What I've Read in The Second Half of 2025

Part one can be found here.

The Terminator - Randall Frakes & Bill Wisher

I heard online multiple times that the novelization of the first Terminator film was very good and I got around to reading it this year. Back in the day before home video was widespread, it was common for novelizations of films to exist. I was hoping to find some more insight into the backstory of the Terminator films, specifically around the creation of Skynet, but there’s not much here other than action scenes. The book is well written, however reading it makes you realize how well certain scenes in the film ended up being shot and that it’s the camera-work that makes a lot of these scenes more than anything else. 

Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot else to say. The majority of differences between the book and the film likely would only be interesting to super fans of the franchise. The book does include a scene where Cyberdyne is founded after two engineers discover a chip they’ve never seen before after the final showdown where the Terminator is destroyed. The book then goes on to suggest that time is cyclical as a way to build in this time travel paradox into the story.

The Prisoner in His Palace - Will Bardenwerper

 

 

This book explores how Saddam Hussein, very likely a malignant narcissist, managed to charm and befriend the young American soldiers guarding him in the days leading up to his execution. If you lived through the Trump presidency, the mechanics of this kind of narcissist might not feel like new information. However, the book finds its footing when it examines the deep failures of the process of policing Saddam.

Even though Saddam arguably deserved his fate, Bardenwerper highlights how far the proceedings fell short of a fair trial. The most haunting (interesting?) aspect of the book is the psychological toll on the guards. Unsurprisingly, the Army took zero precautions to prevent these soldiers from bonding with their prisoner, leaving them to deal with the trauma of watching a man they had grown to like be handed over to a "two-bit operation" execution. While the book skips the specifics of how the execution video was leaked, it vividly captures the chaotic, unprofessional atmosphere of Saddam's final days.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell

 

In this collection of connected essays, Thomas Sowell presents a probably controversial thesis regarding the roots of cultural disparities in America. His central argument is that the behavioral patterns often associated with the "urban ghetto", what he terms "Black Redneck" culture, actually originated with the "cracker" redneck culture of Scots and Northern British immigrants in the American South. He argues that this culture was adopted by enslaved people and later carried to Northern cities, where he claims it was preserved and even encouraged by "whitelLiberals" as a legitimate form of authentic identity, and then descends into the consequences of this world view of seeing problems of race in what he sees as problems of culture.

Beyond his thesis on "redneck" culture, Sowell spends a significant portion of the book on "middleman minorities" - groups like the Jews in Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese in West Africa. He observes that these "merchant peoples" often face identical patterns of resentment and violence across different centuries and continents. His argument is that their success isn't based on privilege but on specific cultural traits: high literacy, frugal living, and community cohesion that allow them to thrive in hostile environments.

The final section shifts to the history of black American education, specifically focusing on the success of schools like Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sowell uses these historical case studies to argue that high-performing black schools existed long before integration or modern welfare programs and  that the decline in these standards was caused by the "redneck" culture he described earlier becoming the dominant social norm, displacing the older, more disciplined educational traditions.

While the book has absolutely challenged the ways I’ve thought about the world, Sowell takes a lot of liberties with the sources he uses and claims he makes. At one point he states as a fact that fact that only black people play bridge, and this comes from British aristocracy. I’m not black, and all my grandparents played bridge, so I’m not sure where that comes from... At handfuls of times I looked up the sources Sowell referenced only to see that he completely misrepresented what the author said or just cherry picked his information. So while his ideas sound interesting, I’m not really sure how grounded in reality they might be.

Jesus Before the Gospels - Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman is a secular New Testament scholar, in this books he focuses on the Historical Jesus from the perspective of the social memory and context of the people who told his stories after his death. Ehrman explores the roughly thirty-to-sixty-year gap between Jesus' death and the writing of the first Gospels, investigating how oral traditions functioned in a world without written records or mass literacy. Rather than simply debunking myths, he uses cognitive psychology and studies on memory to explain how stories naturally evolve, sharpen, or distort as they are passed from person to person.

Ehrman shows how the Gospels aren't verbatim transcripts, but rather reflections of what the early Christian communities remembered and needed to believe about Jesus decades later. For example, Ehrman points out that given Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and were almost certainly illiterate, use of pivotal words with double meanings in Greek (which the Gospels were written in) show us that these particular entries in the Gospels almost certainly didn’t happen - they’re absolutely metaphorical stories.

