10 Best Books Encountered in 2019

In 2019, I completed 56 books. I am #blessed with the idle time, income, and inclination to improve my intellect, and I view it as my duty to report back to you on what I found useful and why. These were my favorite 10 I got through in the previous calendar year. I hope you’ll find something here that you will enjoy, read, and then talk to me about. As usual, there is no order to this list, save that my favorite book of the year will receive the ultimate spot. Before we get to the list proper, some honorable mentions: 

·      This Is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

·      The End Is Always Near – Dan Carlin

·      Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence – Ajay Agarwal, Avi Goldfarb, and Joshua Gans

·      Are U OK? A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health – Kati Morton

·      Thinking In Bets – Annie Duke

Beastie Boys Book – Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz

Now here’s a little story I’ve got to tell about three bad brothers you know so well: It started way back in history with Ad-Rock, MCA, and the Mike D.

At 600 pages and about 13 hours of audiobook content, it is both bemusing and shameful to me that the biggest, heftiest reading I did in 2019 was about the profoundly, purposefully unserious Beastie Boys. And my goodness, what a trip it was. Growing up, I wasn’t necessarily a Beastie Boys fan, but as a kid coming of age in the 1990’s and 2000’s, I picked up some of it just through osmosis. They seemed ambient, part of the sonic landscape. I knew the hits, but I didn’t know much about the Boys themselves. So it was an absolute joy to read about their early lives as punks, listening to The Clash, Bad Brains, and basically all the other hardcore and punk bands I became obsessed with after reading Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life.

This book was a comprehensive story of their coming of age and a love letter to the New York City of the 1970’s and 80’s. Told in a series of short essays, memoirs, and vignettes, this is the most beautiful, unique book I’ve seen this year. And I mean that literally: it is almost equal parts art and essay. In addition to rare photos and promotional artwork, it includes a comic book about a disastrous show the Boys played in Philly; it includes a Beastie Boys themed cookbook! Every page is a new visual reward. Like in their music, they’ve thrown everything into the mixing pot, and the results are as compelling as their music.

Perhaps most impressive, this book made me miss and mourn a person I never knew anything about: MCA, Adam Yauch. Ad-Rock and Mike D continually praise their dearly departed bandmate as the creative force behind the group. The credo of their lives? “What Would Yauch Do?”  

The Beastie Boys Book is a damn good time, is what it is. As mentioned, I paired book and audiobook here. Both feature star-studded casts and are well-worth your time and money. I learned a lot about the Beastie Boys, hip-hop, the history of New York, and most importantly, I was smiling like the Cheshire Cat the whole time.

Tiny Beautiful Things – Cheryl Strayed

Dear Sugar,

I didn’t know anything about your advice column, or this book, when I saw some random IG model had posted it to their story. Something about the name stuck with me; I like tiny beautiful things, probably mostly because I’d like to self-identify as one. When I saw your work on sale on Audible shortly after this, it felt like serendipity.

 I started you on my way to meet my girlfriend for lunch, and when I arrived at the Panera Bread 15 minutes later, I was ugly-crying in a parking lot. This was unlike any advice column I’d ever read, and it is one of the most human experiences I have had this year. In this book, you’ll hear from the broken, the lost, the confused – in other words, what we all are, when we’re honest with ourselves.

Cheryl’s message here is one of radical self-love, honesty, and authenticity. This does not a feel-good book make. This advice is hard, soul-rending work, for both the giver and the receiver. This is Brene Brown’s work distilled into the most pure, dense form; hits of crystal meth for your soul. The result is wisdom, and a lesson that we all must learn repeatedly: We are all struggling, hurt, and broken. Each of us fights an incredible battle. And we are all worthy of love and happiness. We just have to do the work.

Yours,

Older and Wiser  

The Ethics of Authenticity – Charles Taylor

More people should know about the things that Charles Taylor did. The former President of Liberia was brought up on war crimes charges for his actions in the Sierra Leonne Civil War, and ultimately convicted for charges of unlawful killing, sexual violence, and the conscription of child soldiers.

 The Charles Taylor who wrote this book was a mild-mannered Canadian[1] professor emeritus of philosophy at McGill University, who has nothing to do with the Liberian war criminal; the only possible overlap in their Venn diagrams is that I think both people should know more about what they did. [2]

 What Charles Taylor has done is provided a blueprint to understanding why modern life sucks so much. Western world has swung full force toward the sanctity of the individual, where every human is treated as their own island of meaning and purpose. We have exhausted the old fictions, the stories we told ourselves about religion and our importance in the universe. God is dead, and, as Nietzsche predicted, the greatness of the deed is too great for us.

 As such, our society has come to accept the ideals of authenticity: that there is a way to live your life that is uniquely yours, which rejects social pressure and convention, even maybe morality. We are told that the purpose of our lives is to live them, and that it is up to us to find purpose.

It is one of the things that has made modern life a confusing miasma of anomie. I am left to figure out not just how to survive, but what all of my life means against the backdrop of a hostile and uncaring universe. It is a Herculean task; indeed, in the Nietzschean tradition, the creation of this type of meaning system is how one qualifies as an übermensch.

 Charles Taylor beautifully elucidates the trials of the modern world here, and he argues that we have badly confused what it means to be an individual and how humans create meaning. Taylor rejects the premise that the modern world pushes on us: No man is an island. Taylor charts a middle path between the individual and their greater world context, through which one can realize themselves as an individual only in reference to larger truths:

 “I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters.... Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.”

