Books

• Lukianoff & Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Only adds a bit beyond the article, mostly additional horror stories that have occurred in the meantime, and precious little data. I’m broadly sympathetic to their concerns but hardly convinced.
• Several books by Thomas Sowell. I do like him better in longform than shortform. In general I like his “basic economics applied to X” and “bunch of facts you didn’t know” books more than his “my rambly theory of culture” books (e.g. Conflict of Visions). His style is fun and easy to read but his analyses aren’t systematic/rigorous and so it’s often hard to know how much to trust the conclusions. He’s an economist, but in his books he writes like a historian (e.g. ~no identification strategy).

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

• Canarios: Ciclos (1974)
• Embryo: Embryo’s Rache (1971), Steig Aus (1972), Rocksession (1973), We Keep On (1973)
• Dzyan: Time Machine (1973), Electric Silence (1974)
• Ex Vitae: Mandarine (1978)
• Eroc: “Kleine Eva” (1975)
• Los Jaivas: Alturas de Machu Picchu (1981)
• Modrý Efekt & Jazz Q: “Coniunctio I” (1970)
• Jazz Q: Pozorovatelna (1973)
• Bubu: Anabelas (1978)
• SBB: Pamięć (1976)
• Eiliff: Eiliff (1971)
• Missus Beastly: Missus Beastly [1974] (1974)
• Recreation: Music or Not Music (1972)
• Anthony Moore: Flying Doesn’t Help (1979)
• John Cale: Hobo Sapiens (2003)
• Like a Villain: Bast (2014)
• Arbete Och Fritid: “Ostpusten-Västpusten” (1972)
• Kan Mikami: “Bang!” (1974)
• Kazuki Tomokawa: “Sakura no Kuni no Chiru Naka wo” (1980)
• Esperanto: “The Journey” (1974)
• David Stoughton: Transformer (1968), especially “The Anecdote of Horatio & Julie” (industrial music in 1968!)
• Jean Cohen-Solal: Flûtes libres (1971)
• Roberto Colombo: Sfogatevi Bestie (1976)
• Czar: “Tread Softly on My Dreams” (1970)
• Dedalus: Dedalus (1973)
• Karuna Khyal: Alomoni 1985 (1974)
• Love Live Life: Love Will Make a Better You (1971)
• Takeshi Inomata: Jazz Rock in Stravinsky (1970)
• Patrick Moraz: Patrick Moraz (1978)
• Second Hand: Death May Be Your Santa Claus (1971)
• Secret Oyster: Sea Son (1974)
• Pryapisme: Epic Loon (2018)
• Ultra Zook: EPUZZ (2015)
• Black Renaissance: Body, Mind & Spirit (rec. 1976)
• Ohmme: Parts (2018)
• Setna: Guérison (2013)
• Rhun: Fanfare du chaos (2013)
• Szun Waves: New Hymn to Freedom (2018)
• Angélique Kidjo: Remain in Light (2018)
• Morning Teleportation: Salivating for Symbiosis (2017)
• Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra / Grant Kirkhope: Banjo-Kazooie Symphony (2013)
• Arto Lindsay: Prize (1999)

Had completely forgotten about, now rediscovered and really liked:

