Aberrations in the Heartland of The Real - Wendy Painting
This is probably one one the most fascinating and gripping books I’ve read in a while. Wendy Painting wrote this book after meticulously researching the thousands of documents that Timothy McVeigh’s defense team donated to a university library. What she puts together is a narrative of the Oklahoma City Bombing that is as close to the truth as we will probably ever get; it differentiates significantly from the narrative that the prosecution, defense, and media all presented.
What follows is a retracing of McVeigh’s movements in the years up to the bombing and written correspondences between McVeigh, his family, and subsequently... his defense team. While never presenting a definite statement on how the Oklahoma City Bombing came to be, Painting establishes that the narratives presented by the federal government and McVeigh were a convenient compromise for both parties. The reality appears closer to this: Timothy McVeigh spent years moving through white supremacist circles that were saturated with federal informants from multiple agencies, and possibly at least one foreign intelligence asset. Because those agencies often failed to communicate internally, let alone with one another, the record becomes so muddled that it is difficult to separate the role fringe groups played in the Oklahoma City bombing plot from the role, negligence, or interference of the federal government itself. The book reads almost as if the US Federal Government inadvertently found a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem in 1994.
Amid the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, I was struck by the overlap between the tactics, failures, and institutional reflexes that appear in both the Epstein case and the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. In each case, federal agencies that are supposed to be among the most meticulous record-keeping and intelligence-gathering institutions in the world somehow always conveniently lost, destroyed, withheld, or mishandled key evidence at the exact moments when that evidence mattered most.
That pattern is what makes the ending of Aberration in the Heartland of the Real so unsettling. Painting closes by pointing to the case of Kenneth Trentadue, a federal inmate who died in August 1995 at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. His death was officially ruled a suicide by hanging, but the condition of his body, the government’s handling of the scene, and the later fight over records have kept the case alive for decades.The connection to the Oklahoma City bombing is the allegation advanced by Trentadue’s brother, Jesse Trentadue: that Kenneth may have been mistaken by federal authorities for Richard Lee Guthrie, a suspected co-conspirator in the bombing who also died in federal custody, also allegedly from suicide by hanging.
The Allagash Abductions: Undeniable Evidence of Alien Intervention - Raymond E Fowler
I decided to pick up this book after finishing Jesus Before The Gospels This book is awful. Not “I disagree with the conclusion” awful; structurally and evidentially, just outright bad. The entire abduction story (which has been retold time and time again on the History Channel and Sci Fi Network) hinges on memories recovered under hypnosis. Memory recall under hypnosis is not a thing. “Recovered memories” under hypnosis aren’t pristine recollections (no memories are), they’re reconstructed narratives, shaped in real time by suggestion, expectation, and leading questions all given by the hypnotist. It's emotional abuse, and in this book, I’d argue it’s torture.
Bluntly: the guys in this book were not “confirmed abductees,” they were participants in a process that’s extremely good at generating vivid, emotionally convincing false memories. Whether you want to call that manipulation, suggestion, or outright abuse, the book never earns the confidence it demands from the reader. The author was an established “UFO researcher” that needed another notch in his belt and book to publish.
It blows my mind in a frustrating way how many TV show episodes were made in the 90s based on the claims made in this book. Once you read it, it’s horseshit. Inconsistencies in narratives from the separate men are never investigated, instead it’s mostly transcripts of hypnotic sessions where the hypnotist badgers and bullies the men to recall traumatic experiences they didn’t have. The only person who would have use for this book is a sadistic hypnotist.
I read this book before the preceding one in the list as I had always known this book was the primary source on the Allagash Abductions, but I was never able to find a copy. I actually needed to buy a new copy from the publisher to get my hands on it. I’m not stuck with a book that I want to throw out, but have been holding onto because it’s so hard to find.
Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens - Susan Clancy
This is a book Ehrman mentions by name in Jesus Before The Gospels. Clancy’s core argument is straightforward: people who believe they were abducted by aliens generally aren’t lying or delusional in the way skeptics assume; they’re working from memories that feel completely real, but were constructed through a mix of sleep paralysis, cultural narratives, suggestion, and crucially, techniques like hypnosis.
My only knock on this book is that it reads like pop psychology and has the trapping of other books I’ve criticized in that genre for treating one social psychology study as if it represents anything at all statistically meaningful; especially when the studies are conducted by the author themself.
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem - Jillian Lauren
I first heard about this book after the news broke that the wife of the bassist from Weezer was shot after firing a handgun at police officers outside her home in LA. He’s the author of this book. That alone sets expectations for something chaotic, revealing… maybe even psychologically interesting?
It mostly isn’t any of these things.
