors have generally been Social Democrats.

1. Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov. Here’s a reminder that less widely read Nabokov was still written by Nabokov.

2. Beetle on a Blade by Paul Spring

3. How the world’s most expensive colors are made (H/T Lines and Colors)

A dispatch from under the local rock

Trump brokered a peace deal in the war between Israel and Hamas. Israel has pulled forces out of Gaza (or maybe parts thereof?), and Israeli hostages have returned home.

Trump also visited East Asia.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel prize in literature.

There will be communal and regional elections in Denmark on November 18th.

1. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. It would have been my favorite book at age 11 had I read it then. But even as an adult, it’s extremely entertaining.

2. The First and Second American Nations on the Substack Not With a Bang. I have many quibbles with the details making up the argument, and I don’t fully agree with everything in the post. But nonetheless I understood many things about the US which I’d previously found confusing. For example: why Americans were willing to venerate Confederate generals as heroes even outside of the South. What American white nationalists even mean by that name, given that “white” in the US doesn’t represent a distinct racial category. Why Americans used to brag about descent back to the Mayflower cohort, whereas now white Americans lean into being Irish.

3. The Psmith’s book review of Paul Fussell’s Class, and their Substack more generally. I especially enjoyed their clarification that wokeness has gone middle class, and feel I’ve learned much about my own class prejudices, even though I was already familiar with Fussell’s ideas.

4. Faithful Place by Tana French. The biggest twist in French’s mystery novels is how good a character writer she is compared to the baseline in the genre.

5. The title of a paper: HOW TO MAKE A NEW NOSE FOR SOMEONE: WHICH IS OFF ENTIRELY: AND THE DOG HAS EATEN IT by Heinrich von Pfalzpaint. (H/T Replaceable You by Mary Roach.)

6. Bonus horse link: I think it’s fair to say that Azalea Banks is known for getting in beefs. According to her Wikipedia page, one of her controversial statements about gay men is that they “appropriate horse culture” by using ketamine, harnesses, and lube. I am not sure how she manages to come up with this stuff, but hats off to her for creativity.

A dispatch from under the local rock

American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He was known for, among other things, going to American university campuses and discussing politically salient issues with anyone who came up to him.

Oracle’s stock prices rose because they got some big US defense and AI contracts. As a result, the owner of Oracle is now the richest person in the world.

Towards the end of the month, heavy rain in Valencia, Spain caused flooding, similar to last year.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Sam Altman and accused him of hiring a contract killer to murder one of his own employees.

In Danish news, Roskilde University and the University of Southern Denmark had a huge recent inflow of Bangladeshi students, likely by fraudulent means. I haven’t been able to gather exactly how this happened, especially since Danish university tuition is steep by Bangladeshi standards, but it appears that the students did this to get a Danish visa for themselves and their families, and the universities let it slide for extra income.

The Danish government plans to restructure the high school education system to shut down HTX (technical schools) and merge them with STX (mainstream high schools). They also plan to integrate the less-demanding two-year high school program HF more closely with STX.

Like many people, I used to think dueling was absurd. Fighting to the death over an insult? Why not just…not?

Then I read Violence by Randall Collins. And while I still wouldn’t call dueling enlightened, exactly, I realized I’d been viewing it through the wrong lens.

I had tacitly assumed duels were a crude form of conflict resolution. Against the backdrop of modern middle-class norms—calm conversations, apologies, mediation—they seemed not only brutal but pointless.

But that framing rests on two faulty assumptions:

1. That duels were a substitute for nonviolent alternatives, rather than for more chaotic violence.

2. That their main purpose was to resolve disputes.

In reality, duels were often safer than other fights, because rituals and rules limited the danger. And what danger remained wasn’t a bug but a feature—without risk, a duel couldn’t serve its real purpose: demonstrating courage and honor.

Once I stopped thinking of duels as ineffective conflict resolution methods, they stopped seeming senseless—rather, they were one component of a larger social system. Collins’ account1 makes clear how dueling developed and why it endured—and that duels are often a lesser evil.

The rise

Dueling, in the sense of two individuals squaring off, emerged in sixteenth-century Italy and France. By the late 1500s it had also spread to England, where it became a fad. Crucially, a duel was distinct from a feud or a street fight: it was a scheduled contest between named antagonists, witnessed and contained.

What began among soldiers migrated to courtiers as Europe’s political geography shifted. Centralized monarchies drew elites from scattered castles into princely courts, where reputation was legible and closely monitored. In that world, dueling worked as a badge of belonging among gentlemen. Winning mattered less than demonstrating bravery: an honorable loss beat a coward’s win, and sometimes even outshone an honorable victory2.

That dueling was a sport for gentlemen is underscored by the choice of weapons. Gentlemen carried rapiers or sabers—thin, needle-pointed blades that couldn’t pierce armor, but which were easy to carry and dangerous against civilians. The sword became part of the uniform of elite men, a public signal of readiness to defend one’s honor. Yet courts generally forbade spur-of-the-moment fighting, which pushed duels offstage and into appointment: you challenged today and settled accounts tomorrow.

From the mid-1700s, pistols began to replace swords; by about 1790 they were standard in England, Ireland, and America, while swords lingered in France, Italy, and Germany. But even as the weapon changed, the ritual purpose didn’t. The bravest gesture was not accuracy but indifference to risk—letting your opponent fire first, then sending your own shot into the air. And because duels had to be arranged rather than improvised, and took place within a social class that valued manners and decorum, a whole etiquette grew around them—calling cards, seconds, and rules—which is where the story turns next.

Etiquette

To duel was to advertise a man’s place among the elite: it required not just nerve, but also mastery of the proper rituals. Much of the choreography echoed the manners of polite society: the exchange of calling cards so that seconds could make arrangements, the carrying of gloves, the exaggerated courtesy of speech (often laced with sarcasm). Even the chosen ground had a grandiose name: “the field of honor.”

The rules of conduct dated back to the rapier era, but they became even more elaborate once pistols took over. Challenges followed a script. Verbal sparring was expected, often punctuated by the ritual insult “You lie!”—a phrase that needn’t imply literal dishonesty. A slap across the face with a pair of gloves was another standard flourish, since gloves were part of a gentleman’s attire.

A duelist also had to know whom he could challenge. A great lord wouldn’t stoop to fight with the gentry, and a general would never duel a junior officer. Most contests took place among peers—especially junior officers, who had the most to prove. When conflict arose between unequals, the lower-ranking man had no claim to ritual honors. At best he might be rebuked; at worst, handed over to servants for a beating.

Dueling also cemented a man’s place in the elite social network via the appointment of seconds, without whom no duel could proceed. These were trusted gentlemen recruited to stand on each side. Their presence signaled that the fight belonged to the upper class and was therefore distinct from a common brawl. Seconds negotiated the terms, settled the choice of weapons, and often brought along doctors to tend to any injuries—but were not to engage in the actual fighting.

Fatality

Duels could end in death, but that wasn’t their only possible outcome. In fact, one of the duel’s functions was to resolve a quarrel without spiraling into endless retaliation.

The statistics tell an interesting story: the more common dueling became, the less lethal it was—a pattern which was echoed both across countries, and over time within them. The main underlying reasons were technological development, and the development of social norms which limited the danger3. For instance—

Weapons

The dueling weapon made a huge difference. Pistols, in particular, made dueling more forgiving, because unlike a blade, the bullet didn’t need to hit its target. With blades, it was also harder to know when to stop4—whereas a pistol shot gave a clear dramatic endpoint.

Improvements in pistol technology might have changed this, had pistols not been kept outdated on purpose. In military combat of the 1700s, rifled barrels had replaced smoothbores, dramatically improving accuracy. But rifling was considered unsporting for dueling pistols. Hair-triggers were also rejected as unfair. A proper dueling pistol had to be reloaded after every shot, giving pauses that heightened suspense and formality. Revolvers could have made duels far deadlier, but in gentlemanly contests only one chamber was loaded per round. Owning a set of antique dueling pistols became a kind of fashionable archaism, like officers who still wore ceremonial swords in an age of machine guns.

Sword duels could also be limited. In Germany, sabers were often blunted, and their curved blades were less likely to cause deep wounds. Rules forbade striking a fallen man or attacking one who had lost his weapon until he recovered it. Duelists stood close together, limiting the force of their thrusts. Men wore heavy gauntlets; scars and serious cuts were prized as marks of honor, and the bulkier the gauntlets, the more visible the wounds that could be inflicted without causing death. In contrast, in France the goal was often simply to draw blood. Fighters exposed bare skin so any nick would end the match, and gloves were avoided so that hands and wrists—common targets—remained vulnerable. Thus the level of armor could be calibrated to obtain the desired level of wounding.

Format

Another safeguard was the individual format itself. Compared with a free-for-all brawl, a duel was tightly scripted. In earlier days, seconds might join the fight, but over the centuries the line between a personal duel and a group vendetta grew sharper. You can even see the shift in Shakespeare: in Romeo and Juliet, first performed in 1597 when dueling was still a novelty in England, a duel collapses into a street fight; by the time Hamlet was staged only a few years later, the rules were clearer, and the climactic duel unfolds within a more formal frame.

Although they no longer joined in the actual fighting, seconds remained crucial. They didn’t just arrange time and place—they also acted as brakes. A seasoned second might negotiate a face-saving apology or declare the whole affair a misunderstanding. For this reason, it was considered unwise to recruit a young hothead.

When fights did go ahead, the seconds could dial the danger up or down. They agreed on the number of shots, the distance, and the format. Four rounds was considered bloodthirsty, though one duel between German officers in 1886 dragged on for a staggering twenty-seven shots. Distances varied too: twenty-five paces was typical in France, fifteen in Germany; ten was harsh, five point-blank. In terms of format, barrier duels were most common; signal duels the least deadly5.

Sometimes the seconds quietly reduced the risk even further. Since they loaded the pistols, they could choose lighter powder charges, smaller bullets, or even trick rounds made of quicksilver that disintegrated in flight. Old-style smoothbore weapons made such tampering easier, and their round balls were less accurate to begin with.

There were procedural escape clauses as well. A challenge was supposed to be delivered within twenty-four hours of the insult, and the fight staged within forty-eight; the obligation vanished after the deadline passed. A duelist who failed to appear within fifteen minutes forfeited. Weather could get in the way: with such short notice, a heavy downpour or fog might obscure aim. And in places where duels were illegal, it was always possible to tip off the police. Even mechanical mishaps provided an exit—if a pistol misfired, it often counted as a round and ended the match, unless both sides had agreed otherwise.