• Embryo: Opal (1970)
• Stephen Micus: Implosions (1977)
• David Crosby: If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971)
• MU: “Eternal Thirst” (1971)
• Flower Travellin’ Band: Satori (1971)
• Shawn Phillips: “L Ballade” (1970)
• Shawn Phillips: Second Contribution (1970)
• Tony Coe: Zeitgeist (1977)
• Moses Sumney: Aromanticism (2017)
• Os Mutantes: Os Mutantes (1968), Mutantes (1969)
• Alan Sorrenti: Aria (1972)
• Claudio Rocchi: Volo magico n. 1 (1971)
• Franco Battiato: Sulle corde di Aries (1973)
• Egberto Gismonti: Academia de danças (1974)
• David Bowie: Buddha of Suburbia (1993)
• Rush: “Cygnus, Book I, The Voyage” (1977)
• Lou Reed: Street Hassle (1978)
• Mickey Hart: Diga (1976)
• The Denison Kimball Trio: Walls in the City (1994)
• Supertramp: Crisis? What Crisis? (1975)
• Fleetwood Mac: “Tusk” (1979)
• Brand X: Unorthodox Behaviour (1976), Morrocan Roll (1977)
• Camel: Mirage (1974), The Snow Goose (1975)
• Heldon: Stand By (1979)
• Clearlight: Clearlight Symphony (1975)
• Univers Zero: Univers Zero (1977), Heresie (1979), Ceux du Dehors (1982), Uzed (1984), Heat Wave (1986)
• Art Zoyd: Symphonie pour le jour où brûleront les cités (1976), Musique pour l’Odyssée (1979), Génération sans futur (1980), Phase IV (1982)
• Aksak Maboul: Un peu de l’âme des bandits (1980)
• 10cc: The Original Soundtrack (1975)
• Shub-Niggurath: Les morts vont vite (1986)
• U.K.: U.K. (1978)
• Peter Gabriel: Birdy (1985)
• Kate Bush: Hounds of Love (1985)
• Funkadelic: One Nation Under a Groove (1978)
• Patti Smith: Radio Ethiopia (1976)
• Lydia Lunch: Queen of Siam (1980)
• The Clash: Sandinista! (1980)
• Wire: 154 (1979)

Why so many re-discoveries this quarter? I’m listening through the history of rock music again and constructing this playlist along the way. Many great albums aren’t listed above because I hadn’t forgotten about them.

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Finley: Thoroughbreds (2017)
• Bird: Incredibles 2 (2018) ★
• Way & Way: Wild Wild Country (2018)
• Daley & Goldstein: Game Night (2018)
• Swanberg: Easy, season 1 (2016)
• Swanberg: Easy, season 2 (2017)
• Burnham: Eighth Grade (2018) ★
• Aster: Hereditary (2018)
• Kargl: Angst (1983)
• Benson & Moorhead: The Endless (2017)
• Various: Adventure Time, Season 10 (2017-2018) ★

Games

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• [none]

Old favorites

Discovered long ago…

• Book: Modern Principles of Microeconomics by Tyler Cowen & Alex Taborrok
• Music: Absolution by Muse
• Movie/TV: Charade by Stanley Donen
• Game: MESH Hero by Everett Kaser

Added this quarter:

• Mitchell, Innate (Oct 2018)
• Lewis, The Fifth Risk (Oct 2018)
• Kerr, The Gift of Global Talent (Oct 2018)
• Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oct 2018)
• Reich, Just Giving (Nov 2018)
• Roddy et al., The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912 (Nov 2018)
• Healy, Data Visualization (Dec 2018)
• Greenberg, Sandworm (May 2019)
• Caplan, All Roads Lead to Open Borders (TBD 2019)
• Fleischman, forthcoming book (TBD)
• Harden, The Genetic Lottery (TBD)
• Ng, Markets and Morals (TBD)
• Gal, The Power of the Status Quo (TBD)
• Lindsay, Models of the Mind (TBD)
• DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia (TBD)
• Hill, Mid90s (Oct 2018)
• Lanthimos, The Favourite (Nov 2018)
• Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Jul 2019)
• Cameron, Avatar 2 (TBD 2020)

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Added this quarter:

• Chater, The Mind Is Flat (Aug 2018)
• Quammen, The Tangled Tree (Aug 2018)
• North, How to Invent Everything (Sep 2018)
• Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Sep 2018)
• Andrew, The Secret World (Sep 2018)
• Hooper, Superhuman (Sep 2018)
• Liberman & Tversky, Critical Thinking (Oct 2018)
• Poldrack, The New Mind Readers (Oct 2018)
• Rees, On the Future (Oct 2018)
• Williamson, Doing Philosophy (Nov 2018)
• Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe (Dec 2018)
• Kahneman et al., Noise (TBD)
• Portmore, Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism (TBD)
• Ritchie, Hypeology (TBD)
• Chandor, The Triple Frontier (2019 film)