Instead, it hovers in this middle space where things happen, but they’re rarely unpacked. There are flashes where Lauren gets close; moments of insecurity, competition between women, the weird emotional economy of being “chosen”, but she doesn’t push hard enough on them. It feels like she’s reporting from the inside without fully examining what being inside actually did to her.
At a surface level, the book delivers exactly what it promises: Lauren’s time as part of the Prince of Brunei’s rotating harem. There’s money, excess, travel, and the kind of detached luxury that borders on parody. The Prince flies women in from around the world, spends obscene amounts of money, and intermittently sleeps with some of them. That’s the engine of the book.
For example, one thing the book skirts around, and arguably its biggest missed opportunity, is how Lauren’s own history shapes her decision to enter and remain in that environment. She alludes to past trauma, but never fully interrogates how that intersects with the dynamics of the harem itself.I think that absence matters, because without it, the experience risks being framed as purely circumstantial or opportunistic, rather than something psychologically patterned. The book gets close to that question, but almost in what feels like a non-conscious way, pulls back before it has to answer it.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda - Philip Gourevitch
This book is about the Rwandan Genocide. Despite what I was taught growing up, I had no idea that UN intervention in Rwanda didn’t stop the genocide at all, but that they managed to assist it through complete incompetence. I had no idea that the year given in history books, isn’t when the systematic killing of people stopped, its the year that the Rwandan government was overthrown, therefore the only thing that stopped was that the wanton state-sponsored killing continued, it just ceased being state-sponsored.
This book will make you want to kill yourself.
Searching for The Sound - Phil Lesh
After reading the last book about Rwanda I decided that I needed something lighter. I had recently seen the son of of the bass player Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead put on a free show in the panhandle in San Francisco. I knew that Phil Lesh wrote an autobiography and so I queued up this book next before I was even done with Gourevitch’s book.
It turns out that Lesh was a classically trained musician before he was asked to join the Grateful Dead. That he is able and willing to talk about the structure of music, and early in the book, is surprising, interesting, and refreshing even for musicians’ autobiographies. His stark and vivid recollections of specific early performances is impressive. I wish that there was more of this from later shows, but I think that reflects the relentless touring the band did at the time to support the industry they had built under themselves, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion. I always got the impression that the band found the touring energizing in a way that other bands didn’t; it makes more sense that’s not the case in retrospect.
Deal - Bill Kreutzmann
After finishing Lesh’s book I was hungry for more, and this was the next band autobiography I jumped into, one from one of the drummers of the Grateful Dead. I don’t think it’s as well written as Lesh’s book, but it’s still entertaining nonetheless. It’s interesting the specific things that Lesh does not mention that Kreutzman does: Lesh never mentions the attempt to kick Weir and Pigpen out of the band, Kreuzman mentions that Lesh had led the charge here. In his book, Lesh does mention that he was roughed up by Kreutzmann at least once before. I was kind of surprised by this because in most photos and videos Kreutzmann kinda just looks like a dad that’s a drummer.
Turns out Kreutzmann is true to his profession as a rock drummer: a little wild, and was the guy in the band that ended up being the one to rough up promoters who would try to stiff them on the road when management didn’t step up. This book has a lot of those “rock and roll autobiography” stories that you’d probably expect or maybe hope to find in a book like this.
I was surprised at Kreutzmann’s frankness and directness about certain things; he didn’t want Micky Heart, the other drummer to return to the band after a hiatus. Or that he really didn’t like the Weir/Barlow songs and much preferred the Garcia/Hunter songs.
Deep Work: rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport
Deep Work annoyed me. As someone who has been working since he was 16, there was nothing new here for me to learn. I thought this book was going to be a thought provoking analysis on labor. It’s not. Newport writes as if the main obstacle to meaningful concentration is personal weakness: too much email, too much social media, too little being locked-in. But for a lot of people, the real obstacle is that their job is structurally built around interruption.
If your day is ruled by tasks, chats, hand-offs, other people’s timelines, and the constant need to look responsive; that person does not have a ‘monastery’ problem, they have a class and labor problem. The book keeps treating fragmented work like a bad habit when, for a huge chunk of workers, it is the job and they do not have autonomy over their schedule in the way Newport suggests. Albeit about 100 pages in the author acknowledges this briefly, the book never fully grapples with this reality.
The advice mostly is tailored for the people who need it least: professors, writers, founders, senior technical people, and anyone with enough autonomy to carve out long, protected blocks of time and then call it “virtue”. Frankly, I’m of the mind that anyone who would benefit from the book would end up utilizing their time in a way that would make the world a worse place for other people.