Ehrman ends the book by saying that the gospels are no more a historical document than a painting is. It’s not the painting’s job to be a perfect, photorealistic reproduction of a moment in time. Instead, a painting is an interpretation designed to capture the essence, the emotion, and the significance of the subject through the artist’s specific lens. In this sense, the Gospel writers were not acting as objective reporters, but as "artists" who shaped their narratives to address the specific needs and theological questions of their own communities. This book is absolutely fascinating on one of my favorites of 2025.
 

9 ½ Years Behind The Green Door - Simone Corday 

I go to a lot of shows at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. On the corner a few building away there is a boarded up strip club that says Mitchell Brothers on it and has a large sign that says “Where The Wild Girls Are” that has a group of women posing together in colorful bodysuits. I think the sign is supposed to be a reference to the eponymous children's book? All in all it’s an odd building that does look to be in place in the Tenderloin. I wanted to know about the history about the building, which lead me to this book after a quick Google search.

The author of 9 ½ Years Behind The Green Door, Simone Corday, was a dancer at the club for almost a decade. The building in question is the O'Farrell Theatre, and the Mictchell Brothers who owned it have a bit of a history in the city as I learned; often banging heads with local politicians like Diane Feinstein who were trying to get rid of strip clubs in the city. The book title is a reference to an adult film the Mitchell Brothers produced before Simone started working for them.

The core of the book ends up being Corday detailing her long, tumultuous relationship with Art Mitchell, a narrative that often reads like a textbook on domestic abuse. Despite his behavior, Corday remains steadfast in her love for him to this day, offering a raw, sometimes frustrating look at the psychology of a survivor. Although, I don’t think she would describe it that way and might even get upset at that description? The memoir reaches its climax with the the 1991 murder of Art by his own brother and business partner, Jim. Jim Mitchell’s defense team successfully argued a "diminished capacity" plea, suggesting he only intended to intervene in his brother’s self-destruction rather than commit cold-blooded murder. Even though Corday presents compelling evidence that the shooting was absolutely premeditated, Jim was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, eventually serving a relatively short sentence before returning to the O'Farrell Theatre.

I think one of my favorite parts of the book is that Hunter S Thompson shows up in it as a character and becomes close friends with Corday. Out of everyone in the book, Thompson at times seems to be the most level headed and fair person. It looks like later editions advertise on the cover very heavily that Thompson is in this book as a means to get it to sell better. The last part worth mentioning is that Corday documents how the Tenderloin got progressivly more dangerous over time. I found it a little amusing how interactions she had on the street that were concerning for he by the late 80es, are now just typical and expected on O'Farrell & Larkin Street in 2025.

 
South End Syndicate - Anthony Arillotta

 

In 2003 a mob boss named Al Bruno was shot and killed outside Mount Carmel Church in Springfield Massachusetts. I was in middle school in Springfield at the time and it blew a lot of people’s minds that organized crime was a thing still. This book chronicles the history of the Genovese crime family in Springfield, Massachusetts from the 80s to about the 2000s when the Springfield Genovese crime family began to unravel.

One of the biggest complaints I saw about this book publicly is that the author is a snitch. He addresses this at the end of the book by basically saying there is no honor among thieves. In a sort of way, the omerta that mobsters took died with when protectionism was protection against the systemic racism Italian immigrants faced. I believe this creates a Catch-22 situation where we will never have first hand accounts of those times. It also means the people who complain about snitches in this situation are tools. A criminal is an untrustworthy person, that’s how it works.

There’s a lot of interesting contemporary Springfield history here. It’s a good book that kept me hooked and I read it in one day, staying up late to finish it. The author affirms, from his point of view, how the rumors that former Mayor Albano was connected to the mafia were true. He also calls out many locales in Sprignfield where certain events and crimes happened. If you’re from Springfield, it’s highly fascinating if you know the area well.

The forward to the book is written by a former Springfield police officer named Joe Bradly who reflects on an interaction he had with Al Bruno with what feels like nostalgia that ends with him eating at Buno’s restaurant for free for months. My grandfather always warned me that you don’t do any favors for anyone connected, and you don’t let them do any favors for you. Anyone with two cents knows that former officer’s story doesn’t end where he ended it in that intro. I left Springfield as soon as a could. This book doesn’t do the city any favors when it comes to Springfield’s reputation of being an absolute shithole. 

