The Knowledge Machine How Irrationality Created Modern Science
We Are Not Saved
This was my entry to the 2026 ACX Book Review Contest. Given that it was, sadly, judged inadequate to the high standards of the ACX readership, I must now inflict it on you. Hopefully, with your obviously lower standards, you’ll enjoy it. It is ridiculously long. These warnings aside, I would urge you to at least read parts one and two. The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science By: Michael Strevens 0. Why This Book? Out of the tens of millions of books ever written over the centuries, why review this one? Because science is the secret to the creation of the modern world...
info_outline![Let Him Have Thy Legos Also - [Essay] show art](https://assets.libsyn.com/content/203352190?height=50&width=50)
Let Him Have Thy Legos Also - [Essay]
We Are Not Saved
I. If you don’t live in Utah, you may not have heard that the Great Salt Lake is in trouble. It’s been rapidly dwindling in size and depth, and while it’s never going to disappear entirely (though look at the ), there are always issues when an environment goes through a rapid transformation. The big worry is that the lake will become so salty that even brine shrimp and brine flies can no longer survive. This would eliminate a major source of food for migrating birds, while at the same time a shrinking lake also removes the wetlands they use for mid-migration habitat. There are other...
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The Desecration of Man - Say No to Nietzsche
We Are Not Saved
The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity By: Carl R. Trueman Published: 2026 256 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? In the standard story of the transition from the premodern to the modern, the world has gradually been disenchanted. Depending on who you are, this is either a good thing, a sad thing, or a mixed thing. Trueman’s contention is that disenchantment has, over the last few decades, transitioned to desecration. In his telling, the modern world hasn’t just outgrown the sacred, it’s rebelled against it. Much like a headstrong teenager might...
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Four Books on the End (Or at Least the Plateauing) of Civilization
We Are Not Saved
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Do Not Go Gentle - State Provided Death is Incoherent
We Are Not Saved
Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death By: Kathleen Stock Published: 2026 304 pages Briefly, what is this book about? The general topic is right there in the subtitle, but Stock separates out two distinct ideological foundations. There are those who consider assisted death (a term she prefers over “assisted dying”) to be a way of eliminating suffering. And then there are those who view it as a principle of liberty: If we allow people absolute bodily autonomy, why should someone be prevented from choosing to end their life? One problem with having two ideologies is that they...
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Annihilation – A (Very French) Biography of the "Last Man"
We Are Not Saved
Annihilation: A Novel By: Michel Houellebecq Translated by: Shaun Whiteside Published: 2022 (English translation 2024) 544 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Houellebecq is a well-known French author, and this book felt very French to me. What does that mean? Good question… Certainly there is a lot of wine drinking, a fair number of R-rated sex scenes, and French politics plays a major part as well. Mostly I think there’s a lushness, and a lack of action or even conclusion, which reads more as European decadence than the typical American delusion I’m used to. I opened with a...
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Picky How Modernity Completely Screwed Up (Part LXVII)
We Are Not Saved
Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History By: Helen Zoe Veit Published: 2026 304 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Stop me if you’ve heard this one… Up until the beginning of the 20th century we never ever did this one thing, and then starting in the 20th century attitudes and culture gradually changed until now, this very new thing, that basically never existed historically, is accepted as a fact of life. For this go-around it’s children being picky about food. The whole concept only began to emerge in the 1930s and back then it was just used to identify...
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Last Branch Standing - Honey Badger References and Case Analysis
We Are Not Saved
Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today's Supreme Court By: Sarah Isgur Published: 2026 416 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A deep dive into the Roberts Court, with a historical framing of the Court as a whole. Two main themes run through the book. First, while people want to evaluate the Court on the single axis of liberal vs. conservative, there is a second, perhaps more important axis that tracks the institutionalism of the justices—respect for precedent, maintaining the legitimacy of the Court, congressional deference, etc....
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Four Short Classics for the Lazy Pseudo-Intellectual
We Are Not Saved
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Against the Machine - Steelmanning Modern Luddism
We Are Not Saved
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity By: Paul Kingsnorth Published: 2025 368 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Before Kingsnorth can tell you how to be against the Machine, he first sets out to define it. The Machine is multi-faceted, but Kingsnorth distills it down into four S’s: Science, The Self, Sex, and the Screen. To take a position “against the Machine” he urges a return to the four P’s: People, Place, Prayer, and the Past. But before you grasp this simple heuristic too firmly, it turns out that not all P’s are good, and not all S’s are bad. He is opposed...
info_outlineWould 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 the NYT for 30 years. For the bulk of those years he was the science and health editor. He left the paper in 2012 and in 2014 he published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The book argued that human evolution is ongoing and that it has been “recent, copious, and regional”. The regional part got him “cancelled” or at least it attracted a lot of negative attention, since it implied that differing national outcomes might be partly genetic in nature rather than wholly the result of chance, culture, or colonization.
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for a strong pushback against blank-slateism along with a defense of the traditional nation-state (and of tradition in general). Or if you’re looking for another reason to worry about decreasing fertility.
What does the book have to say about the future?
The aforementioned fertility decline looms large in his warnings about the future, but as I mentioned he also warns about any policy that tries to exercise power in ignorance of evolutionary drives. One of the major drives is tribalism and immigration directly conflicts with that instinct. All of this points to the potential for a demographically declining society with lots of disorder.
Specific thoughts: Children are the ultimate civilizational scorecard