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

1. Everyone Is Lying Again: A blog dissecting how, in response to the majority of even slightly controversial or partisanship-evoking news stories, all “sides” (right, left, etc.) grossly misrepresent the facts and/or their scientific, historical, or cultural context. Probably one dissection per week, allowing time for substantial research for each post.
2. The Story of Rock Music: This podcast would guide the listener through the history of rock music, playing extended clips of >10 tracks per episode and helping the listener hear exactly how different styles developed, split off from their roots, and recombined later. For example in one episode I might explain what a raga is and play an example clip, then explain what modal vs. chordal improvisation is and play contrasting clips, then explain what blues rock is and play an example clip, then explain what post-bop jazz is and play an example clip, and finally talk through (with example clips) how these forms were fused together in the classic Mike Bloomfield track “East-West,” one of the earliest examples of “raga rock.” Episodes would proceed in roughly chronological order, so that the listener could “hear” the evolution of music over time, as later episodes build on the stylistic evolutions described in past episodes.
3. Evolving Sounds: Relatedly, I’ve long wanted to research, compose, and record a many-hour continuous piece of music that recapitulates the entire history of “Western music” (which is better documented than other traditions). The piece would begin with sections composed in accordance with scholarly guesses about how prehistoric music might have sounded, eventually transition into the earliest styles from recorded history, then evolve into styles covered in e.g. Burkholder’s History of Western Music, up to the present day. This is a pretty obvious idea and I’m upset that nobody has attempted it yet.
4. Everything is Awesome and We’re All Going to Die: This book would start off like a more thorough and epistemically scrupulous version of the empirical sections from Enlightenment Now, and would then proceed to explain in detail why global catastrophic risk is nevertheless increasing over time via Moore’s Law of Mad Science, inescapable asymmetry in the difficulty of creation vs. destruction, inadequate equilibria, and related phenomena.
5. Better Moral Judgments: Moral philosophy makes little attempt to estimate what our moral intuitions would be if we were smarter, better informed, etc. Works like The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes are baby steps in the right direction, but still far less ambitious than what I sketch here, which could easily be expanded into quite a large research program. But I’d start with a book sketching out that research program and working through some initial examples.

Added on 9/10/2018:

6. The Case For and Against Utilitarianism: Among families of theories in normative ethics, I think the utilitarian family has the most to recommend it, but no book on utilitarianism I’ve seen covers (in much depth) what I think are the most important arguments. In part that’s because some of the best arguments build on a perspective derived from Better Moral Judgments (see above), which has yet to be articulated in any detail. But it’s also because books on utilitarianism often say very little about developments in utilitarianism after Mill (who died in 1868!) or maybe Sidgwick (d. 1900). Arguments I’d cover, in roughly descending order of how compelling I’d expect to find them after further investigation: (1) a variety of reasons why better-informed moral reasoners would trend toward utilitarianism (e.g. because utilitarianism is least parochial/arbitrary and simplest), (2) classic arguments for expected utility maximization + complete class theorems + Harsanyi, (3) utilitarianism handles personhood fictionalism better, (4) a variety of pragmatic considerations, such as the central thesis of Moral Tribes, and other things including “utilitarian theories are better specified,” and (5) the historical track record of utilitarianism. I’d also cover what I think are the best arguments against utilitarianism, e.g. that it might break on infinities (kind of a problem given that the universe is likely infinite). Compared to other books, I’d spend much less time on “Do my current, immediate, stupid and uninformed moral intuitions like or dislike what utilitarianism vs. other theories recommend in such-and-such highly constructed scenarios?”, for reasons that a copy of me in a different Everett branch has explained in Better Moral Judgments.
7. Moral Weight: Amazingly, in 2018, there is almost no literature attempting to estimate the comparative moral weight of different species’ lives and subjective experiences under varying assumptions. This book would build on some preliminary thoughts on the question I previously posted here.
8. Very Important Facts: A blog that, once per month, publishes a post explaining and making the case for some extremely important fact (that isn’t ~universally acknowledged), e.g. (a) “Almost everything we care about and can measure has gotten better around the world since approximately the industrial revolution” and (b) “Nuclear winter is plausible in the next 50 years and would be incredibly devastating” and (c) “The number of animals (farmed or in the wild) who probably/plausibly have lower subjective welfare than humans living in extreme poverty is X/Y/Z (under different assumptions), and we could probably substantially help A/B/C of them (under different assumptions) in reasonably cost-effective ways” and of course (d) “AGI will likely be the most important development in the 21st century.” In other words, the blog would only cover things that are massively more important (in a “how good/bad for how many?” sense) than the worldview/policy/culture/science debates that dominate the attention of most citizens/journalists/scientists/etc.
9. The Story of Film: Basically The Story of Rock Music (see above), but for film. Each video essay in the series would play >10 film clips per episode to show the viewer how different film techniques and styles evolved over time, split off from their roots, and recombined later. Episodes would proceed in roughly chronological order, so that the listener could watch the evolution of film technique and style over time, as later episodes build on the developments shown in past episodes.
10. Moloch: A TV series (I’d write the scripts) about coordination problems resulting in nuclear conflict and nuclear winter. The series would trace the stories of a variety of high-level decision-makers and influencers, as well as ordinary citizens living in multiple countries, as tensions between two great powers increase. By the end of the first season, a variety of coordination problems (hence the title) and instances of incompetence/carelessness (see e.g. The Doomsday Machine or Command and Control) would lead to a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons. Subsequent seasons would focus on the surviving characters’ struggles to survive under conditions of nuclear fallout and extended nuclear winter (a bit like Threads). The series would strive for realism, broad accessibility, and emotional impact. My goal would be for the series to be watched by heads of state and other high-level policymakers, and impact their decision-making in ways that reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict, as The Day After may have via its influence on Reagan and perhaps Gorbachev.