Solaris - Stanisław Lem

 

 

I picked this up as a cheap science fiction paperback. The premise was really interesting: a sentient-like plant is being studied by scientists who just can’t understand it. I love the ideas like this that come up in cheap paperbacks like this book. Despite its short length, the book is a bit of a slog. It is an interesting book, and I liked it, but I didn’t like reading it. It is translated from French and at times the translation can feel disjointed. Lem spends a lot of time talking about the VERY specific ways in which the planet interacts with the humans studying it, but ultimately one of the messages of the books seems to be that what we are looking for out there in outer space is ourselves (think Star Trek where ever other race that is encountered is just other humanoids with shit slapped on their foreheads); that when we eventually do encounter something out there resembling what we consider sentience, we will fail to fathom it or know what to make of it. That is an interesting idea on its own, but it takes a lot of investment in this book into having to follow along about all the weird stuff this planet does that has no other pay off.

There’s other ideas in this book that are fascinating, but only the surface is scratched on: one thing that happens in the book is that the planet constructs other people based on the humans’ memories, and the idea of how we don’t remember people; we remember versions of them is explored. So is the idea of identity as a construct and loneliness on a cosmic scale. Like the issue of the planet, these ideas are left there to hang out in the air, with one of the lessons of this book being there’s not an answer for everything. 

The Last Victim - Jason Moss 

 

 

This is a book written by a college kid who started corresponding with serial killers in prison, most prominently John Wayne Gacy. The book is ok. The first 50 pages of the book are completely skippable, and are about the author himself. The book itself is not well written, there are jarring tone shifts where you can tell the psychologist co-author Jeffery Kotter took over. Overall the book would have been better if it was only transcripts of the letters and phone calls between the author and the killers that he corresponded with.  

The author himself writes about women in a really jarring way, even for a college student. At one point he calls his college women softball team’s uniforms ‘skimpy’? As the author has intimate correspondences and phone calls with the inmates it’s hard for me to not think of the quote at the beginning of Vonnegut’s book Mother Night; “we are what we pretend to be” and that maybe some of the energy going into this book is misdirected sexual energy. I’m dead serious.

There is an untold story that is written between the lines of this book that is fascinating. Years after this book the author would eventually kill himself. As he talks about his upbringing, it is patently obvious that he grew up in an abusive household. He writes about his mom giving him money to buy shoes after he’d completely worn out his current pair, only to yell at him for spending the money when he gets home.

The climatic in-person meeting with Gacey at the end of the book is a bit interesting, though he ultimately just ends up being what I think most informed readers would expect; he’s manipulative and violent. And given the intimate conversations he had with the author, he want’s to fuck him and pulls his dick out several times in front of the author - to, what I felt like, was only to the surprise of the author himself. The co-author writes in the closing: what is interesting about this book is that Jason was able to document the “point of transaction” between the killer and victim where the victim is reeled in right before the crime took place. 

Overall however Jason Moss just doesn’t seem like a reliable narrator. He cites Faces of Death claiming a group of men were arrested for committing a ritual sacrifice of another man. After meeting with Gacy the book ends with a story where he was able to pull one over on Gacy with with answering machine “accidentally” catching a recording between Gacy and an associate. It just seems all too clean and pasted together to tell a cohesive narrative. 

The Year of The Boar and Jackie Robinson - Bette Bao Lord

 

 

I first read The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson back in elementary school as part of a group reading assignment. I remember having fond memories of the book, and it still holds up for a children’s novel. I was surprised to see that today the book was nominated for few, if any, awards. The genre of the book is a mix of realistic fiction and autobiographical elements; it is about a young Chinese girl who moves with her family from rural China to New York City in 1947. The author, Bette Bao Lord, immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 8.

The book starts in China and is written from the perspective of the protagonist who is a child known as Bandit in her home village. These first chapters carry with them the sort of childlike wonderment and amazement that come with childhood at that age, and then bleed into her perceptions of New York City and the US as an industrialized nation. The rest of the book deals with the protagonist’s assimilation into the US and into her school friend groups, she’s able to connect with them through learning baseball, and following Jackie Robinson in his rookie year in the MLB and the Dodger’s eventual post-season run.