The result was a staged danger: real enough to demand courage, but often less lethal than it looked. The duelists played their part by displaying honor under threat, while the seconds managed the practicalities to keep the bloodshed within limits.

The fall

Dueling was never without its critics. The church condemned it, and governments, intent on monopolizing violence, tried to suppress it. In practice, though, opposition did little during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When aristocrats filled the ranks of government, they condemned dueling in public yet quietly tolerated—or even practiced—it in private.

By the nineteenth century the culture of dueling began to erode. Once pistols replaced swords, the practice spread more widely, and with that expansion it lost its cachet as an aristocratic privilege.

But what truly undermined dueling, unevenly but steadily across countries, was democratization. Before the 1800s, only gentlemen—and military officers, deemed gentlemen by virtue of rank—had the right to fight for honor. But as armies grew and recruited more broadly, dueling ceased to be the exclusive mark of an elite officer corps. Civilian duels followed the same trajectory. By the late nineteenth century, dueling in France and Italy had moved well beyond the nobility: politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens claimed the right to defend their honor with pistols. In Germany, university dueling clubs spread into the middle class. What looked at first like aristocratic values conquering the wider society, in the end diluted the prestige of dueling by making it ordinary.

This process was especially clear in the pre-Civil War American South. Unlike European aristocrats, white Southern men prided themselves on equality—at least among themselves—and insisted that any man could issue a challenge. The wealthiest landowners soon turned away from the practice, dismissing it as the behavior of uncultivated men. By mid-century, genteel manners in the South were redefined not by violence but by the ability to keep the peace.

The last flourishing of the pistol duel in America thus came not in Southern plantations but on the frontier. Between 1865 and 1900, the “wild West” produced a new figure: the professional gunfighter. He held a kind of reputational elite status, romanticized and demonized in equal measure. But he was no gentleman—rather, he was a rough man living by his wits. Gunfights sometimes carried echoes of the old rituals—prearranged meetings, a semblance of formality—but most of the dueling paraphernalia had fallen away. There were no calling cards, no seconds, no polite firing into the air. Success meant striking first, often by ambush. The gunfighter stood halfway between the aristocratic duelist and the modern barroom brawler.

By the twentieth century, pistols had vanished from staged one-on-one combat. Where ritual fights persisted, they were fought with fists or knives. Where guns were used, it was no longer in duels but in straightforward attempts to cause harm.

Conclusion

Duels were a type of staged fair fight among elites. But why did they spring up when they did? What conditions actually produce such fighting cultures?

One setting is loose military coalitions—groups too large to be clans, but too unstable to have a settled chain of command. Historically, this happened when tribal units gave way to raiding bands or temporary inter-tribal alliances. In that environment, the stage was set for the berserker: the lone hero who built a following through sheer ferocity and reckless courage. These men preferred one-on-one combat, since victory (or even fearless defeat) maximized their personal reputations. What mattered wasn’t family honor or clan vengeance—those produced cycles of ambush and reprisal—but individual glory. Each hero attracted his own entourage, and coalitions were little more than gatherings of these entourages under temporary banners.

This kind of culture usually produced a sharp divide between the elite and everyone else. The heroes fought each other for honor, while the masses were excluded. In theory, status came from personal valor; in practice, property and inheritance played a role too. Over time, hereditary elites softened into something less ferocious: men defined as much by their manners as by their fighting prowess.

That’s the transition point where the berserker gives way to the gentleman duelist. Once strong states replaced ad hoc coalitions, dueling could persist so long as aristocrats still stood apart from commoners. Elite clubs and training schools kept the ethos alive, rehearsing etiquette and codifying the rituals. Most fights in such settings weren’t to the death but staged within the school or circle, performed for sport rather than blood. The practice faded once the aristocrat/commoner divide disappeared, though it often spiked during transitional periods6.

All of which raises the question: should we be glad that dueling has disappeared?

The obvious answer is yes. Duels could be lethal, and modern norms of non-violent resolution have undeniable advantages.

Yet the picture is not quite that simple. Ritualized violence had benefits of its own. Compared with middle-class scripts of time-outs, HR mediation, or calm conversation, duels gave men a way to compete for honor and status. Fighting could feel meaningful even to the loser.

This resonates with Richard Reeves’ argument that boys and men today are adrift7. Schools reward long stretches of sitting still, which many children—especially boys—struggle with. Teachers are overwhelmingly female, limiting the supply of adult male role models. Physical fights are punished. Boys lack initiation rituals, and traditionally masculine virtues are often treated with suspicion.

Of course, kids still invent their own fights, despite adult supervision. Collins notes that children account for a disproportionate share of violence, though it’s usually harmless. But at some point we expect children to self-regulate and taper off violent behavior.

I find myself wondering if that expectation is entirely for the best. Many men seem hungry for violent conflict—perhaps not duels to the death, but real fights with real stakes. And the staged one-on-one duel was among the least bad options. Compared with elites beating down inferiors, duels were respectful and contained. Compared with clan feuds or gang wars, they resolved disputes directly without cycles of retribution or collateral harm8.

Maybe, then, dueling deserves to be remembered not only as a relic but as a partial antidote to the malaise Reeves describes: a way of settling conflicts that displayed masculine virtues (and vices), rather than feminine ones.

After all, is there any way to demonstrate courage without risk?

1. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory by Randall Collins, about the micro-scale, interactional patterns that lead to violence in a large variety of settings. Extremely clear-headed and insightful. While every chapter was excellent, my favorite point was about domestic violence.
   
   I’ve seen muddled arguments about whether women are disproportionately victimized. Collins divides domestic violence into two kinds: a reciprocal, milder kind involving violence used as a rhetorical technique rather than an actual attempt to hurt one’s partner (about 16% of couples, especially common among the young), and a kind that involves a perpetrator who terrorizes their victim in repeated instances (about 6% of couples). The former is often gender-balanced, while the latter tends to have a male perpetrator and female victim.
   (A side note that the prevalence rates seem high to me, though I have poor intuition about what people’s relationships are like in social circles very different from mine.)

2. Are you living lo-fi?

3. The short story collection Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang. (My favorite among the stories was Jasmine Tea.)

4. China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict by David Daokui Li. A useful introduction for someone like me who knows little about contemporary Chinese culture and governance—though as I know little, it’s of course hard to sanity check.

5. The Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, an award for books with strange titles. My favorite was Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power: How to Use the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts by Donald L. Wilson, though the whole list of winners is worth a read.

6. Bonus horse link: the plus side of being unable to draw horses.

A dispatch from under the local rock

First and foremost, Taylor Swift got engaged. I hear her fiancée is an athlete who has a podcast.

Secondly, a Norwegian prince was charged with 32 crimes, including four instances of rape.

Thirdly, the Danish prime minister announced increased government spending to help deal with/cause inflation.

Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes is a popular history of autism, written in the narrative-journalism style. For a book about autism, though, this one sure isn’t very autistic. Silberman does the journalist thing of sprinkling in color commentary on every figure he profiles, weaving in personal anecdotes instead of sticking to general principles. It’s lively, but also bloated. (Did I really need to know that one lab assistant had curly hair and was into the Ramones?)

It’s also logically muddled. Silberman often argues by vibes, sometimes contradicting himself. For example, he traces the history of autism through 20th-century ideas about eugenics, but the discussion stalls because “eugenics” functions as a magical dirty word. Without stating it outright, Silberman relies on the shorthand “Eugenics = Nazi = Bad”, relying on our current knowledge of history that was yet to happen in the early 20th century. Never mind that Jewish researchers fleeing Nazi Europe (notably Leo Kanner and Bruno Bettelheim, two prominent autism researchers) still engaged with eugenic ideas. Or that many Westerners today hold what are, in practice, eugenicist views—the most obvious being selective abortion of disabled fetuses. All of this appears in the book, but Silberman never connects the dots, leaving the reader with a kind of argument-by-collage.

A more persistent slipperiness lies in how he blurs autism, the broader autistic phenotype (BAP), and plain old STEM disposition. At times he admits they’re different—acknowledging that while some prominent scientists may have been autistic, many others are only posthumously misdiagnosed. But elsewhere he implies that interest in STEM, or even logical reasoning itself, is inherently autistic. Sometimes he makes it sound like having any non-status-oriented interest is a sign of autism.

This is a serious problem for a book advocating recognition and accommodation of neurodiversity, because it’s never clear exactly what Silberman means. To be fair, the definition of autism did shift over decades. But he never lays out the diagnostic criteria over time, nor does he consistently clarify what level of functioning he’s describing.1

The book closes with a plea for acceptance: if given the choice between “curing” autism and keeping it, society should opt for the latter, lest science grind to a halt. But the trade-off is a straw man. It assumes it will never be possible to select against severe autism while preserving mild or subclinical traits—say, by screening for certain de novo mutations. While I’m no biologist, Silberman himself notes that severe autism often overlaps with intellectual disability and epilepsy. Wouldn’t selection against those be a plausible future path?

And yet, we do seem to love trade-offs. Even adults who’d swear they understand life isn’t fair are soothed by stories where the wealthy, brilliant man is hollow and corrupt, or the beautiful woman is secretly insecure and disordered. But life doesn’t demand balance. A person can be attractive, smart, scientifically gifted, rich, and loathe daylight saving time—without also having perceptual or social impairments. Surely such people exist.

At the same time, we hate trade-offs. Silberman acknowledges that raising a child with significant impairments can be difficult, but his examples make it sound remarkably easy, if only the parents are sufficiently accepting. Behavior modification is framed as discouraging flapping or spinning—never violence, self-injury, or public masturbation. Lack of acceptance is always prejudice. Lack of resources never stems from real constraints.

To be clear, I agree with him in part. Historically, disabled—or just unusual—children were often treated appallingly (many “treatments” amounted to “beatings will continue until morale improves”). And modern “cures” are typically both unproven and cruel. Accommodation is a far better approach.

But accommodation alone isn’t a panacea. Some behaviors are dangerous and must be curtailed. Some loneliness or social difficulty may be inevitable. Parents will face real challenges. Silberman seems to think that acknowledging these downsides would undermine his case for compassion, or perhaps that they’re already overblown in the public mind.

I disagree. Downplaying the real difficulties of autism weakens, rather than strengthens, the argument for understanding. Autism does sometimes involve profound impairments. And often, that’s simply bad. Why obscure this by conjuring a false trade-off?

A Jewish hat was “a cone-shape pointed hat, often white or yellow, worn by Jews in Medieval Europe.” An illustration, from the Wikipedia page:

A dispatch from under the local rock

I was sick this month, so the local rock was extra large. Nevertheless, some news items I overheard, in the order I encountered them:

There will be a New York City mayoral race in November, and the candidate predicted to win is a polarizing socialist named Mamdani. (I didn’t catch his first name.)

