Review

Thankful for the Theif Poetry is emotion distilled through the pen of another, and this collection offered glimpses across the narrowing edge of what I can still understand outside everyday discourse. I especially liked the introduction to Nizar Qabbani. The facing translations do not reproduce the Arabic so much as open a particular door into it. That is enough to encounter lines worth keeping. One example, the image of happiness as a phantom that exists in anticipation and dulls once possessed: وما السعادة في الدنيا سوى شبح. ...

The Evidence Stops Short There is little here that will feel groundbreaking to someone who is already a dad. The brain is plastic. Hormones will mess you up, though not in any linear or intuitive way. The science supplies mechanisms for experiences that fathers already know from the inside. A more interesting argument emerges underneath the neuroscience. Dad Brain becomes an argument about caregiving as a universal human capacity and desire that society has made increasingly gendered. Saxbe’s case for de-gendering care reminds me of Ruth Bader Ginsburg pursuing women’s equality through cases involving men: make visible how the same system constrains both sexes, then attack the distinction itself. The book is strongest when fatherhood becomes evidence that care was never naturally women’s work. ...

No really, let’s talk about alternatives We should dream of a better world, but there are dreams that lead to action and others that keep us sleeping. Fisher’s is the latter. Capitalist Realism is persuasive about the extent to which capitalism has become normalized, shaping not only our institutions but the limits of what our generation can imagine. Yet diagnosis without alternatives is just complaint and for this topic, reifies the very subject of the essay! Feeling depressed? It is not your fault, it is capitalism’s fault. Perhaps. Now what? ...

American Jahiliyya It is a shame poetry has passed out of fashion. Our relationship with art has become so direct, pixel to dopamine, that the layers of human emotion between creator and consumer disappear. Yet poetry was the original TikTok: short enough to enjoy and ignore, but capable of compressing an entire perception into a few words. Language is our oldest compression algorithm, and I appreciate anyone who applies it earnestly. ...

History for the 10% The promise of the premise is what I want from ancient history: the anonymous many instead of kings and battles. You are a Greek soldier the night before battle, you are an Egyptian woman dressing for a party, are among the most interesting exercises history can attempt. But availability bias ascends the slippery slope upward. The sources are written by and about people wealthy enough to be recorded, and Garland follows them there: dinner parties, weddings, respectable households. This is not the 0.1% history, it is history for the 1% and 10%. ...

In Praise of the Rabbit Hole The thing I miss most about college is not the classes I was supposed to take but the ones I chose: syncretic Islam across Central Asia, water politics in the Middle East, graphics processing down at the hardware level. Following a professor into whatever narrow thing they happened to love was fun. Fifteen years into a career, very little of my reading looks like that. It drifts on the currents of the publishing industry, toward the general and the safe: Western classics, business execution, another big-tech chronicle. Ravina’s course is the best argument I’ve encountered for the lecture format as a genre: the novellas of nonfiction, shorter and thinner, but aimed at a specific subject and a narrow audience willing to pay for exactly that. It reopens the rabbit hole. ...

Neither Doom Nor Loop The title makes two promises and keeps neither. There is no doom here: Prasad is far too careful an economist to forecast anything so falsifiable. And there is no loop: no mechanism, no causal chain where disorder feeds on itself and compounds. A doom loop should be a specific, interesting claim about dynamics. I can tell you about what a doom loop looks like in a gaming industry, it’s my job to avoid one. What the book actually contains is a survey of things currently going wrong in the world economic order, arranged neatly and left unconnected. ...

The Fun Was the Point The best parts of this book are the ones where Sid stops being a game designer and is just a strange, happy man. He swaps into a Swiss family to study abroad. He brings a desktop computer on vacation, not out of obligation but because the machine is where the fun is. That is the thread worth pulling: for Meier, work and play never separated, so the question of work-life balance simply dissolves. That is the asymptotic ideal I want to reach inside the gaming industry, and the memoir is just an existence proof that such an arrangement is possible, even if not a manual for getting there. ...

bcc: re: Dystopia After the Green Bone trilogy, Fonda Lee has earned the “I’ll take a pass at anything you write” slot. The Last Contract of Isako justifies that trust: dystopian corporate thriller, or possibly a lightly fictionalized onboarding document for the life we are all currently living. One conglomerate owns the employment stack; the planet still needs terraforming; retirement means death. It is science fiction, technically. Lee is very good at making systems feel lived-in rather than lore-dumped, and here the system is bureaucracy as atmosphere. The corporate memos are painfully real, If you are not ready for corporate speak, stay away. If you are, the book lands with the grim pleasure of recognizing the monster. ...

Millennial Nightmares Fifteen years ago I left public service, and I still have nightmares about going back. Specific nightmares. I’ve signed up for another year-long tour in Baghdad with the best intentions, certain that this time I will do real good, only to end up helpless, locked in an office and a compound, filling out safety forms and pushing emails. The Incandescent understands that trap. The novelty is the easy sell: magical school, but from the faculty side, with bureaucracy rendered as a system just as arcane as magic. The better trick is that Emily Tesh convincingly creates an alternate universe at the midpoint between Harry Potter and our own. The spellwork matters less than the paperwork. The demons matter less than the institutional incentives. Anyone can write “dark academia”; fewer books understand that the real horror is another committee meeting where everyone knows the right thing and does the easy thing anyway. Doing good does not mean doing well, and it certainly does not mean doing good well. ...