book

Rated The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse 10/10

Wants to read Home: A Short History of an Idea

Finished reading Pattern Recognition

Rated Hockey Abstract Presents... Stat Shot: The Ultimate Guide to Hockey Analytics 10/10

Rated One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War 10/10

Finished reading Virtual Light

Finished reading I'm Glad My Mom Died

Wants to read The Greeks: A Global History

Wants to read Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

Wants to read Compiling with Continuations

Finished reading The Peripheral

Wants to read Radio Free Albemuth

Wants to read Hitler's Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing

Finished reading Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

Wants to read The Curse of Chalion

Wants to read The Art of the Scribe: Practical Projects Inspired by the Calligraphy and Illuminations of Medieval Manuscripts

Wants to read 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

Wants to read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Wants to read The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back

Wants to read Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England

Wants to read House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France

Wants to read King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Rated Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life 8/10

Brain-bendy in the manner of those optical illusions where you think you're seeing a vase and then you realize it's two faces and you can't unsee the faces. The overall theme is that "racism" isn't a problem caused by "race," but rather the opposite - "race" is a concept used to justify and offer a basis for "racism." A very academic and sociological but sharply and brightly argued series of essays, challenging and eye-opening, drawing on foundational sociologists like Durkheim, DuBois and Weber to explain how race isn't some pre-existing fact about the world, but rather a retroactive justification for oppression. The comparison with "witchcraft" is quite deliberate and even explicitly spelled out in one essay. What the authors do very successfully is *describe* how their ideas operate in practice, and the ideological implications, without having to point out that the net effect of "racecraft" is monstrous, leading to not just absurdity but real suffering and violence. Highly recommend.

Wants to read The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society

Finished reading Ancillary Mercy