There was a bad storm in Texas, US.

A CEO and HR manager had an affair, which wouldn’t normally be newsworthy, except they got caught in a public display of affection on a kiss cam at a concert. Instead of kissing, which ultimately would’ve gotten them into less trouble, both looked horrified—the man ducked and the woman turned away. The video went viral, resulting in the two becoming the subjects of vast amounts of online hate.

There is a new tariff agreement between the US and EU, in which the US tariff rate on EU goods will be 15%.

1. I haven’t yet made many recipes from The Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma, but the ones I have made have turned out great.

2. Sabbatai Zevi was a Jew in the early-mid 17th century who claimed to be the Messiah, and was believed by many. After being arrested by Ottoman officials and getting the choice to either die or convert to Islam, he chose to convert, which mostly ended his Messianic reputation, although some of his followers did convert with him. One of these followers was his wife, Sarah, whose origin story was being forcibly put in a convent after a pogrom in Poland, escaping by miraculous means, and then having prophetic dreams that she’d marry the Messiah. Sabbatai heard of this, whereupon he said he’d had prophetic dreams of marrying a fallen woman, and the two met and in fact got married. (Romantic?)

3. I usually don’t like true crime, but Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry is quite good, if too long.

4. Quicksand by Nella Larsen. I also learned that Larsen was the daughter of a Danish mother named Pederline1 and a Carribean man named Peter, both of whom were immigrants in the US. Her parents separated before she was born, and her mother eventually married a fellow Dane in the US named Peter Larsen. Nella Larsen was thus a mixed race daughter of a white couple, who had other white kids and lived in white neighborhoods, which partly explains her fixation on racial ironies. (Note: this book is good, but Passing is better.)

5. Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp is a love-it-or-hate-it sort of book. So, of course, I thought it was pretty good, if only because the writing style should’ve grated much more than it did.

A dispatch from under the local rock

Israel attacked Iran with a goal of hindering their nuclear program, severely damaging Iranian military defenses and killing many top Iranian generals and nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated with bombing campaigns in Israel. Both countries seemed to focus on hitting military targets. The US got involved as well, attacking three nuclear sites in Iran. There is now a ceasefire.

God gave 10 commandments at Sinai, and the 11th commandment, which they expunged but which has come down orally, is 'Thou shalt do anything for publicity and recognition.'

—Shmuley Boteach

Shmuley Boteach isn’t a regular rabbi—he’s a cool rabbi. He had his own reality TV show, was crowned (ordained?) Great Britain’s 2000 “Preacher of the Year” (out of clergy of all faiths), and at different points managed to be both a close personal friend and bitter enemy of Michael Jackson. And oh, yeah, he also publishes self-help books with titles like The Kosher Sutra, in which he implies far more about his sex life than I ever wanted to know.

And I read a couple of them! Specifically, Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments and The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life. But the man is prolific. Other gems include Lust for Love: Rekindling Intimacy and Passion in Your Relationship (co-written with Pamela Anderson), Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy (serialized in Playboy), and Kosher Lust: Love Is Not the Answer. (You may be sensing a theme at this point.)

Anyway—here’s a review of the two I read.

Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments

Show your date that you have some core beliefs by mixing some religious traditions into the date.

Sacrifice animals together in the comfort of your living room.

This book is aimed at straight people looking to get married—though it oddly includes a section trying to convince readers that marriage is worth wanting in the first place. (If they’ve already picked up a dating self-help book by a rabbi, isn’t that battle won?)

The main gist is simple: be a wholesome, decent human being who isn’t shallow, and look for someone similarly inclined. As advice, it’s unobjectionable—probably even helpful for some. But it also sidesteps the reality that “shallow” traits, like physical attraction, do matter in dating. That’s a surprising omission from the man who, in other books, argues that lust is more important than love for long-term relationships.

Shmuley also attempts secular arguments for religious practices, like abstaining from sex before marriage. These arguments aren’t especially convincing. It feels like he started with the conclusion and reverse-engineered the reasoning—probably because he did. While he tries to keep things general, the book seems better suited to a conservative religious audience already aligned with his worldview.

The most intriguing part, to me, is his rejection of self-actualization and self-love. For example, he argues that people shouldn’t aim to be “complete” on their own, but rather find someone who “completes” them. He also cautions against always holding out for someone better or insisting on a partner who matches your accomplishments. At times, though, he seems to be talking past the advice he critiques. When mainstream dating advice tells you to be “complete,” I think it means “not insecure”—a point Shmuley also makes, just in different words.

As an aside: He writes that agreeing to polyamory or open relationships is sign of low self-esteem. I find this remarkable given that I’ve heard poly people say the same about monogamy.

Best advice: Follow up a compliment with a question, so the other person doesn’t feel awkward.

Worst advice: Avoid talking about movies, the weather, your sex life, your friends, your parents, your childhood, or “any other depressing topic” on a date. Instead, talk about “life”—which apparently excludes all of the above.

Overall grade1: C. Most of the good tips you can get elsewhere. Most of the bad tips are Shmuley originals.

The Kosher Sutra

But to the extent that in marriage we sometimes have heated arguments and our inner rage is about to be let loose, think to yourself, This is the perfect opportunity for erotic sex. Rather than allowing myself to blow a gasket at my spouse and have some stupid argument, I’m going to use that swelling passion to create glorious intimacy. And then channel that swelling anger into sexual passion. It works. Your spouse will be confused that you looked so angry a moment ago and now you want to make passionate love to them. So explain it. “I was getting angry. But whenever I feel intense emotion, it brings to life this inner animal in me that just wants to take you because I need you so badly.”

This one’s for straight married couples whose sex lives have stagnated, and who want to reinvigorate things within the bounds of marriage—and Shmuley has nine kids, so presumably something he recommends worked at least occasionally. Compared to Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments, this book is lighter on practical self-improvement tips and heavier on shared partner exercises. The tone is also more flowery, less funny, and, for me, less enjoyable overall.

Many of the suggested exercises revolve around imagined cuckoldry: the husband asks about his wife’s past sexual experiences, or watches her in settings where other men desire her, or some variation on those two themes. (But never, under any circumstances, the reverse—husbands should not disclose their attraction to other women.) Other exercises focus on stoking desire without climax. There’s also some mention of being presentable—like women wearing lingerie—but once again, Shmuley glosses over the fact that overall physical attractiveness matters too.

Best advice: I didn’t find the exercises particularly inspiring, but I have to admit that I didn’t try any of them. Maybe I overlooked some gems. But absent that, I think his best advice is to spend quality time with your spouse. Basic, I know.

Worst advice: This might not be the worst for everyone, but I had the strongest visceral negative reaction to his suggestion that husbands install a webcam in the bedroom. The wife should know it’s there, just not when he’s watching. I made my husband promise never to do this.

That said, a close runner-up is Shmuley’s fixation on having women elaborate on their exes—whom they still miss, whom they considered “husband material,” and so on. In couples where intimacy is already fragile, this seems likely to backfire. The obsessive focus makes me wonder whether Shmuley is projecting his own preferences onto other people.

Overall grade: D. Low on content, so the bad tips were a large percentage of the total.

Bonus material: While reading, I couldn’t stop thinking how awkward this must be for his kids. Their dad has written extensively about what he wants to do to their mom, or what he enjoys imagining other men doing to her. But not all his kids seem to mind. One daughter opened a Jerusalem sex toy shop called Kosher Sex (named after his most famous book). She also runs a webshop at the (awesome) domain kosher.sex, once had a podcast by the same name, and even featured her dad on it. There’s a video on the site where he discusses whether BDSM is kosher.

Conclusion

So—should you read either of these books?

Maybe, but probably not.

Their best case, compared to other similar self-help books, is if you’re looking for a religious guide to relationships without the prudishness that can sometimes imply. Or if you’re already into tantric sex, but concerned about idolatry.

I’m not sure how many people that is.

Links

1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Beautifully written, with beautiful plot twists.

2. The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which came out in 1992 but seems a lot older—in a good way. I notice a trend over the last fifty or so years of novels favoring naturalness, with writing styles that mimic simple speech. As it's narrated by a pretentious scholarly sort, The Secret History doesn't need to be as simple, and I get the sense that Tartt consciously tried (and succeeded) to make the writing beautiful, rather than merely functional.

3. The album Sierra Tracks by Vega Trails

4. The Secret Life of Books podcast episode on Richard III

5. I spent my formative years reading the full archive of Unqualified Reservations. So naturally, I found this exciting.

A dispatch from under the local rock

All the things I heard while intentionally consuming as little news as possible last month.

Donald Trump

People continue to be very worked up over Donald Trump—I guess he's still President. There are more deportations to El Salvador, including of people not related to El Salvador. They get sent to horrible prison camps, in exchange for money and legitimacy for Bukele. Others get rejected at the border in spite of having valid visas.

A federal judge in the US got arrested for aiding a man who was sentenced for deportation to stay illegally. Her arrest took place amidst a court proceeding, even though she didn't seem like a flight risk. While she did do something illegal, her trial is overly focused on her political beliefs rather than the pure facts of the crime. This was implied to be Trump-related by the person who told me, though I don't know enough about how the US system works to evaluate how plausible that is.

Additionally, Trump has a shitcoin, though maybe the term isn't fair because the value, as of now, isn't zero. Melania has one too, though it's less successful.

War

The Hooties attacked the airport in Tel Aviv. Israel retaliated, escalating their war with the Hooties and with Hamas in Gaza.

India attacked Pakistan with missiles in the struggle over Kashmir.

Religion

The last Pope died in late April. A new Pope has been elected. He's called Pope Leo, is American, and has a math degree. As a Cardinal, he knew about a child sex abuse case within the Catholic Church and failed to report it.

Tech

Mark Zuckerberg thinks that Meta should make AI friends to solve the problem of people not having enough close friends. This is nowhere near operational yet.

Culture

There was a particularly suspenseful Champion's League semi-final between Milan and Barcelona (or was it Madrid?) The match was a tie until the very end, where Milan won.

A Gazan writer won a Pulitzer prize for journalism. This pick was controversial, because in some of his social media posts he dismissed Israeli hostages and implied they were lying or exaggerating (or something to that effect).

In other controversies, Israel participated in Eurovision again this year, placing second. Austria won.

Denmark

In response to souring relations with the US, there's an increased emphasis on digital sovereignty and open source software in Danish politics, with support across the political spectrum. Policies may be enacted targeting Microsoft in particular, as their products are widely used in the Danish public sector.