The book does end with elements of “in America, you can be whatever you want if you try hard enough”. It perpetuates the American Dream, and I think that alone will alienate a lot of Americans today, and if anything, would facilitate classroom discussions about how that’s not necessarily true - conversations that likely should happen some time after elementary school. The ending is a bit saccharine; with the protagonist meeting Jackie Robinson and presenting him with the key to the school. Nevertheless, I think this is a good book. I enjoyed reading it again, and if anything it shows what Americans thought of themselves at one time, and I think later generations might find that interesting on its own. 

What I've Read Halfway into 2025

The Pathless Path - Paul Millerd

 

Normally this is a list of the books I’ve read in the order in which I have read them. This book is the lone exception to this rule because it had such a profound impact on me. I was first introduced to The Pathless Path by Jose Madrigal after seeing his Youtube video HR is Not Your Friend and reaching then out to him. I highly recommend giving his video a watch and also contacting him yourself if you feel so compelled.

Millerd’s book is about stepping away from conventional career paths and embracing a more meaningful, uncertain, and self-directed way of living. I know that sounds really self-help-y, but he really does dig into how careers are unfulfilling for many people, as having a career often means not being able to live a life that is authentic to oneself. He heavily cites his work and the personal experiences that he touches on in corporate America mirror my own. 

 

I was initially skeptical of this book; in the second chapter he lays out life advice for people who I would frankly consider tools - people who act as though to seek approval on the outside - they’ve only done what they’ve done in their life so far for the money and prestige. The reality is that this book’s advice for people who feel stuck in the rat race despite trying their best to pursue their interests and struggle to stay true tI was initially skeptical of this book; in the second chapter he lays out life advice for people who I would frankly consider tools - people who act as though to seek approval on the outside - they’ve only done what they’ve done in their life so far for the money and prestige. The reality is that this book’s advice for people who feel stuck in the rat race despite trying their best to pursue their interests and struggle to stay true to themselves in corporate America. That includes addressing tools from the ground floor.
o themselves in corporate America. That includes addressing tools from the ground floor.

The Puck Stops Here: My (Not So) Minor League Life - Bruce Landon 

 

Bruce Landon is the reason why professional hockey has remained in Springfield Massachusetts for almost 100 years. Most Americans may not know this, but ice hockey has been a staple of rust-belt American cities since the 1930s. The cult classic film Slapshot has a plot-line that details this, though it has not aged well in certain ways. Slapshot also details a hockey culture and game that no longer exists anymore, in a way, I’m lucky I guess to have witnessed what was left of that culture in the 90s: bench clearing brawls, goalie fights, and fistfights in the penalty box that broke out into the stands.

Bruce is well known by hockey fans who also can recall other greats such as Eddie Shore, Bobby Orr, and Frank Mathers. Landon was a NHL caliber goaltender, who by happenstance, ended up playing for the minor league hockey teams that have existed in Springfield. He went on to be the owner of the Springfield Falcons; keeping hockey in Springfield, and helped bring in a new franchise when the Falcons finally did move to Arizona in the 2010s, something we all knew was bound to happen since the mid-naughts. 

My family were Springfield Falcon season ticket holders, and to be frank, the team was awful and uninspiring. Games felt like watching teams run drills, completely indifferent of the score or game. Back then there were no nets behind the plexiglass, so you had to pay attention to the game for your own safety even if you were bored out of your mind. I hated and resented going to hockey games and having to pay attention to something so boring out of safety the whole time. In my lifetime I’ve been to hundreds of AHL games. Landon addresses all of this malfunction in the book. And despite all of this, and my disdain for the team, I saw Landon at the games in his suit addressing the fans’ concerns personally in the hall. I genuinely got the impression from him that he was someone in the org who cared and should be respected, even if I couldn’t stand going to the games with my family.

I think if you followed the news in The Springfield Republican at the time about what was going on in the franchise, there’s not much new here for you in this book. The book sort of validates what I already knew: the motley group of owners that Bruce was able to scrap together to keep hockey in Springfield meant that there were too many cooks in the kitchen who didn’t know enough about professional hockey. He does also fess up to his own mistakes he made. I also appreciate that Landon acknowledges how much of a shithole Springfield could be at times. To be frank, I don’t think there’s a lot of anything new in this autobiography. But nonetheless, Landon is a standup, honest person who should be celebrated for doing the best that he could and continues to do to swim upstream and keep quality professional hockey in Springfield. Thank you Bruce.