Books

• Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine. Pretty good, scary.
• Kwak, Economism. Not ideal, but still: many people need to read an economics 101 textbook, and many other people need to read Economism.
• Simler & Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain. Pretty great, especially given the authors’ own caveat that “we are no doubt wrong in many places, not just in the details, but also in some larger conclusions” and that “to demonstrate that hidden motives are common and important” they “don’t need to be right about everything.” Though I wish it was more clearly flagged that one key reason much of the book is likely wrong is just that the underlying research is false, as must be true for ~all books summarizing large amounts of “soft” science.
• Caplan, The Case Against Education. I read about half. I don’t know much about the research in this area but I personally find the “mostly signaling” model more intuitive than the alternatives. A good example of synthesizing important relevant data from multiple fields (not just from economics).
• Pinker, Enlightenment Now. Generally pretty good. I disagree with the section on existential risks and AI, and I disagree with Pinker’s weird transcendental argument in favor of humanism, and I’m less confident in humanism’s role in human progress than Pinker seems to be, and his account of “the Enlightenment” is inaccurately clean & rosy, and some his data are exaggerated and cherry-picked, but shrug, I generally agree with most of the book, and with the overall thesis about human history. Pinker also skips over the history of likely-sentient animal welfare, but at least he tweeted Jacy Reese’s essay about that.
• Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader. I read this on Pinker’s recommendation of Sowell in general. These short essays didn’t exhibit much of anything special. Maybe he’s more impressive in longer formats.
• Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon. I found it pretty informative, but I’m still far too much a China novice to know whether Pillsbury’s overall take is more reasonable than the other high-level takes I’ve read.
• Rid, Rise of the Machines. Fine, I guess.

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

• Rubblebucket: Survival Sounds (2014)
• Hammock: Mysterium (2017)
• Weaves: Wide Open (2017)
• Pryapisme: Hyperblast Super Collider (2013), Diabolicus Felinae Pandemonium (2017) [wow!]
• Ex Eye: Ex Eye (2017)
• Kashiwa Daisuke: Re​:​RED (2017)
• Arrigo Barnabé: Clara Crocodilo (1980)
• Flat 122: The Waves (2005)
• Nils Frahm: All Melody (2018)
• Snarky Puppy: We Like It Here (2014), and especially this keyboard solo [wow!]
• Son Lux: Brighter Wounds (2018)
• Wacław Zimpel & Kuba Ziołek: Zimpel/Ziołek (2017)
• Daniel Hart: A Ghost Story (2017)
• Ulver: Blood Inside (2005), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2017)
• Vitor Araújo: Levaguiã Terê (2016)
• A.A.L. (Against All Logic): 2012-2017 (2018)
• Superorganism: Superorganism (2018)
• inside//outside: inside//outside (2013)
• Adam Neely: Exigence (2015)
• Olli Hirvonen: New Helsinki (2017)
• Sunwatchers: II (2018)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Benson & Moorhead: Resolution (2012)
• Gertwig: Lady Bird (2017)  ★
• Gillespie: I, Tonya (2017) ★
• Pesce: The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
• Zahler: Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)
• Safdie brothers: Good Time (2016)
• Lehmann: Blue Jay (2016)
• Soderbergh: Mosaic (2018)
• Wright: Baby Driver (2017)
• McDonagh: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)  ★
• Vigalondo: Colossal (2016)
• Reeves: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) ★
• Soderbergh: Logan Lucky (2017) ★
• Anderson: Phantom Thread (2017)
• Various: Top of the Lake, Season 2 (2017)
• Richards: Pushed to the Edge (2016)
• Iannucci: The Death of Stalin (2017) ★
• Franco: The Disaster Artist (2017) ★
• Baker: The Florida Project (2017) ★