More controversially, a Danish prison was built in Slovakia to save money. The prison is meant to follow Danish standards of prisoner welfare.

The CEO of Novo Nordisk got fired.

I read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell the other month, and while I enjoyed it, I also came away confused. Not so much by the plot, which is pretty straightforward, but in what exactly I was supposed to take from it.

Like a lot of historical fiction, it tells you as much about the time it was written—the 1930s—as it does about the time it’s set—the American Civil War. But being far removed from both, reading it felt like watching history through a funhouse mirror. I had so many questions. Was Scarlett's belief that the war is pointless meant to make her sympathetic, or just cynical? What are we supposed to make of her unapologetic flair for business? Was Mitchell as racist as her characters, or was she trying, however imperfectly, to depict racism without endorsing it? Could parts of the novel even be read as anti-racist, in a weird, old-timey way? And in the 1930s, when schoolchildren were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, how did readers respond to such a sympathetic portrayal of the Confederacy?

Trying to answer these questions, I got interested not only in what Mitchell meant, but also in why Gone with the Wind struck such a chord. It’s easy to focus on the supply side—the way a story shapes culture—but cultural impact also depends on demand. A story doesn't become a juggernaut just because the author made a persuasive case. It takes off because something in the culture was already primed for it.

So I dug into the historical context and the novel's reception. Unless otherwise noted, what follows is informed by The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells by Sarah Churchwell.

In the following, I'll start with some background on the 1930s, especially in Georgia and the broader South, where Gone with the Wind is set and where Mitchell was from. Then I'll look at Mitchell herself and what she thought she was doing. After that, we'll touch on the film adaptation and how the work was received. Finally, I'll circle back to the questions that first puzzled me and try to answer them.

Let's dive in.

The 1930s

To understand where Margaret Mitchell projected the 1930s back onto the 1860s, it helps to know what the world looked like as she was writing. A lot of the big debates—race, class, gender roles, national identity—resemble current preoccupations. But the stakes and tone were different, and economically, at least, we've got it much better now.

The Great Depression and the New Deal

The Great Depression, triggered by the 1929 stock market crash, sent the U.S. into a downward spiral of unemployment, poverty, and institutional breakdown. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal (1933–1938), a set of public programs, social reforms, and financial regulations meant to get the country back on its feet.

It was the first major expansion of the federal welfare state in American history, and many well-off white Americans hated it. To conservatives, it looked like a slippery slope to socialism: threatening free markets, rewarding laziness, and undermining meritocracy.

In the South, where distrust of federal power already ran deep, the New Deal was especially provocative. Many white Southerners had long viewed the Civil War not as a fight to preserve slavery, but as a struggle against centralized control, so Roosevelt's programs felt like a repeat of old grievances.

Women's suffrage

Although the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the vote in 1920, debates over women's suffrage dragged on into the 1930s, especially in the South. There, white suffragists argued that women's votes would reinforce white male political dominance. Their opponents, meanwhile, saw women's suffrage as a dangerous Yankee import and a legitimization of black suffrage under the Fifteenth Amendment. In Georgia, both camps were led by prominent members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Fascism and racism

Fascism loomed large in 1930s America. Partly because it was on the rise in Europe, but also because Nazi propaganda kept pointing to U.S. racism as a defense of Germany's treatment of Jews. Critics of Jim Crow were quick to draw the obvious parallels: lynchings, segregation, voter suppression—they looked uncomfortably similar to the things America claimed to oppose abroad. But many Americans insisted the comparison didn't hold. Nazism, they said, was an ideology; American racism, while real and regrettable, was more of a bad habit—something peripheral, not foundational. (Or just something Nazi newspapers had blown out of proportion.)

Meanwhile, Southern defenders of segregation disliked being compared to Nazis, but had no issue adopting some of the same logic. They called for boycotts of the 1936 Berlin Olympics to signal disapproval of Hitler, then fought against black voting rights at home.

The phrase 'master race' didn't start in Germany, either. It was coined by American eugenicist Madison Grant in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, a bestseller that helped mainstream the idea of racial hierarchies well before Hitler made it infamous. Antisemitism was also well-established in American conservative circles. Henry Ford's The International Jew series ran in his newspapers for years, and one of the most influential public voices of the decade—Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a radio audience that reached 22% of Americans—spent the late '30s justifying Kristallnacht, calling Roosevelt "Rosenfeld," and arguing that the New Deal was secretly a Zionist plot, giving it the nickname "Jew Deal."

The Klan

The first Ku Klux Klan formed during Reconstruction, drawing inspiration from the chivalric fantasies of Sir Walter Scott. The second Klan, revived in the 1920s, leaned into theatricality—adopting white robes, burning crosses, and cinematic flair, much of it borrowed from The Birth of a Nation (1915), which itself was based on the novels of Thomas Dixon Jr. This Klan became more popular than the first, and is more prominent in cultural memory.

In the 1930s, Americans often distinguished between the two Klans. The first was still praised in mainstream outlets as a kind of postwar neighborhood watch. A 1939 New York Times article described it as having existed for "frightening obstreperous Negroes into good behavior... applying the lash when that seemed most effective, murdering if that remedy was demanded"—often, it added, with "abundant provocation." A 1937 Chicago Tribune piece, inspired by Gone with the Wind, offered similar praise, brushing aside arson and murder as regrettable excesses.

These days we also tend to forget that the Klan wasn't the only active white supremacist terror group at the time. The Black Legion, a paramilitary group based in the Midwest, was accused of murdering up to fifty people in 1936, most of them black. Its leader plotted a coup to seize Washington, D.C., and proposed exterminating Jews by pumping poison gas into synagogues on Yom Kippur.

Even in the 1930s, the Klan was being compared to the Nazis by both its critics and admirers. One Nazi consul general in California even tried to fund a U.S. putsch by purchasing the Klan. But they declined—he wasn't offering enough money, and they didn't want foreign interference.

Criminal labor

By the late 1930s, criminal labor was under national scrutiny. Georgia's chain gang system became a scandal, thanks in part to the 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, based on a true story of a wrongfully convicted white man who escaped, was recaptured, and re-incarcerated. In 1937, amid growing outrage, Georgia promised to abolish the practice.

Popular media

Gone with the Wind was not alone in capturing the popular imagination. The number one best selling novels of the 1930s, beyond Mitchell's, were:

• Cimarron by Edna Ferber: Historical fiction about the Oklahoma Land Rush

• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck: A dramatization of Chinese village life in the early 20th century

• Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen: Historical adventure fiction about a man who, among other things, participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, owned a plantation in the US, and was incarcerated

• Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas: An uplifting interpersonal drama

• The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: The coming-of-age story of a farm boy

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: A realistic novel about a family's journey to California during the Great Depression

A couple other relevant works of popular fiction include:

• Show Boat by Edna Ferber (1925), adapted into a film and musical about interracial love and life on the Mississippi.

• It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935), a dystopian novel about American fascism

More broadly, plantation fiction and minstrel imagery were cultural mainstays at the turn of the 20th century, though by the mid-1930s they seem to have faded. Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories and performers like Al Jolson (whose 1935 recording helped popularize the term 'moonlight and magnolias') romanticized the antebellum South. The Little Colonel novels by Annie Fellows Johnston were widely read, and the 1935 film adaptation starring Shirley Temple—featuring a dance with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson—was one of the last major films to depict the minstrel tradition.

Hollywood was also operating under the Hays Code by 1934, which, among other restrictions, banned the use of the N-word in film. But in other contexts, the term was common—including a couple of newspapers which declared "nxxxxr brown" as the color of the season1.

Who was Margaret Mitchell?

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1900 to a white Southern family with deep Confederate roots. Her great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant, owned a 3,000-acre plantation and held thirty-five slaves by 1854—a notable figure, given that only about a quarter of white Southerners owned slaves at all, and just ten percent of those held more than twenty. By Mitchell's lifetime, however, her family's wealth came from Atlanta real estate, as was typical for many of the city's old families.

Mitchell spent almost her entire life in Atlanta, apart from a single year at Smith College in Massachusetts, which she disliked. According to a former roommate, she idolized Robert E. Lee and reacted poorly when a black student enrolled in one of their classes. Mitchell's own explanation was that the professor showed contempt for Southern students and was hypocritical about race. Sarah Churchwell finds this defense implausible, but notes that Mitchell did harbor a deep resentment toward Northern condescension. In a letter to a friend, she wrote:

the Romans, after all, were politer than the Northern conquerors, for after they had sown Carthage with salt they never rode through it on railroad trains and made snooty remarks about the degeneracy of people who liked to live in such poor circumstances

This was part of a general belief that many of the tensions underlying the Civil War had never been resolved. When President Roosevelt endorsed a liberal Democratic senator in Georgia over a conservative one, many locals saw it as federal overreach (and compared him to Hitler, naturally). Mitchell noted that the South hadn't changed much since the Civil War, and expressed surprise that so many Northerners thought sectional divisions had been settled.

Like many elite white Southerners of her generation, Mitchell grew up steeped in the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative, which romanticized the Confederacy, downplayed slavery, and framed the South as noble but misunderstood. Her political views reflected this regional wariness of federal authority: she leaned libertarian and was described by her brother as "extremely reactionary." She was staunchly opposed to the New Deal, and kept a "Red" file on Southerners she suspected of leftist sympathies. She even considered writing an essay titled "Why the Communists Attack the South and Attempt to Inflame the Negro Press and Public Against the South."

She supported Georgia politician Herman Talmadge, a segregationist who rose to power defending Jim Crow and opposing civil rights legislation well into the 1950s. As a young journalist in 1923, Mitchell also wrote a favorable profile of Rebecca Latimer Felton—both the first woman and the last slaveholder to serve in the U.S. Senate. Felton was a prominent suffragist and an advocate of lynching, white supremacy, and the convict lease system. Much like Felton, Mitchell identified as a feminist, which was less correlated with left-wing causes than today. Her mother, Maybelle Mitchell, was a prominent Georgia suffragist, and Margaret shared many of her ideals.

Mitchell also held complicated and often contradictory views on race. At fifteen, after seeing The Birth of a Nation, she was so taken with the film that she wrote her own adaptation of another of Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novels—complete with Klan costume. Later, she praised the first Ku Klux Klan as a protector of women and children, though she opposed the second Klan of the 1920s and was disturbed by its resurgence in Atlanta, especially when black residents, including her own domestic staff, were afraid to leave their homes due to the threat of violence. Later in life, Mitchell quietly donated to Morehouse College, a historically black university, funding scholarships for black students.