A Short Stay In Hell - Stephen Peck

This is a novella about a man who goes to hell, of which there are a handful of variations. The hell this man is sent to is that he’s tasked with finding the one book that holds his life story in a giant library that holds every variation of the letters of the alphabet put together possible. Finding a book with a word, never mind a sentence in it, is an achievement. There are also other people in this library looking for their life stories. The novella delves into themes of eternity, futility, and the human condition, and reflections on the nature of existence. The ending is not satisfying, but I guess that’s kinda the point of being in hell. I don’t want to get too in depth because it’s just a short story, nonetheless, check it out. 

The Teenage Brain - Frances Jensen

 

 

This ended up being just another pop psychology book with the first few chapters being things that you would expect to learn in a psych 100 class; it is absolutely geared more towards parents and not academics. It could be a good NeruoSci refresher for psych students, though some of the information in this book is dated. In addition, at times Jensen takes liberties to make claims without citation, claiming that marijuana is a gateway drug for example, or providing parenting advice that seems completely removed from academic literature; such that parents should know all the passwords that their teenagers have. The book also claims that “kids can get started early on a path to addiction through free-to-play gambling apps available through iTunes”. She uses the term “marijuana cigarettes”... While these claims may have some substance, a citation is still needed and the information can be presented in a more modern way that's less dated than the wired headphones on the cover. In the same paragraph about free-to-play apps the author claims that “various studies indicate that anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of all teenagers have tried online gambling at least once” without citing any one of these studies. She does say that for teenagers, school can sometimes be analogous to the cage in a rat experiment - so she gets points for that.

Jensen argues that teens respond better to psychiatric medication than adults. While she does acknowledge the increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens, she fails to fully grapple with the implications of that risk and largely brushes over it. At another point she attributes the tragic cases of teenagers who, after drinking, will hide from those searching for them, sometimes resulting in death from exposure; she attributes this to their underdeveloped brains rather than questioning the role of our punitive legal system. This feels especially inconsistent given that later in the book, she critiques how the juvenile justice system often denies teenagers due process.
 

There were things I did like about this book. I do appreciate that the author says the reason teenagers like to smoke is because it reduces stress. And that there is a whole chapter on stress, acknowledging school is incredibly stressful for teenagers and that there is an anxiety epidemic now, especially with teens. She does go into how juveniles outgrow their antisocial behaviors.

Something I found interesting and learned from this book is that, while the neural tube develops from front to back in the womb, the brain develops in the opposite direction, from back to front throughout childhood and into the teenage years. There is a correlation of gray matter to IQ. Also, teenagers don’t necessarily have poor reasoning skills, but rather, their reward centers are more sensitive, which is one reason why they are more prone to sensation stimulation. There is also research that is referenced suggesting that anticipation, but not the reward is the most stimulating part of an experience, which which relates to a Ted Bundy quote: “The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself”. I also learned that nicotine in cigarettes change the number of cannabinoid receptors in the brain and makes brains more sensitive to the effects of marijuana.

There is a chapter on gender matters which demonstrates brain imaging studies differentiate between male and female children's brains. I was wondering how these studies would account for genderqueer or non-binary children Unfortunately, the research on brain imaging and gender, particularly in relation to genderqueer or non-binary children is still emerging and not as extensive as studies on cisgender boys and girls. I wasn’t able to find any studies in this regard. 

High Conflict - Amanda Ripley

A lot of the books on this list came from this Youtube video on online discourse which came with a list of cited books at the end. This is the first book in this list from the video.

High Conflict feels like it was written for aliens on how to communicate. I’m not sure who this books is for, because you have to want to listen from the other person when you’re in conflict if you actually want to get out of it. As a result, this book is like an oxymoron, the people who need to read it never will. Even the book calls out that if people want to revel in contempt, righteousness, want to dominate, and stay in a state of high conflict; they well. Furthermore, if you bring these people to the negotiation table, you open up the other party to physical and emotional abuse. That tends to be the limit of this book, and it offers no resolve for dealing with those that act this way, probably because it would have to resort calling for violence. The book specifically calls out that most people don’t want to solve climate change, for example, because they want to use climate change as a way to change the world into something they’d like to see. The author says the same thing about Israeli officers in relation to the Gaza Strip.

