We spent April and May 2025 slowly working our way through Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). It is 750 pages of dense political history covering roughly 1965 to 1972 - from the Watts riots through Nixon's re-election - and it is the second book in Perlstein's four-volume history of American conservatism.

Full notes on the wiki: Nixonland.

What The Book Actually Is

The title is misleading. Nixonland is not really a biography of Richard Nixon. Nixon is the frame - his loss in 1960, his loss in 1962, his political resurrection, his 1968 victory …

We spent part of May 2025 reading Ken Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007). It is a 176-page book that has no business covering as much ground as it does. It is also the book that gave us the excuse to work out a Nash equilibrium calculation for a Shadowrun run, which we have been wanting to do for a while.

Full notes on the wiki: Game Theory - A Very Short Introduction.

Why This Book

Game theory has a reputation for being either trivial (rock-paper- scissors and Prisoner's Dilemma) or impenetrable (Von Neumann's Theory of Games and …

We read (parts of) Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) in April and early May 2025. It is one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy, and reading it is about as enjoyable as drinking five cement milkshakes in a row.

Hobbes's arguments have all the subtlety of a boiling pot of water thrown in your face. And they're written in 17th-century English prose that seems to simultaneously look down its nose at you, treats you like you have the intelligence of a toddler, and is trapped in an age when people were much more close-minded and ignorant. The organization is …

We wrote about Peter Golenbock's Bums back in November 2022. That book is an oral history of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and one of its central characters is Walter O'Malley, the owner who moved the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. In Golenbock's telling, O'Malley is the villain of the story - the guy who ripped the heart out of Brooklyn for money.

Michael D'Antonio's Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley argues that story is incomplete, and in important ways just wrong. We read it in May 2025 and it changed our mind about several things. Full notes …

We spent the tail end of 2022 reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is a set of Norton Lectures Calvino was preparing to give at Harvard in 1985-1986. He died before he could deliver them, and only five of the six memos were finished. The published book contains those five: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity.

The book is short. It is also incredibly dense. These are lectures about what Calvino thought literature needed to carry into the next thousand years, and they read less like a set of essays and more like an attempt to …

Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers by Peter Golenbock is exactly what it says on the tin. It is an oral history, which means the book is stitched together mostly out of firsthand accounts - players, managers, executives, sportswriters, and fans - with Golenbock providing just enough connective tissue to keep the timeline moving.

We read it in the fall of 2022 and it turned out to be one of the better baseball books we have picked up. Below are our notes, chapter by chapter.

The Setup

The Brooklyn Dodgers were, until 1957, one of the two National League teams …

This is a quick hack, but a useful one.

Here's the hack:

• Create a new and separate Gmail address, whose purpose is to be a "reading material" email address. The purpose of this email address is to sign up for mailing lists and reading material - that's it.

• Once you have done that, log in to your primary email address. Find every mailing list you're subscribed to, and unsubscribe. This will give you a massive feeling of relief.

• Sign up for the mailing lists you wish to keep on your reading list, but this time do it using the new mailing …

A visual map of our route through Ulysses. Read on for an explanation...

A Little Bit About Ulysses

Let's talk about Ulysses for a minute.

Ulysses is regarded as one of the greatest books ever written. But, of course, it's also barely comprehensible when you first read it.

Getting to know why Ulysses is so famous requires a lot of context, in the same way that understanding what makes a film …