Though conservative in many respects, Mitchell didn't support European fascism. She proudly noted in 1944 that Gone with the Wind had been banned in Nazi Germany. Though she heard Hitler and his inner circle had seen the film adaptation, she doubted they appreciated it: "They did not think a story or a movie which had to do with a conquered people who became free again would be a good thing to show in Germany or occupied countries."

Mitchell's intentions

Margaret Mitchell insisted Gone with the Wind was a realistic portrayal of the Southern experience during and after the Civil War. She claimed to reject the sentimental plantation fiction she'd grown up with, instead depicting a cast of modern realists—laissez-faire, self-interested characters who reflected the rise of the New South. Her Georgian characters span a range of social classes, and she prided herself on accurately capturing the white caste system, calling the book "as true as documentation and years of research could make it."2 That said, while her military history is meticulous, her political and racial portrayals were based on sources drawing from the same Lost Cause narratives she claimed to reject.

Mitchell's realism extended to linguistic and visual detail. She researched black dialect by interviewing African Americans who had been born into slavery, and insisted that her language choices were historically accurate. When a publisher urged her to soften racially charged phrases like "Mammy's ape face," "black paws," and references to "negro rule," she expressed surprise, saying she had "tried to keep out venom, bias and bitterness." She claimed, for instance, to have heard black people refer to their own hands as "paws." Still, she conceded that such phrasing might come across differently in print than in conversation.

In her correspondence, Mitchell generally used "Negroes" or "colored people" to refer to black people, both standard terms at the time, though earlier letters sometimes included "darkies." As criticism of the novel's language mounted, she doubled down on her claim that the novel's language was historically grounded, including the slurs. She expressed bewilderment that readers found the black characters offensive, insisting that Mammy, Peter, and Sam displayed more dignity and moral clarity than Scarlett. Mitchell furthermore dismissed black critics of the book as "professional Negroes" stirring up trouble, and said she was thrilled when white liberals disapproved of it.

In spite of her attempts to stay neutral, Mitchell's contempt for Northern hypocrisy comes through in the novel. In one scene, recently arrived Northern whites offend Peter, Scarlett's black domestic servant, by their insensitivity and use of slurs. The Northerners refuse to hire black staff, unlike white Southerners, who view their black servants as part of their family. Mitchell's implication seems to be that Southern racism, while overt, was less hypocritical. Historically, this framing is flawed. While the use of slurs increased during Reconstruction, there's plenty of evidence that white Southerners used slurs earlier, too. Additionally, domestic slaves were rarely as loyal as the novel implies, often the first to leave after emancipation.

Some of the novel's racial preoccupations also seem to project 1930s concerns onto the 1860s. The trope of idle freedpeople during Reconstruction, for instance, may reflect Mitchell's anxieties about federal welfare under the New Deal. Likewise, some readers found terms like "Götterdämmerung" (popularized by Wagner's 1876 opera) and "survival of the fittest" anachronistic for characters in the 1860s. Mitchell defended their use as plausible for educated Southerners, though both phrases were more common in the political discourse of her own era.

Mitchell did reveal some of her explicit intentions with her work. Scarlett O'Hara was meant as an anti-hero, and Mitchell was uneasy with how readily readers embraced her. "I have not found it wryly amusing," she wrote, "when Miss O'Hara became somewhat of a national heroine and I have thought it looked bad for the moral and mental attitude of a nation." While she admired Scarlett's courage, loyalty, and drive, Mitchell made it clear that Melanie was "really my heroine, not 'Scarlett.'" Melanie, with her quiet grace and moral strength, represents the doomed Old South. Scarlett, though less admirable, has the "gumption" to survive.

This ties in with the novel's core theme, which Mitchell helpfully made explicit:

If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.

The film

Gone with the Wind became a runaway bestseller within weeks, and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The film adaptation was greenlit almost immediately after this success. By 1937, producer David O. Selznick had acquired the film rights, launching what would become one of the most ambitious and controversial Hollywood productions of the decade. Even before a script was finalized, Selznick's studio kicked off a high-profile nationwide casting campaign known as "the Search for Scarlett." Thousands of actresses were considered, and the publicity helped build anticipation for a film that hadn't yet begun production.

Visually, the film exaggerated the grandeur of the Old South—particularly the plantation Tara, which Mitchell had wanted to appear more modest—but in most other respects, it hewed closely to her text. Cuts were permitted, but additions were not. Multiple screenwriters cycled through the project, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who found the strict adherence to the novel stifling and soon walked away.

One of the major challenges facing the filmmakers was how to handle the novel's racism. African American activists protested not just the use of the N-word, but the broader racial stereotypes embedded in the story. Mitchell and Selznick defended the language as historically accurate, but public pressure forced the studio to revise several elements of the script.

Yet public pressure wasn't the only reason that racism in the novel is toned down in the film. Selznick, the American-born son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, expressed private sympathy for black audiences, stating: "I feel so keenly about what is happening to the Jews of the world that I cannot help but sympathize with the Negroes in their fears about material which they regard as insulting and damaging." He also cautioned that "we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger."

Although Selznick, like many Americans at the time, viewed the first Ku Klux Klan more sympathetically than the second, he briefly considered removing the Klan from the film entirely. He feared its inclusion might serve as "an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times" given the Klan's resurgence in the 1930s. Ultimately, however, the Klan remained in the story.

Other changes were made to soften political messaging, though. In the novel, Scarlett's father dies after refusing to swear loyalty to the United States—a defiant act of Confederate pride. In the film, his motivation was altered to make his death more acceptable to mainstream audiences.

The reception

The novel and film adaptation of Gone with the Wind were wildly successful, both in the United States and abroad. American critics praised the novel for its vivid realism, graphic depictions of war, and complex characters—especially Scarlett, who was seen as daring, modern, and compellingly unladylike. Many readers viewed the book as a departure from nostalgic plantation fiction, applauding its frank portrayal of bodily functions, cursing, and emotional ambiguity. Scarlett's foray into business also struck a chord with women impacted by the Great Depression, many of whom had taken on similar responsibilities to support their families.

International audiences responded just as strongly. The story found large audiences in, among other places, England, France, Spain, Norway, Iceland, Poland, Japan, Vietnam, and even Nazi Germany (where it was later banned). When the film was released in 1939 soon after the outbreak of World War II, its anti-war undercurrents resonated with American isolationists, while European audiences, already under siege, saw reflections of their own wartime struggles. In London, the film played continuously at Leicester Square for four years, with audiences lining up daily despite the Blitz. By 1949, Mitchell remarked that the story's popularity had only grown across Europe: nearly every country now knew what it meant to be invaded or occupied.

The film's popularity in Nazi Germany had ideological dimensions as well. Its portrayal of the South as a culturally distinct Volk, its racial hierarchy, and its comparatively flattering depiction of slavery made it appealing to some Nazi audiences. Hitler reportedly liked the film, though some Nazi elites disapproved of the public's preference for American kitsch over German high art. Some American outlets also praised the novel for offering an "ideal plantation," in contrast to more negative portrayals such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even outside the South, Mitchell was commended for her depiction of black characters, including their heavily phonetic dialogue.

But not all readers were persuaded. Some critics felt Mitchell had written exactly the kind of sentimental, mythologized plantation novel she claimed to reject. F. Scott Fitzgerald placed Gone with the Wind in the same tradition as The Birth of a Nation and the work of Thomas Nelson Page—what he called the "romantic chivalry" strain of Civil War fiction. He contrasted it with less popular but more honest works by writers like Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce. Other critics pointed out the novel's "Fascist implications," warning that its nostalgia for hierarchy and pre-modern social order could subtly encourage readers toward authoritarian sympathies.

The story's cultural footprint was large enough to inspire satire. In early 1939, Clare Boothe wrote a comedic play, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, which parodied the "Search for Scarlett" by following a film producer hunting for an actress to play Velvet O'Toole in a Civil War romance. Boothe framed the play not just as a send-up of Hollywood, but as an allegory for American fascism. She argued that fascism in the U.S. would take a uniquely domestic form which she dubbed 'Southernism,' a soft authoritarianism that Americans failed to recognize or take seriously. Mitchell, along with other critics, dismissed the comparison as absurd.

African American audiences overwhelmingly rejected the film. Protests erupted during production and continued through its release, with demonstrators condemning it as "un-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, Reactionary, Pro-Ku Klux Klan, pro-Nazi and Fascist." A journalist for the New York Age wrote that the film "openly refers to the Negroes as 'simple-minded darkies', resurrecting all the racial inferiority theories which science has discarded, and which Hitler and his fellow imperialists have picked up against Jews and other minorities."

Conclusion

When I first read Gone with the Wind, I was puzzled. Was it controversial when it came out? Did readers really sympathize with the Ku Klux Klan? Was Scarlett's girlbossing seen as transgressive, or aspirational? So I wasn't all that surprised to learn that it was in fact controversial in its time, though certainly less so than it would be today.

And yet, in spite of everything, the story holds up—well after most plantation fiction has become a historical curiosity. For all of Mitchell's politics, Gone with the Wind isn't reducible to a simple message. Mitchell favored Melanie, the novel's moral center, but also portrayed her as too gentle to endure. That tension remains one of the book's most interesting choices. Scarlett's brilliance as a character lies in her moral ambiguity—her views aren't meant to be trusted, and the novel is stronger for it.

In The Wrath to Come, Sarah Churchwell sees this moral ambiguity as a weakness. She argues that it's a failure of the novel that Scarlett, a sharp and forceful character, doesn't comment on the appalling treatment of black people happening around her. But I strongly disagree. A protagonist who perfectly mirrored the sensibilities of 21st-century white liberals would feel not only anachronistic, but insufferable. On the other hand, had Scarlett been a paragon of Southern virtue, completely persuaded of the rectitude of the Confederate cause, the story would have been unreadable in a different way. Mitchell struck an impressive balance: Scarlett's disdain for the war is both sympathetic and rooted in her lack of moral core. I wasn't surprised to learn Mitchell was a libertarian, but I wouldn't have been shocked if someone had told me she was pro-labor union either—Scarlett's labor practices, after all, are depicted as morally bankrupt.

Still, fiction is more than authorial intent. Gone with the Wind didn't just reflect its time—it helped shape it. It's implausible that a book this popular wouldn't have influenced how readers, both in the U.S. and abroad, thought about the Civil War and its aftermath. And yet measuring that influence is slippery. As with all cultural products, it's hard to separate the role of supply and demand—do popular stories shape culture (supply), or does culture decide what stories get popular (demand)?

