Three Books With Some Variation of the Word “Fly” in the Title
We Are Not Saved
1- Operation Overflight By: Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry Published: 1970 384 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? An autobiographical account of Powers’ experiences before, during, after and around his U-2 spy plane being shot down over the Soviet Union, including his 21 months of imprisonment in a Soviet prison and his long campaign to rehabilitate his reputation upon his return to the US. 2- Flybot By: Dennis E. Taylor Published: 2025 430 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Another Taylor book where a few scrappy nerds get thrust into the middle of world altering...
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HeartMath Solution - A Sugary Pseudoscience Soufflé
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Come for the unreplicatable science, stay for the promise of a planetary heart beating out peace for a thousand years. The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath's Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart's Intelligence By: Doc Childre, Howard Martin, and Donna Beech Published: 1999 304 Pages (But somehow this translates to only 2 hours 45 minutes on audio…) Briefly, what is this book about? The idea that the heart contains a separate brain, and true emotional health comes from aligning the heart’s brain and its “intelligence”, with the actual brain. Basically...
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Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - A Series of Unfortunate Events
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A book full of potential comparisons to our own day for the motivated, and strangely removed from our own day if you're really going to be honest about it. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany By: William L. Shirer Published: 1960 1250 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany, from Hitler’s birth to the Nuremberg trials. Written by someone who was there for a great deal of the most important period. What authorial biases should I be aware of? Shirer is a journalist, not a historian, but he did have access to the German...
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Radical Markets - I Mean Really Radical
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Policy proposals from the White Queen. (It’s a Lewis Carroll reference. No, I’m not talking about the Mad Hatter or the Red Queen. It’s from “Through the Looking Glass”.) Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society By: Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl Published: 2019 384 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A series of radical proposals for restructuring property, voting, immigration, investing, and employment. All of the proposals seek to solve the problem of “monopolized or missing markets” in ways that seem pretty strange. One has to...
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Gemini Goes Insane — How Should I Update? [Essay]
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One part documentation of a strange AI hallucination. One part panic about whether I’ll be put out of business by AI.
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Goliath's Curse (and the Agents of Doom!)
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Using the Stone of Democracy to Slay the Goliath of Inequality Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse By: Luke Kemp Published: 2025 592 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? By most accounts, civilization, which is to say the large Hobbesian state, is a good thing. Kemp doesn’t necessarily agree. In his account, states are lumbering, tyrannical, extractive Goliaths, cursed to grow bigger, more oppressive and more brittle until they are eventually brought down by a “stone” that hits in just the right place. Civilization forms out of dominance hierarchies,...
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Knowing Our Limits - Epistemology Without Bayes
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I was promised useful stories to assist me in a quest for justified belief. Instead I got a lesson in the limits of expertise. Unfortunately it was the author’s expertise that was limited. Knowing Our Limits By: Nathan Ballantyne Published: 2019 344 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Regulative epistemology as opposed to descriptive epistemology. Put more simply, this is about how to find truth, as opposed to how to define truth. Though because the author recommends having very high standards, you may come away from the book thinking that there is no truth. That is not...
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A YA Series, a First Contact Novel, and a Startup Book Walk Into a Bar—Pursued by Wolves
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The Origin of Politics - Kibbutzim, Chimps, and Children
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Would you like some genetics in your politics? The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations – Social Disintegration, Birth Rates, and the Path to Extinction By: Nicholas Wade Published: 2025 256 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Wade offers up an evolutionary psychology account of how to make politics actually function; how, when you try to disconnect politics and the exercise of power from core human nature, as shaped by evolution, things go off the rails. What authorial biases should I be aware of? Nicholas Wade worked as a science writer for...
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A Case for Latter-Day Christianity - (i.e. A Case for the Christianity of Mormons)
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I feel like I should make some clever connection between this book and the discussion which raged about the Shroud of Turin, but nothing occurs to me. A Case for Latter-day Christianity: Evidences for the Restoration of the New Testament’s “Mere” Christian Church By: Robert Starling Published: 2019 360 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A broad, and intensive defense of the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). With a special focus on tying that theology to the theology of the early Christian Church. As such it spends a lot of time examining differences...
info_outlineWe have a lot of nice things. We’re really good at making nice things. We should preserve these nice things. But also nothing lasts forever?
The Origins of Efficiency
By: Brian Potter
Published: 2025
384 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The clever and incremental ways we’ve vastly increased humanity’s ability to make stuff. We’re constantly finding ways to build stuff cheaper, faster, and with fewer resources.
What's the author's angle?
Potter is probably best known for his Substack Construction Physics, which covers infrastructure, manufacturing, and building stuff in general. He also works at the Institute for Progress. Put those two together and you’ve got someone who’s a big fan of material progress, or what is sometimes referred to as a techno-optimist.
Who should read this book?
If you want some amazing stories of how processes have improved, and a stirring defense of the modern world and all its wonders this is a great book. If you’re looking for higher level reflection on what it all means, particularly any sort of caution around progress and efficiency, then this is not the book for you. Potter is definitely an “onward and upward!” kind of guy. He does note that efficiency can’t be applied everywhere, and that it’s often constrained by other goals, like safety, but he still treats it as being inherently good.
What does the book have to say about the future?
The book does point out that efficiency has become a “sociotechnical” issue. Particularly in the West, we often make choices to constrain efficiency as part of some broader societal goal. Potter doesn’t talk very much about China, but one could imagine that their drive for efficiency is not constrained in the same way and, going forward, this could give them the edge in our ongoing competition.
Specific thoughts: Fantastic, awesome, hopeful, and scary