August 2025
Extra books/links/whatever from August 2025.
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.)Are you living lo-fi?
The short story collection Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang. (My favorite among the stories was Jasmine Tea.)
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.
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.
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.