While both forces are always at work, I think Churchwell overrates the power of the supply side. Gone with the Wind could only become as influential as it did because it struck a chord with its audience. If it had been published today, it wouldn't have taken off—had it gone to print at all. Likewise, many books that are critically celebrated today wouldn't have stood a chance in the 1930s. There were things you couldn't get away with then just as there are things you can't get away with now.

Churchwell acknowledges that fiction about the horrors of slavery often fell flat in the 1930s. But she seems too outraged to ever compromise, an ultimately ineffectual attitude. The truth is, demand matters. The culture has to want what a story is offering. That's why I'm skeptical that a version of Gone with the Wind that appealed to a broad audience while offering a sharper critique of slavery and the Confederacy could have succeeded in that moment. It might have been praised in niche circles, but I doubt it would have had mass appeal or enduring influence. Beyond that, overly didactic fiction is often terrible.

And while a book with a more positive social impact may have improved things at the time, today, I'm glad Gone with the Wind exists as-is. The novel provides a rare window into how white Southerners saw themselves—or wanted to be seen—in both the 1860s and the 1930s. Mitchell's portrayal of white characters justifying slavery doesn't feel like a modern author trying to inhabit the mindset of their ancestors. It feels like someone writing from within the logic of that world. And because of that, the story feels plausible.

Of course, just because a book needs cultural traction to become influential doesn't mean supply-side explanations are always wrong. Some stories really do shift public imagination. Churchwell comments that KKK vigilantes after The Birth of a Nation were doing more than just LARPing. But to the contrary, I think the conclusion is that it was a LARP—but that LARPing is extremely powerful. So perhaps there was room in the 1930s for a novel or film that would make people LARP something better.

But I'd wager there wasn't. It's frankly a little unbelievable that Mitchell expressed such surprise that readers glommed onto glamorous Scarlett instead of mousy Melanie—glamour is a real strength of the novel. And glamour is never fully honest.

Judaism had sectarian faultlines in the Second Temple Era. The main ones were:

The pharisees are the group that evolved into the mainstream rabbinic Judaism of today after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD. While priests controlled Temple rituals, rabbis studied and interpreted the Torah, beginning in the exile period after the destruction of the first Temple. They believed that all Jews ought to adhere to purity laws that applied to Temple services even outside the Temple. If we're to trust Josephus, who was perhaps a pharisee himself, they were anti-elitist, and thus popular with the common folk.

In contrast, the Sadducees represented society's elite, including priests and Judean state administrators, who were significantly Hellenized. They had a more literal interpretation of Biblical edicts, didn't follow the oral Torah, and had different ideas about when different purity rules should be followed. They didn't believe in any kind of afterlife, choosing to live luxuriously in this life instead. None of their own texts survive, and all the mentions we have of them are by people who hated them.

The Essenes were a monastic group responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. They led communal lives, with collective ownership and refusal to participate in trade. They didn't sacrifice animals or use weapons unless in self-defense, and chose not to have slaves. In slightly less sane rules, some would avoid defecation on the Sabbath in order to maintain purity.

Zealots were aligned with the Pharisees, but were radically anti-Roman. They tried to force other Jews to join their struggle against the Romans by, for example, destroying decades’ worth of food and firewood to increase Jews’ desperation while under siege.

Jewish Christians were a growing faction of Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah. Jewish Christians still continued to worship at synagogues with non-Christian Jews for centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple. Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were in this time much less orthodox and doctrinally homogeneous than today, and both were influenced by Hellenistic religion and philosophy.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, prospects for a third were grim. Jews needed to figure out how to do their religion without its centerpiece. The pharisees were prepared with the best answers for this, and so they prevailed—in contrast with many pagan faiths that faded after their civilizations encountered a loss. To prevent further sectarianism, rabbis were committed to debate as a value, encouraging these debates to happen within a single community, rather than developing schisms. Zealots were all wiped out, and Sadducees lost influence. Essenes were always marginal. Jewish Christians became just Christians, though when the overlap ended is hard to pin down.

Links

1. Genmaicha, AKA popcorn tea.

2. The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, an edited and translated collection of weird fiction from the 18th century Chinese political figure (both Special Advisor to the Emperor and Imperial Librarian), writer and supernatural investigator Ji Yun. It’s structured as a collection of very short stories of purported supernatural or strange occurences, along with reflections. The tone is very delicate and curious.

3. This SNL sketch, on good and bad uses of AI:

4. Glassdoor and Comparably give salary averages for gang leaders...? According to Glassdoor, they earn a median salary of $140K per year, with a range of $105K-$195K. Popular employers of gang leaders include Walker Crips and Yepas. According to Comparably, “The average Gang Leader in the US makes $58,772. Gang Leaders make the most in San Jose, CA at $116,039 averaging total compensation 97% greater than US average.”

5. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. The writing is choppy. There are many short sentences. They meander pretentiously across the page like a long, winding river. There are no semi-colons, nonetheless, I enjoyed it.

A dispatch from under the local rock

Intentionally consuming the news is overrated. So in this new feature, I’ll be covering every bit of news I was told by people throughout the month—just keep in mind I haven’t fact-checked a single thing, and any bias reflects the opinions of everyone I know except me.

It’s felt like a fast news month, mostly due to goings-on across the Atlantic. There’s been a lot of turbulence in the US, where President Donald Trump has either implemented—or maybe just threatened to implement—a series of tariffs proportional to America’s trade deficit with other countries. This has made products like beer more expensive, thanks to aluminum tariffs. The goal is to stimulate US manufacturing, though some speculate it’ll tank the economy instead. Stock markets seem to agree.

America’s European allies aren’t thrilled. They’ve responded with retaliatory tariffs on US goods and are generally unhappy about what they perceive as a lack of respect. One example: Trump said that forcefully taking Greenland from Denmark isn’t off the table, even though Denmark is a US ally. Meanwhile, I heard a speculative claim that the US might retroactively extend treasury bond yields to 100 years, which sounds implausible—though at this point, who knows.

There was also a diplomatic kerfuffle caused by a leaked Signal chat among top US cabin crew, including Vice President JD Vance, discussing how to respond to Houthi threats to shipping routes. The messages included times and locations of planned military operations, and lots of embarrassing emojis. Vance vented about having to bail out Europe again, suggesting this isn’t just posturing for his base. The chat leaked because an Atlantic journalist was accidentally added. Trump being Trump, I wonder who got fired.

Domestically, the current US government seems more totalitarian than previous iterations. A French citizen was denied entry to the US for criticizing the government on social media. The White House press secretary supposedly said—or heavily implied—that Supreme Court judges who oppose Trump’s decrees could face arrest. The administration is also planning to slash NSF funding by two-thirds. While not authoritarian on its own, the cuts seem politically motivated, and academic leaders are hesitant to speak out for fear of retribution. Even European researchers who receive NSF grants—or collaborate with those who do—have gotten surveys about their work and any potential ties to Chinese researchers.

On the flip side, I also heard a claim that a large chunk of unaudited US taxpayer money was quietly funneled to a terrorist group masquerading as an anti-climate-change organization, and that the Trump administration is cracking down on it.

There’s also been attention paid to the administration’s reading list and underlying political philosophy. This means the normies—by which I mean my mom—have discovered the oeuvre of Curtis Yarvin. Meanwhile, I heard about a clip featuring AI-generated Trump and Netanyahu lounging on a beach in Gaza wearing bikinis, parodying Trump’s recent comments about developing Gaza. I actually looked this one up because it sounded too good to ignore, but was disappointed to find no politicians in bikinis.

Towards the end of the month, the entire Iberian Peninsula reportedly lost power at once. I wonder if they’ve fixed it.

Closer to home, Danish media has increasingly reckoned with the country’s colonial history and role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. One controversial DR documentary about Greenland featured a reporter crying over the supposed profits of a Danish-run mine. The catch? They used revenue as a proxy for profit, implicitly assuming zero operational costs. Several people were fired for the error. In financial news, Novo Nordisk shares took a hit after Eli Lilly announced a competing weight loss drug.

And in culture: people have been running their selfies through an AI Studio Ghibli filter, making everything look extremely cute. Also, casting announcements for an upcoming Harry Potter TV reboot are out—and apparently controversial.

Overall, it was…

A quick, enjoyable read that taught me something new. It’s not my favorite book on the subject (that would be An Immense World by Ed Yong), but it’s written in a refreshingly direct style.

Here were my highlights.

Senses and perception

Animals seem to perceive stark contrasts between light and dark as differences in depth. This may be linked to their limited color vision. Grandin cites the case of a man who lost his color vision due to brain damage; afterward, he began seeing light contrasts as depth differences—even though he’d had no issues with depth perception before.

This phenomenon helps explain why cattle guards work: a pit is dug across the road and covered with metal bars so that cars can pass, but cattle are too frightened to cross. Interestingly, even a painted version with no pit at all can be an effective deterrent.

Another insight is that animals tend to use an additive system, rather than an averaging one, to identify objects. This means that a single change in sound, appearance, or smell can be enough to make a familiar person or object seem entirely unfamiliar and therefore threatening. It’s part of why dogs often react badly to Halloween costumes: someone they know might look, smell, or sound just different enough to be perceived as a stranger.

Grandin also emphasizes that animal perception is highly detailed and lacking in inattentional blindness. But this detailed attention is correlated with hyper-specificity and a reduced ability to generalize or form broader categories about how things should behave.

Mental health and behavior

Animals with albino characteristics—such as blue eyes, a pink nose, and white fur or skin—are more prone to neurological and behavioral problems than their darker-skinned or dark-furred counterparts. This vulnerability isn’t limited to full albinism; even partial traits seem to carry risks. One reason may be that melanin plays a protective role in the brain, and its absence affects development. It also matters medically: melanin binds to certain chemicals used in medications, so albino animals can respond differently to drug treatments.

This pattern shows up across species. White chickens, for instance, tend to be more frantic than brown ones. Paint horses, particularly those with blue eyes, are more likely to be “plain crazy,” in Grandin’s words.

Fear and pain are another area where animal responses diverge from ours. Grandin suggests that animals may not feel pain as intensely as humans do, but they experience fear more acutely—a claim she admits is speculative. What’s more certain is that animals, especially prey animals, are highly motivated to hide pain, because displaying weakness in the wild is a good way to get eaten. To observe whether a pet animal is in pain, for example, Grandin suggests leaving the animal alone with a video camera.

A series of clever experiments illustrate how fear responses can be both biologically primed and socially learned. Wild monkeys are always afraid of snakes, but lab-raised monkeys often aren’t—until they see a wild monkey reacting in fear. Once they do, they acquire that fear permanently. But when shown an edited video of monkeys reacting fearfully to a flower, they don’t acquire fear of the flower. This suggests monkeys are biologically predisposed to fear snakes, but that the fear itself must be learned. Timing matters too: if a lab monkey first sees a snake in the company of an unafraid monkey, it won't develop fear of snakes, even if other monkeys panic later.