Chapters three, four, and onward feel like a This American Life extended episode on Chicago gang violence. I did learn from this book that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams loathed the concept of political parties, and that George Washington also warned that political parties could be used by an individual to usurp democracy. So that’s cool.

Unlearning Shame - Devon Price

Unlearning shame has also been one of the most influential books that I have read recently. I could probably write a whole article on this book itself. If fact, it was highly influential in regards to my last post on the crisis of credibility in scientific research today. The author Devon Price centers this book around Systemic Shame - the self loathing belief that says you are to blame for the circumstances you’re living in, and the only way to overcome those problems is through individual goodness and grit. Systemic Shame holds marginalized people responsible for solving the problem of their own oppression and that the only way meaningful change can ever occur is if individual people put in a ton of effort and always make the right decisions; that systemic issues are individual issues and need to be solved as such - keeping people in place; that gun violence is caused by mentally ill individuals, that every purchase is a moral decision, that global pandemics are caused by selfish people and not corporate cruelty and government negligence, etc, etc. Genuinely, without trying to sound disingenuous, this book is the closest I’ve seen someone get to Ted Kyzinsky’s theory of over-socialization while also building on it, which breaks out into all sorts of mind blowing directions. 

For example, consider how systemic shame politicizes everyone’s choices, with marginalized people especially placed under the microscope. This is why any action taken by a marginalized person is often viewed as representative of their entire group. Another example is how the author demonstrates that online dogpiling, slacktivism, virtue signaling, and the moral licensing effect are all rooted in shame. In one case, she uses Construal Level Theory to argue that the only people who truly benefit from this kind of toxic online engagement are advertisers. Price also explores the history of shame, giving examples of how it is tied to social class, and how in more interdependent and egalitarian societies, fewer behaviors such as nudity, sex, or not contributing to the broader group are seen as shameful. (Though this point seems heavily borrowed Peter Stearns' book Shame: A Brief History.)

I found how systemic shame gets weaponized against workers in the workplace to be particularly insightful. Price points out that individuals are expected to take on more responsibilities and behave more perfectly than the powerful institutions that surround them. If you company’s CEO cuts your hours or reduced your team’s headcount, you as an employee are still on the hook for completing all of your duties. Companies essentially force employees to out themselves by including their pronouns in emails, which potentially can make things worse for them and their clients. When the author presented to their HR team that keyloggers and surveillance tools harm autistic workers during a presentation on neurodivergent people in the workplace, HR ended the talk early and deleted all employee complaints. The author calls out something I have always been suspicious of, that the only thing companies want from Employee Resource Groups is platitudes and praise. A further example for universities is given on page 87: Loyloa University had called the police on student protestors and then issued public statements on its commitment to anti-racism and suggested people take workshops on personal racial biases (bringing a systemic issue back to personal responsibility). Furthermore the workshops also provide the institutions with a legal shield against accusations of racism. Price goes on to detail how employers and universities will NEVER suggest collectively organizing for larger change and that if HR was really on the workers' side they would be advocating for them to organize. And this is the direction of where the end of the book goes: that coalition and community building and organizing as individuals are the best ways we can overcome systemic issues in our society; this is where I will be focusing my free time the rest of this year Price then points to the gay movement of the 80s that started with the Stonewall Riots to show how this coalition building can be done. He says that nearly everyone interviewed for the book said that they were only able to heal from shame through their relationships to others, because shame is intrinsically tied to social rejection. 

There are a handful of failings I did find with this book. For one, the ideas in the book are not very well organized, throughout the book Price comes back to all the ways that companies have used systemic shame to shame consumers. I think this might be a way for him to hammer away his point, but I don’t really see why these examples couldn't have just all been grouped all together rather than sprinkled throughout the book. There’s one part of the book that talks about the Protestant Work Ethic scale being a measure of Puritanical attitudes in 19 questions. My copy of the book only has 18 of the questions. 

At times, he also seems to take the liberties of pop psychology books with the statements he’s making:

• Price claims that you can tie bureaucracy to shame because public records came to exist. Public records existing are evidence of public records existing. Without any further clarification or sources, I’m not really sure how his editor didn’t underline this. 
• On page 63 of the book, without citation, Price says that the Columbine shooters’ white supremacist sympathies should have been investigated, as if that was a thing. The reality is that was a very early on direction investigators went in and it lead them nowhere.
• Price claims that nearly half of mentally ill people experience a violent crime once in their lives. I went ahead and researched this claim and found that Americans have at least a 50% chance of experiencing some form of violent crime and that approximately 83% will be victims of violent crimes (including rape, robbery, and assault), either 'completed' or attempted, at least once during their lives. I got this information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and  the Bureau of Justice Statistics titled "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization":
  https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
  https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/llv.pdf
• Social class is the biggest determiner of success in America before race, sexual orientation, and gender. There is also a level of shame and expected behavior tied to everyone’s social class in America, however the author does not even mention the word class until about halfway into the book. 