Deep Work flatters the already empowered by telling them their protected working conditions are evidence of superior values, while offering everyone else a kind of aspirational guilt. Read it and you come away feeling like focus is a character test, when in reality it is often a status marker. As universal advice, this book is self-congratulatory, and way less honest about modern work than it thinks it is. This is the trashy self-help book that people think of when they think of trashy self-help books. This book went into the recycle bin.
Others Unknown - Stephen Jones
Stephen Jones was Timothy McVeigh’s lead court appointed attorney during the Oklahoma City Trial Bombings. I mean it when I saw that Aberrations in the Heartland of The Real is one of the most fascinating and interesting books that I’ve read in a while. This is really just an opportunity for me to spend more time talking about that book instead. About 30 pages in, Jones lets us know that attorney-client privilege still exists and that he’s not going to tell us anything that McVeigh has said to him. He could have done this in the intro, instead leading up to that information, a significant amount of the book telling us a bunch of boomer stories about the attorneys in his family before him.
As a result, Painting’s book is better because it utilizes this book as a primary source to show a broader picture Anything important in this book is going to be cited in Painting’s book and crucially analyzed from every perspective imaginable. As far as how Jone’s inside perspective goes, despite his crucial position in the case, really isn’t the best narrator. True to his profession, throughout the book he tries to poke holes in the prosecution’s case even when he probably doesn’t need to for our sake, or in places where his argument seems flimsy.
The title comes the federal grand jury indictment of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. In Count One, the indictment charged that McVeigh and Nichols “conspire[d]… together and with others unknown to the Grand Jury” to use a truck bomb against the Murrah Federal Building. Ultimately, Jones believes McVeigh was involved, but he was not the mastermind. Jones says McVeigh exaggerated his own role to protect others and explicitly says he is not claiming McVeigh was innocent, but that McVeigh’s self-contained confession story is false or incomplete.
The Identity Trap - Yascha Mounk
The Identity Trap met me where I’ve been at with intersectionality for a long time, which is to say: I understand the basic idea, but I have never fully trusted the way it gets implemented in the real word. My first exposure to the concept was at UMass in a conversation where a Black woman used the concept less as a tool for understanding other people and more as a way to position herself above the room; privilege as a pissing context. I do not remember the exact topic, and honestly I do not think the topic mattered as much as the power move itself. What stuck with me from that experience was the implication that empathy had hard racial limits, and the idea that you can't fundamentally have empathy for another person because of their race. The other thing I later learned that switched something in my brain was that this person came from a very wealthy family. She grew up with horses in a wealthy Eastern Massachusetts town, but it was important in that moment for her to identify as being more oppressed than anyone else in the room. I appreciated that I found a book that would explore these paradigms with me from a liberal point-of-view and not some shit-head American conservative Charlie Kirk-esque point-of-view.
in American public discourse, intersectionality often talks about every form of power except class. When class is discussed, it's done in a vague decorative way, as if money, family background, institutional access, and social hierarchy are secondary details rather than central facts of life. This is just me still yapping by the way. Mounk's argument is that the “identity synthesis” as he calls it, undermines the liberal tools and ideas that made real pluralism possible in the first place. He argues that the framework built around the identity synthesis can become a moral shortcut that is just as discriminatory as the systems it is trying to replace. It flattens people into categories, ignores the actual distribution of power in the room, and asks working and middle-class people to defer to people who may be more protected, more connected, or more institutionally fluent than they are; while the shaming those social class while patting the upper class on the back. That is the personal nerve The Identity Trap hit for me anyways.
With all that said, Mounk’s book is not primarily about class, and honestly I wish it was more interested in that relm. His argument is not that racism or sexism are fake, or that America already achieved some colorblind liberal paradise. The argument is that a this style of identity politics has become powerful precisely because it sounds morally serious while encouraging people to use racist group identity as the deepest truth about any person in every situation.
Mounk is good at explaining how ideas that may begin as subtle academic claims become crude social rules once they enter institutions. I 100% agree with this claim. A theory that says identity shapes experience becomes, in practice, “stay in your lane.” A claim that universalism has often been applied hypocritically becomes, in practice, suspicion of universalism itself. A desire to correct exclusion becomes, in practice, a new hierarchy of who is allowed to speak, who must apologize, and who is presumed to understand the world correctly.
Phone Losers of America - Brad Carter
Phone Losers of America is a collection of stories documenting the twenty-year (at the time) history of the Phone Losers of America. Brad Carter, co-founder of the group, is the sole constant of the group over the years. PLA originally started out as a BBS zine that Carter write for and edited, today it mostly exists as a prank call community. Chapters of the book are outlined here, with links to the actual content in question that is being covered. As a result I would recommend reading through the companion first, and then read the book if you still find it compelling.