Another researcher discovered that a single cat hair in the lab was enough to terrify a rat that had never encountered a cat. He speculated that cues like researchers carrying the scent of their pet cats could be skewing the results of behavioral studies, since terrified animals don’t make great test subjects.

Even behaviors that seem straightforward, like canine aggression, turn out to be surprisingly context-dependent. Neutering a male dog, for example, does reduce aggression, but not because it changes the dog directly. Instead, other male dogs respond more kindly to the neutered dog, since he no longer smells like a sexual rival. It’s not his behavior that shifts first—it’s theirs.

Selective breeding

Grandin shares a number of cautionary tales about what can go wrong when animals are bred too aggressively for a single trait. One particularly memorable story involves roosters on a commercial chicken farm. Over time, the farm ran three consecutive breeding programs: first to make chickens grow faster, then to increase breast size, and finally to improve health after the first two led to birds in chronic pain. But the unintended side effects were severe. The roosters lost the instinct to perform their courtship dance—a key behavior, since hens rely on that dance to know when mating is about to happen. Without it, the hens were caught off guard and resisted, leading to violent behavior from the roosters. Some roosters began raping and then killing the hens, and eventually, half the males on the farm were affected.

Not all examples are quite so grim, but they still highlight unexpected consequences. Holstein cows, for instance, have been bred to consume enormous amounts of feed in order to produce more milk. As a result, they often develop oral fixations. Unlike beef cattle, which might just sniff or nudge objects, Holsteins left unsupervised will lick the paint off tractors and chew through hydraulic hoses.

Selective breeding also affects social and sexual behavior. American pigs, bred to be leaner in line with consumer preferences, have become more anxious and less attractive to other pigs than their fatter, calmer Chinese counterparts. When a Chinese boar was brought to the U.S., he managed to repeatedly escape his pen and breed with sows whenever he was left unsupervised—something a typical American pig would never even attempt.

Grandin also delves into the realities of how breeders collect semen and manage animal reproduction. In some species, it’s straightforward: for example, applying pressure to the females’s back can reliably trigger mating behavior in some species. But pigs present unique challenges. Boars often have very specific preferences, and breeders have to experiment to figure out what works. This might involve something as innocuous as scratching dandruff off a boar’s back—or, more intimately, masturbating the animal in a highly specific way, including (in one example Grandin gives) playing with the boar’s butthole.

Language

Grandin highlights several striking examples of complex animal communication which have led researchers to question the common wisdom that animals don’t have language.

Prairie dogs, for instance, have an astonishingly rich vocal system that includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They use distinct calls not just for different species of predator, but for specific individuals—such as particular coyotes—and can signal how fast a threat is moving. They’re even able to communicate whether a human is carrying a gun. Researchers focused on prairie dogs in part because they sit at the bottom of the food chain, living under constant threat. They speculate that the pressure has driven the development of an especially nuanced communication system, likely crucial to their survival.

Humpback whales offer a very different kind of linguistic intrigue. Their elaborate songs often feature refrains and rhyming patterns, and these elements become more common as the songs grow longer and more complex. Some researchers speculate that the structure—like rhyming in human speech—might serve a mnemonic function, helping the whales remember the sequence.

And as an aside about humans, which in the book is in a longer passage about music, apparently all cultures have lullabies.

YIMBY

I’m generally sympathetic to the YIMBY movement. But sometimes its proponents seem more committed to the ideology than to understanding the specifics of the systems they want to reform. Since I usually don’t have domain-specific knowledge either, I'm often unable to evaluate their claims. So when someone does weigh in with deep expertise, I tend to give their views more weight.

Temple Grandin is one of those people. While Animals in Translation isn’t about housing or land use, a couple of points she makes struck me as relevant to YIMBY concerns—particularly when it comes to the unintended consequences of well-meaning activism and the limitations of bureaucratic systems.

The first example involves screwworm infestations in horses. This used to be a widespread problem in the U.S. until the USDA launched a program to breed screwworms and irradiate the males at the pupa stage, rendering them sterile. These sterile males were then released into the wild. The program began in 1958, and by 1982 screwworm infestation in the U.S. had been eradicated. It was a major success that saved thousands of animals from suffering.

But Grandin argues that such a program would be nearly impossible today. She suggests that environmental activists—often well-intentioned but unfamiliar with on-the-ground realities—would likely protest to protect the flies. At the same time, a web of court procedures and risk-averse institutions would slow or derail the effort entirely. The project also required competent field staff with authority to act, whereas today, decision-making is often confined to office-based bureaucrats.

The second example comes from her work on meatpacking plant audits. Grandin criticizes long, detailed audit checklists. She argues that these are not only impossible to remember, but often full of vague language (like “no more use of force than strictly necessary”) and focused on measuring inputs—such as plant layout—instead of outcomes, like how the animals are actually faring.

She developed a much simpler five-point checklist focused on observable animal welfare outcomes. Her system doesn’t require perfection because demanding a zero-mistake standard often causes standards to erode over time, as rule-breakers find workarounds and honest operators give up. She also notes that the more vague, complicated audit checklists are usually made by verbal thinkers with little hands-on experience in the environments they’re regulating (i.e. wordcels).

(As a side note: in the U.S., these audits are typically conducted not by regulators, but by major restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Burger King.)

Five extra books/articles/links/etc. from March 2025:

1. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. The story of a seemingly normal family, told from each of their perspectives. I thought the book was full of witty little details, and though it was on the longer end for a novel, I breezed through it.

2. Speaking of long novels: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I picked it up expecting to abandon it, thinking it would be a soap opera. But the plot turned out to be deeper and more thematically complex than I had expected—though if someone told me they found it too racist to get through, I would completely understand.

3. The Minister’s Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a beautiful short story about a minister who one day decides to don a black veil which he never removes, and how that choice affects his community.

4. Eye to the Ear, an album by Cosmo Sheldrake, whose music is such a kindness to the listener.

5. On a much sillier note:

In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.

The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)

Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West

Here are some amazing highlights:

I’ve read in several places that Arabs were identified as descendants of Ishmael even before the rise of Islam. I also came across claims that they practiced circumcision and avoided pork independently of any Abrahamic religion.

Curious about the origins of this identification and the customs surrounding it, I dug deeper. My two main questions were:

1. Where and with whom does the identification of Arabs as Ishmaelites originate?

2. Did the customs (like circumcision) come first, or the genealogical identification? How widespread were these behaviors?

So I looked into it. Here’s what I found.

One guy (probably) made it all up

According to Fergus Millar’s book chapter Hagar, Ishmael, Josephus, And the Origins of Islam, the earliest clear and unambiguous identification of Arabs as Ishmaelites comes from Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian. In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus links the Arab practice of circumcision at age thirteen to their descent from Ishmael:

Eight days later they promptly circumcised [Isaac]; and from that time forward the Jewish practice has been to circumcise so many days after birth. The Arabs defer the ceremony to the thirteenth year, because Ishmael, the founder of their race, born of Abraham’s concubine, was circumcised at that age.

Josephus mentions Arabs in other contexts too. In his retelling of the Joseph story, he refers to “Arab traders of the race of the Ishmaelites”, and elsewhere lists their genealogy based on Genesis 25:13–15. But while Genesis says the Ishmaelites “from Havilah to Shur which is opposite Egypt,” Josephus expands their domain significantly:

occupied the whole country extending from the Euphrates to the Red Sea and called it Nabatene, and it is these who conferred their names on the Arabic nation and its tribes in honour both of their own prowess and the fame of Abraham

Josephus was working within a Greek historiographical tradition that traced peoples to mythical or legendary founders—often with tangible implications for the self-identification and customs of those peoples.

But despite this Greek tendency to associate peoples with mythical ancestors, they don’t appear to have applied it to Arabs—until Apollonius Molon, a pagan Greek writer of the first century BC, proposed that Arabs descended from Abraham and Hagar.

I tried to track down Molon’s original text, but as far as I can tell, his written works are lost to time. The closest surviving version comes from Eusebius’ Preaparatio Evangelica from the early 4th century AD, which quotes Molon via a retelling by Alexander Polyhistor:

...Molon, the author of the collection Against the Jews, says that at the time of the Deluge the man who survived departed from Armenia with his sons, being driven out of his home by the people of the land; and after crossing the intermediate country came into the mountain-district of Syria which was uninhabited.

After three generations Abraham was born, whose name is by interpretation “Father’s friend,” and that he became a wise man, and travelled through the desert. And having taken two wives, the one of his own country and kindred, and the other an Egyptian handmaiden, he begat by the Egyptian twelve sons, who went off into Arabia and divided the land among them, and were the first who reigned over the people of the country: from which circumstance there are even in our own day twelve kings of the Arabians, bearing the same names as the first.

This account is both later and filtered, not to mention ambiguous.

Could Josephus have used Molon’s Against the Jews as a source and expanded on it? And where did Molon get the idea in the first place? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Josephus was certainly familiar with Molon’s work, and it seems unlikely that a pagan writer would apply a biblical genealogy to the Arabs without some influence from Jewish tradition. (That said, I’m curious about the context for Molon—now mostly remembered for his anti-Semitism—adopting a Jewish narrative at all.)

Another possibility is that both Molon and Josephus were drawing from a broader cultural or oral tradition. But while it’s hard to rule that out—especially given how much post-biblical Jewish literature has been lost—there’s little evidence to support the idea. As Millar puts it: “explicit expressions of any conception of a significant relationship between Jews and Arabs are extremely rare outside Josephus.”

And given Josephus’s known habit of embellishing Biblical stories—often by inserting specific details where the text was vague—Millar sees the most plausible explanation as this: the genealogical link between Arabs and Ishmael was Josephus’s own invention.

What does the Bible say?

The only direct biblical reference linking Arabs to Ishmael appears in the Book of Jubilees, a second century BC retelling of Genesis. In chapter 20:16-17, it states:

And Ishmael and his sons, and the sons of Keturah and their sons, went together and dwelt from Paran to the entering in of Babylon in all the land which is towards the East facing the desert. And these mingled with each other, and their name was called Arabs, and Ishmaelites.

At first glance, this looks promising—could it have been a source for Josephus?

Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward. This passage comes from Latin and Ethiopic Christian translations of Jubilees dating from at least the 6th century AD. These were translated from a Greek version, which itself was based on a now-lost Hebrew original. While we do have surviving Hebrew fragments of Jubilees, this particular passage isn’t among them.