My biggest qualm with the book is that Devon Price writes that Questionable Research Protocols are a systemic problem. QRPs are when you invalidate the scientific method by essentially putting you thumb on the scale to make sure that your research results will be shown as statistically significant, showing your hypothesis to be true. The author then gets into the history of the replication crisis in social psychology where it came to light, that frankly speaking, a lot of psychological researchers were just making shit up. He then gets into how he was taught these techniques such as “fishing” for only statistically significant data as a doctoral student. I don’t know where Devon Price got his degrees, but when I went to college I was required to take a year of statistics and research methodologies before I was allowed to take any 300-level courses in the Psychology department. I’d argue that a decent dose of shame and self-reflection for not understanding basic statistical methodology as a doctoral student is relatively healthy.

 

Nevertheless, despite these failings, I want to be clear that this is a great book and I highly recommend it. There’s so much more that this book contains (as well with points that I really don’t agree with or are uncited claims that are pretty out there) but I’ve already written about two pages on this book. Again, nevertheless, I highly recommend reading Unlearning Shame. 

Cheap Speech - Richard Hasen

The title of this book comes from a 1995 scientific journal article titled “Cheap Speech and What it Will Do” which, in a way, predicted the current state of technology. Much of this book is just an overview of the 2016 election leading up to Trump’s first candidacy as well as Trump’s first term as president. Going over these chapters reminded me of the Reddit post where a user talks about the collapse of his country being like that of a frog boiling in water: it’s just more and more bad news that you can’t keep up with… and being reminded of all the scandles one after the other I forgot about that have happened in almost the past ten years now... something I think worth calling out in the book is that the “glitches’ we saw in the 2024 election, with Democrats’ content not showing up on social media also occurred in the 2020 election (page 20) and that claims of fake news swinging the 2016 election from Hilary to Trump are unproven and unlikely (page 38). Page 50 is an example of a  local Democrat candidate using fake news in his campaign. I also love how this book uses Reddit as a literal example of fake news and amplifying fake news, an accusation which if made on Reddit itself will usually cause users to go reeling. The book points out that in 2016 Russia spent about $100k on Facebook ads as opposed to Clinton spending $768k and Trump spending $398k. This broke the common rule that whoever spends the most on advertising in a US presidential race usually wins; Trump likely did a much better job at utilizing micro targeted ads on Facebook.

The Hot Zone - Richard Preston

When I was a kid, my mom had The Hot Zone on audio cassette and would listen to it in the car with me in the back seat. Given the cover of the book, and its contents, I grew up thinking that it was a horror novel. The book explores the origins and outbreaks of viral fevers, particularly the Ebola virus; specifically a 1989 incident at a primate quarantine facility in Virginia near the capital where a strain of Ebola virus was discovered among imported monkeys. Preston examines the potential dangers of emerging viruses, the response, and the thin line between humanity and a global pandemic. Given the news in February about a “mystery disease” spreading in the Congo likely being linked to children eating a bat, I figured that this book was relevant reading. The book is incredibly captivating and well written, I can see how it was a bestseller. It’s also incredibly short and only took a few days to read. 

Jacked - David Kushner

I was hoping that this book would be about the development of Grand Theft Auto 3, especially given how the cover specifically seems to reference that era of the series, however it is about the history of the DMA games, eventually Rockstar North, and mostly the history of the controversy of the GTA series. Whole sections of the book focus on Jack Thompon, the disgraced evangelical, now disbarred, Florida attorney who tried to fight the video game industry in the 2000s. In fact, he is where the title of the book comes from. Like Cheap Speech, I was reading an account of events that I remembered living through in most of the book. I was a huge fan of Rockstar as an early teen and followed the GTA controversy closely in the news.