Games

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Skyrim
• Stardew Valley
• Rayman Legends
• Celeste ★

Added this quarter:

• Agrawal et al., Prediction Machines (Apr 2018)
• Leigh, Randomistas (Apr 2018)
• Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets (Apr 2018)
• Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town (Apr 2018)
• Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct (Apr 2018)
• Winchester, The Perfectionists (May 2018)
• Fox & Christoff, The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought (May 2018)
• Pearl & Mackenzie, The Book of Why (May 2018)
• Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (May 2018)
• Boyer, Minds Make Societies (May 2018)
• Posner & Weyl, Radical Markets (May 2018)
• Baumberg, The Secret Life of Science (May 2018)
• Sanger, The Perfect Weapon (Jun 2018)
• Cirkovic, The Great Silence (Jul 2018)
• Sejnowski, The Deep Learning Revolution (Aug 2018)
• Quammen, The Tangled Tree (Aug 2018)
• Kandel, The Disordered Mind (Aug 2018)
• Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution (Aug 2018)
• Johnson, Farsighted (Sep 2018)
• Lee, AI Superpowers (Sep 2018)
• Ausiello, The Making of a New Science (Oct 2018)
• Page, Model Thinker (Nov 2018)
• Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden (2019)
• Sumner, The Money Illusion (TBD)
• Seth, some book about consciousness (TBD)
• Wellerstein, some book (TBD)
• Tetlock, another book about forecsting tournaments (TBD)
• Kaufman, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things (TBD 2019) [film]

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

(no order)

• S-Town
• Ponzi Supernova
• Crimetown
• Planet Money
• StartUp
• Slate Star Codex
• Everything Hertz
• Casefile
• Reply All
• This American Life
• Pessimists Archive
• Waking Up
• EconTalk
• 80,000 Hours
• Rationally Speaking
• The Weeds
• The Daily
• Conversations with Tyler
• The Insight
• Criminal
• Radiolab
• More Perfect
• Ben Shapiro Show [good for popping my filter bubble, but also see here]

Books

• Berezow & Campbell, Science Left Behind: Meh.
• Biederman & Bennis, Organizing Genius: Some interesting stories, not sure how reliable they are, authors make no attempt to get data on the question.

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid (2017)
• James Holden: The Animal Spirits (2017)
• Daniele Luppi & Parquet Courts: MILANO (2017)
• Kristofer Maddigan: Cuphead (2017)
• Tale of Us: Endless (2017)
• The Great Harry Hillman: Tilt (2017)
• Schnellertollermeier: Rights (2017)
• Bent Knee: Say So (2016)
• The Kandinsky Effect: Somnambulist (2015), Pax 6 (2017)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Denis Villenueve: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) ★
• Mike Mills: 20th Century Women (2016)
• Various: Top of the Lake, season 1 (2013) ★
• Various: Bojack Horseman, season 3 (2017)
• Noah Baumbach: The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) ★
• Mike Leigh: Life is Sweet (1990)
• Dee Rees: Mudbound (2017)
• Various: Broad City, season 4 (2017)
• Various: Better Things, season 2 (2017)
• Johnson: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
• Aronofsky: Mother! (2017) ★

Games

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Breath of the Wild (2017) ★
• Super Mario Odyssey (2017) ★
• Steamworld Dig 2 (2017)

Added this month:

• Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (Mar 2018)
• Kurzban, A Different Kind of Animal (Nov 2018)
• Scharre, Army of None (Apr 2018)
• Damasio, The Strange Order of Things (Feb 2018)
• Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Jan 2018)
• Burns & Shulgan, Autonomy (Aug 2018)
• Lukianoff & Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (Jul 2018)
• Payne, Strategy, Evolution, and War (May 2018)
• Duke, Thinking in Bets (Feb 2018)
• Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (Apr 2018)
• Clark et al., The Origins of Happiness (Jan 2018)
• Ord, book about existential risk (TBD)
• MacAskill et al., book on moral uncertainty (TBD)
• Sandberg, Grand Futures (TBD)
• Valeriano et al., Cyber Strategy (TBD)
• several movies & TV seasons

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Ever since I wrapped up my animal consciousness report, I’ve been working to become a better reducetarian. As such, I’ve been hunting for storeable, convenient veg*n meal options. (Getting restaurants to carry tastier veg*n food is harder, but I’ve been enjoying my Impossible Burgers!)

A spreadsheet of my findings thus far is here. In my area, they’re available locally via Instacart. So far, my tastiest solution is “buy Vegetarian Plus meals.”

Most of these meals don’t satisfy me on their own, so I usually supplement with a banana or whatever.

Books

* = added this round
bold = especially excited

Added this month:

• lots of movies and TV
• Blattman, some book (TBD)
• Gioia, a history of subversive music (TBD)
• Oppy, Blackwell Companion to Atheism and Philosophy (TBD)

Full list:

[Read more…]

Books

• Tegmark, Life 3.0

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• Deerhoof: Mountain Moves (2017)
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Luciferian Towers (2017)
• Kamasi Washington: Harmony of Difference (2017)
• L’Rain: L’Rain (2017)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Spicer: Ingrid Goes West (2017) ★
• Ross: Captain Fantastic (2016)
• Shults: It Comes at Night (2017)
• Young: Hounds of Love (2016)
• Alvarez: Don’t Breathe (2016)

Books

• [none]

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• The Moonlandingz: Interplanetary Class Classics (2017)
• The Arcade Fire: Everything Now (2017)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Nichols: Loving (2016)
• Gray: The Lost City of Z (2016)
• Various: Transparent, season 3 (2016)
• Mangold: Logan (2017)
• Showalter: The Big Sick (2017)
• Peele: Get Out (2017) ★
• Nolan: Dunkirk (2017) ★
• Arnold: American Honey (2016)

Books

* = added this round
bold = especially excited

Added this month:

• Woodruff, Philanthropy and Philosophy (TBD)
• Pummer & Greaves, Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (TBD)

Full list:

[Read more…]

Books

• Allison: Destined for War (2017). Decent, but very one-sided in its arguments. Scary.

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• [none]

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Various: Stranger Things, season 1 (2016)
• Campos: Christine (2016)
• Various: Fargo, season 3 (2017) ★
• Various: Better Call Saul, season 3 (2017) ★
• Various: The Handmaid’s Tale, season 1 (2017) ★

Books

* = added this round
bold = especially excited

• Andrews & Beck, Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Animal Minds (Jul 2017)
• Gat, The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace (Jul 2017)
• Brown, Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments (Jul 2017)
• Shapiro & Todorovic, The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions (Jul 2017)
• *Johnson & Rommelfanger (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics (Jul 2017)
• Gelman & Nolan, Teaching Statistics 2e (Jul 2017)
• Corns, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain (Jul 2017)
• Peterson, The Ethics of Technology (Jul 2017)
• *Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives (Jul 2017)

[Read more…]

Books

• [none]

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• Saagara: 2 (2017)
• Perfume Genius: No Shape (2017)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

• Birbiglia: Don’t Think Twice (2016)
• Various: Master of None, season 2 (2017)

Books

* = added this round
bold = especially excited

• McAfee & Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd (Jun 2017)
• Mcpherson & Plunkett, Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (Jun 2017)
• Callaghan et al., The Technological Singularity: Managing the Journey (Jun 2017)
• *Bernecker & Michaelian, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (Jun 2017)
• Doudna & Sternberg, A Crack in Creation (Jun 2017)
• Owen, Into the Gray Zone (Jun 2017)
• Brannen, The Ends of the World (Jun 2017)

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