Scholars agree that the Ethiopic translation is generally faithful to the lost Hebrew, but given the popularity by the 6th century of the idea that Arabs descended from Ishmael—especially among Christians—it’s entirely possible this passage reflects later influence. In particular, by this time the Christian view that Arabs had strayed from an originally Jewish or Abrahamic tradition had solidified.

The earliest Christian reference to the Ishmaelites’ historical and religious identity comes from Origen in the mid-third century. In Contra Celsum, he observes that Jews differentiated their practice of circumcision from that of the “Ishmaelite Arabs,” even though Ishmael was also a son of Abraham and had been circumcised. Around the same time, Eusebius, in his Praeparatio Evangelica, makes a similar point—writing that Ishmaelites in Arabia circumcised their sons at age thirteen. According to Millar, “[Eusebius’] dependence on Josephus (direct or indirect) is clear.”

Even setting aside the textual transmission issues, Jubilees itself isn’t part of the Hebrew Bible. It is, however, canonized in the Ethiopic Bible and was widely read by early Christian authors. But for Josephus, who didn’t belong to one of the Jewish sects that treated Jubilees as canonical, it likely didn’t carry scriptural authority.

As for the canonical Hebrew Bible, it contains references to both Ishmaelites and Arabs, but never links them explicitly. According to I. Ephʿal in his article “Ishmael” and the “Arab(s)”: A transformation of ethnological terms, the biblical references to Ishmaelites portray them as desert nomads, but so do references to many other groups. There’s nothing in the text that clearly identifies them as Arabs.

The Ishmaelites in the Hebrew Bible are most often associated with groups like the Midianites, Amalekites, Hagarites, and the “People of the East.” But mentions of these groups taper off after the mid-10th century BC—and no contemporaneous records from other cultures reference the Ishmaelites at all, including sources dealing with the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula.

The term “Arab” in the Bible is broader and more cultural than genealogical. It refers to nomadic desert-dwellers rather than a distinct ethnic group. The term appears relatively late, surfacing only from the second half of the 8th century BC onward, both in biblical and non-biblical sources. Its use as an ethnic label seems to be a much later development still.

What about the shared customs?

Even before Islam, Arabs were known to practice male circumcision and avoid eating pork. But how widespread were these practices, really?

This wasn’t the main focus of my reading, but I stumbled across a few relevant sources that are worth sharing. Maybe I’ll return to this topic in more depth another time—for now, here’s what I found.

In Herodotus’ Histories (5th century BC), he writes:

...the Colchians and Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only nations that have from the first practised circumcision. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine acknowledge that they learned the custom from the Egyptians, and the Syrians of the valleys of the Thermodon and the Parthenius, as well as their neighbors the Macrones, say that they learned it lately from the Colchians. These are the only nations that circumcise, and it is seen that they do just as the Egyptians. But as to the Egyptians and Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which nation learned it from the other; for it is evidently a very ancient custom

Josephus, writing in the Antiquities of the Jews (late 1st century AD), responds to this directly:

[Herodotus] says withal that the Ethiopians learned to circumcise their privy parts from the Egyptians, with this addition, that the Phoenicians and Syrians that live in Palestine confess that they learned it of the Egyptians. Yet it is evident that no other of the Syrians that live in Palestine, besides us alone, are circumcised. But as to such matters, let every one speak what is agreeable to his own opinion.

This seems to suggest that Josephus identifies Jews as being a subset of the “Syrians of Palestine,” but rebuts Herodotus’ claim that all the inhabitants of the region were circumcised. Even so, as late as the 4th century AD, Epiphanius described circumcision as a widespread cultural practice—not limited to Jews or governed strictly by religious law:

What have the Ebionites to boast of in practising circumcision, when idolaters and the priests of the Egyptians observe it? But so also do the ‘Sarakēnoi,’ who are also called ‘Ismaēlitai,’ observe it, as do the Samaritans and Jews and Idumaeans and ‘Homēritai.’ But of these most do not practise this as a matter of the Law, but by a sort of unreflecting custom.

(Note that by this point, the names “Saracens” and “Ishmaelites” are already treated as interchangeable.)

On the subject of pork avoidance, the clearest reference I found is from Sozomenus’ Ecclesiastical History (440s AD), which also contains a rather idiosyncratic (i.e. false) view of the origin of the word “Saracen”:

As their mother Hagar was a slave, they afterwards, to conceal the opprobrium of their origin, assumed the name of Saracens, as if they were descended from Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Such being their origin, they practice circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs.

Meanwhile, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing around the same time in his Philotheos Historia, describes “Ishmaelites” who converted to Christianity and gave up worshipping Aphrodite. Upon conversion, they also stopped eating the meat of asses and camels. Notably, pork isn’t mentioned—which might suggest they weren’t eating it to begin with.

Which leaves me with even more questions: Why weren’t they eating pork already? And why did they start following Jewish dietary customs when that wasn’t a requirement for Christians?

I have no idea.

Summing up

It seems likely that Josephus is the one responsible for introducing—or at least popularizing—this particular piece of misinformation. Whether he borrowed it from earlier sources or came up with it himself, we can’t say for certain. But what’s clear is that his version of the story caught on, especially among later Christian writers, and eventually filtered into Arab cultural memory.

I’ve been reading A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael Cook, and early in the book he tries to explain the unexplainable by laying out the preconditions for the rise of Islam. One of the conditions he proposes is that Islam’s success may have hinged on its ability to present itself not as a break with the past, but as a return to ancestral tradition—a revival, not a revolution.

But from today’s vantage point, that seems almost certainly false.

We can’t run the counterfactual in which Josephus never put this idea to paper, but it’s hard not to wonder what might have been. The rise of Islam is such a black swan event that even explaining it in hindsight feels like mere rationalization, as Cook himself acknowledges.

And yet, here we are, living in the post-truth era—created in part by a single first-century historian’s false claim. I think there’s something oddly beautiful about that.

Oberon and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart are/were a couple of top tier hippies, who have spent years of their lives doing hippie things. Here are a few quick highlights before we get to the big stuff:

• Morning Glory met her first husband, Gary Ferns, in 1969. They met while she was en route to join a commune, and he was a hitchhiker who joined her. I think this may be the most 1969 way to meet a future spouse.

• Morning Glory and Oberon lived in a converted school bus for years, which in my opinion tops the classic hippie VW van.

• In 2018, Oberon embarked on what his Wikipedia page calls a "legendary" "Walkabout of the Wandering Wizard," which in spite of the name was a road trip over the US.

• Morning Glory had a daughter called Rainbow who lived with them until she was an adolescent, when she left to live with her father Gary, and changed her name to Gail. It seems that she doesn't have much online presence, but I would love to hear her take on what this kind of childhood was like.

They have a lot of illustrations and figurines of this rather terrifying image of the Goddess Gaia:

Now onto the bigger things.

My favorite hippie thing they did was develop a surgery to move a goat kid's horns to the middle of its head so that, as the horns developed, they'd grow together into a single horn—or, in their words, creating a unicorn. The website for this is extremely dodgy about what they actually did to make this happen, calling it "magick". A quote from Oberon:

In 1976, in the process of our research, [Morning Glory and I] discovered the secret of the Unicorn. Unicorns weren’t just figments of imagination, or distorted images of rhinoceroses; they had been actual living animals created by a closely-guarded secret process at various times throughout history, and derived from different species of horned animals. We realized that it was in our power to resurrect the authentic medieval Unicorn into the modern world.

The patent they got for the process is more specific, however:

The resulting "unicorn", posing with Oberon and Morning Glory:

In 2004, Oberon founded The Grey School of Wizardry (named after Gandalf the Grey). The aim of the school was to educate students ages 11-17, though they mostly draw adult students, and have five Houses: Flames, Waters, Stones, Winds and Psyche. Your guesses are correct, as the first paragraph of their Wikipedia page confirms they were indeed inspired by Hogwarts.

The school is virtual, though they now have a physical location. And in case you were thinking this only means they have digital class recordings, think again:

The Grey School extends its reach beyond traditional online learning through the Virtual Grey School (vGSW), powered by Second Life.

They offer classes in 16 different subject groups: Wizardry, Natural Philosophy, Magickal Practice, Psychic Arts, Healing, Wortcunning/Herbalism, Divination, Performance Magics, Alchemy & Magickal Sciences, Lifeways, Beast Mastery, Cosmology, Mathemagicks, Ceremonial Magic, Lore, and Dark Arts. I trudged through their entire course catalog, and my interest was most piqued by the following:

• Santa Claus: A Global Wizard (Department of Wizardry, Year 2)

• Garbageology (Department of Natural Philosophy, Year 3). No description given, unfortunately.

• Chaos Magick (Department of Magickal Practice, Year 3). Practiced by toddlers everywhere.

• Wizardly Stage Presence (Department of Performance Magicks, Year 1)

• Electrical Wizard, Nikola Tesla (Department of Alchemy and Magickal Sciences, Year 2)

• Space Invaders: The Mortal Perils of Alien Fauna (Department of Beast Mastery, Year 3)

• Conceptual Quantum Physics 101 (Department of Cosmology, Year 1), "Description: Quantum Physics: A little physics, a little chemistry, a little magick..." I wonder if Griffiths has a textbook for this one, too.

• Statistics 401: Description to Regression (Department of Mathemagicks, Year 4). I wouldn't have found this one so remarkable, except this was the course image:

  

• The Elephant from Denmark and Other Mathemagickal Performance Tricks (Department of Mathemagicks, Year 7)

• Jediism 401: Introduction to Jedi Knighthood (Department of Lore, Year 4)

• Wizards of History 501: Scientific Revolution (Department of Lore, Year 5)

• Basic Banishing (Department of Dark Arts, Year 1), "Description: This class will introduce the student to the technique of banishing." I think I have family I'd like to use this technique on. But perhaps I'd need the more powerful techniques from the Year 5 continuation called Advanced Banishing.

• Don't Touch That! (Department of Dark Arts, Year 1). No description provided, but I'll note that the technique in the course title has failed me in the past.

I wondered for a bit if they were grifters, but I think they're true believers. If nothing else, I think they'd be more successful if it was pure grift. I didn't pick any of these out in the list above, but they have a bunch of courses in reiki, herbal healing, astrology, etc., and these are pretty popular woo topics. I'd bet their reiki course isn't the most popular one you can find online, even though the school has existed for 20+ years at this point.

In case my tone didn't already give me away, I think they’re quacks. But they were and are a couple of very ambitious hippies, and looking over it all, I think I can respect the way they set their own path in life.