A few things I learned from this book is that Sam Houser, current president of Rockstar games and co-founder, gave a chat-based interview that was posted to the a day before the 9/11 attacks saying that planes would not be in GTA3. This contradicts a longstanding rumor that planes were removed from the game due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While it’s also never outright states by the book, I do believe after finishing this book that Houser knew that the mod community would eventually find the content that lead to the Hot Coffee debacle in 2004. It was his ultimate goal to release this content potentially as a paid add-on for the PC release at least. I believe he was intent of releasing this content one way or another and potentially purposefully left the content on the console game disks for the mod community to find and release.

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levins

The 70s film adaption of the Stepford Wives always at the top of my recommended films to rent from Netflix back when they had an unparalleled recommendation algorithm and I still got DVDs in the mail from them. Netflix got rid of that algo when they started producing their own content and their own algo was ranking their content as the worst content available on the platform...
Anyways, this book hits a lot of the beats that Rosemary’s Baby does - that there is a broader conspiracy that builds up from a slow burn paranoia, there’s an socially isolated protagonist, trust is weaponized against the protagonist, and ordinary settings hide horror. My copy didn’t say on the cover that this was the same author as Rosemary’s Baby,  ome to find out the same author that wrote Rosemary’s Baby wrote The Stepford Wives. The book is a good quick read and social commentary, but I wish it leaned more into the science fiction aspect of the book.

Something I found fascinating about this book is that one of the antagonists in the books formally worked as an engineer at Disney making animatronics. The Youtube channel DefunctLand by Kevin Perjur recently released a video talking about how animatronics captured the imagination of Americans when they first came out. And in a way, I think this book kind of pulls you into that headspace of the time when it comes to this new tenchnology that facsinated and even scared people.

Unwinding Anxiety - Judson Brewer

I don’t think that the premise of this book had to be book length. Brewer outlines a three-step process designed to manage anxiety by disrupting the habit loops that fuel it:

Awareness: Recognize and clearly identify anxious feelings and behaviors without judgment or avoidance. Observe when anxiety arises and what triggers it.

Curiosity: Instead of immediately reacting or resisting anxiety, approach it with curiosity, exploring how it feels physically and mentally. This curiosity reduces emotional charge and helps dismantle automatic responses.

Mindful Replacement: Shift focus to healthier, mindful behaviors. Substitute anxiety-driven actions with calming, mindful activities, gradually creating new habits that weaken the anxiety cycle.

The author emphasizes mindfulness-based practices to help individuals break habitual anxiety patterns, and breaks down what mindfulness is and can be rather than suggesting over and over that you be mindful or practice meditation. The author spreads this three step process out over the length of the book instead of just coming out with it, and he is also guilty of repeatedly citing the results of studies despite only one study allegedly being performed. At times the book feels like an advertisement for their app and at one point the book even starts to show screenshots of the app on the latest model iPhone for the revision of the book I had.

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

My friend ended up with an extra copy of this book and lent it to me after I told her about A Short Stay in Hell. In this book an Irish woman has the opportunity to relive any of her unlived lives after she takes her own life - her unlived lives being represented by a vast library that seemingly goes on forever. This is a very good book and a quick read, I actually put it in a little library in my neighborhood with a sticky note on the cover that says exactly that and it was gone the next day. Ultimately this is the Jungian exercise of imagining your unlived lives put to a novel and done pretty well (this specifically is an exercise Robert Johnson recommends in his book Inner Work). I will say that I thought the ending could have been better, but I also was not sure how a book like this could end.

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I had initially read this back in 2020 right before the US federal election. I am still struck by how sharply relevant King's words still are. Reading his own words is such a great way to challenge the “Disney-fied” version of the man and his ideas that we were taught in public school. This wasn’t the sanitized, feel-good version of MLK but rather the radical, direct, and deeply critical of American capitalism and militarism MLK. King challenges the entire economic and social system that allows inequality to persist. What stood out most to me was his emphasis on genuine equality, not just legal rights but economic justice too, including ideas like a guaranteed basic income fixed to the middle class and that scales with the country’s income.

It shouldn’t be surprising but King is an eloquent writer, and his writing invokes the philosophies of Martin Bueber and Hegel in such a compelling way. This book is hauntingly relevant almost 60 years later and should be required reading in schools rather than the literal cartoons they showed us instead. King was not concerned about just race, but class and poverty, and it’s not unintentional that the latter have attempted to be erased from American history and textbooks.