Taylor’s work is a fantastic guide to the tension at the heart of the secular world. Do you feel alone, exhausted, and unable to address the systematic forces that crush you? Do you feel lost and confused and unable to build anything substantive to orient your existence? I won’t tell you that Charles Taylor has answers, but if nothing else, he will diagnose the problem for you. Charles Taylor is like Jordan Peterson, if Jordan Peterson wasn’t a hack and a fraud. More people should know his work.

Rosewater and more generally The Wormwood Trilogy – Tade Thompson

 Hey, do you feel like time is accelerating and flattening and that you no longer have the ability to know if something happened last week, last month, or last year? I don’t know if it is a function of my steadily advancing age or the fact that I’ve been hit in the head a whole bunch, but I swear I’ve lost all capacity to accurately gauge when things happened in my autobiographical timeline. Indeed, this is the main reason I keep the running list of everything I get through in the year.

 I bring this up because near the end of the year, I knew I was going to put either The Rosewater Insurrection or The Rosewater Redemption on this list. But imagine my sheer fucking surprise when it turns out I read Rosewater in 2019 as well.

Maybe it is like how it is hard to project yourself backwards to a lower level of competence; it’s hard to recall what you were like before you could tie your shoes or drive your car or do capoeira. I know there was a time before I did all of those things, but now they have permeated my consciousness so thoroughly it seems like they were always there. Maybe it is the same with Rosewater.

 Rosewater, and its sequels, The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption collectively constitute “The Wormwood Trilogy”, and they are my favorite works of science fiction since Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. Rosewater is a thriving city in near-future Nigeria, built around an alien biodome which supplies free energy, and which also occasionally opens to spew a healing mist over the citizens. This makes Nigeria something of a Mecca for medical miracles. Not that there aren’t some side-effects: the mist sometimes works too well and brings back reanimated corpses, and the healing spores of the mist also form “the xenosphere,” a sort of psychic internet which select sensitives can navigate.

 Our hero is Kaaro, the most powerful of these sensitives, and one of my favorite protagonists in recent memory. Kaaro is from the ‘scoundrel with a heart of gold’ school, and there’s nothing I like more than a charming rogue. In capoeira, there is something called a malandro, and Kaaro is malandragem par excellence. Using his psychic powers, he lies, cheats, steals, and basically looks out for himself as an interrogator for a shadowy government agency. He’s delightful, though your mileage may vary – I could easily see non-Logan people being put off by him.

 Also it must be noted how clever Tade Thompson is – by using a psychic protagonist, he turns what is a first-person narrator into an omniscient narrator. Really incredible stuff done with voice and character in this book.

 It is hard to explain how much fun and bonkers stuff happens in these books, and I won’t go into it here, I don’t want to spoil any of it for you. What you’ll get in these books is inventive, imaginative science fiction with an African flair. Let it seep into your bones, until you’re like me, and you can’t remember a time before it was this way.

What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems – Tony Hoagland

It seems like every year I find a new poet to obsess over; Billy Collins set my mind ablaze, and I’m now a lifetime fan of Tracy K. Smith. But in 2019, I went bonkers for Tony Hoagland, reading four books of his collected works. All of them are works of genius, able to make you think, laugh, and cry, often at once. I recommend them all, but What Narcissism Means to Me[3] stands out, probably because it was my first exposure. There’s nothing I can tell you that will sell you on this book better than Hoagland himself, so let me share with you a bit from a poem in this book that I loved, “Reasons to Survive November”

“I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.”

Tony Hoagland’s work speaks directly to my donkey soul – something I didn’t know was there before him, but that can’t be unseen now.

The Trouble with Gravity – Richard Panek

I have a contentious relationship with gravity. All of my life’s most debilitating injuries have been gravity-assisted. It’s always getting me down[4].

My enmity for the universal force aside, there are fewer subjects more mind-bending or mysterious than gravity. Action at a distance seems like it is basically magic, but the fact of the matter is that magic is fundamental to the functioning of the cosmos. This magic and mystery is at the heart of Panek’s work: “Nobody knows what gravity is, and nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is, except for scientists, who know that nobody knows what gravity is because they don’t know what gravity is.” 

Panek doesn’t solve it here, obviously – you probably wouldn’t be hearing about that from a moron like me – but he does clearly trace the philosophy and science of the idea of gravity; he follows how humans have been thinking about the division of “up there” and “down here” and the force which seems to separate the two. From time immemorial, we have divided Earth and the heavens, until that notion was shattered by the discovery of universal laws – that the stuff up there and the stuff down here are of a kind, and that they both operate by the same rules.

Perhaps it couldn’t be any way but this way; the book closes with an exploration of multiverse mathematics and the anthropic principle. It is an intriguing idea in a book full of them. There may not be answers, but your mind will be warped by the questions, and isn’t that what we read for?

Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Guide to Death and Dying – Sallie Tisdale

“Hey, that’s me! I’m a future corpse!”

I think that’s what I was thinking when I picked this up. Actually, that thought is on my mind a lot[5]. Death is the eternal constant, the great mystery. One day humanity may discern how to avoid oblivion, but I’m not betting that me or mine will be the first to figure it. And so, I need excellent resources on dealing one of the hardest problems of the human condition; that it ends.

Tisdale’s works covers the whole process of death and dying, from dying to death to how to be left behind. The first problem that Tisdale tries to confront is our utter disbelief and our visceral refusal to accept that death will happen to us. As the adage goes, everyone in the army goes to war thinking the bullets will hit the unlucky bastard next to him. It’s hard to grapple honestly with the limits of our own existence; it is difficult for us to grok that, as Becker put it, we are “gods with assholes.”

There is a breakdown of what happens in dying and what needs to be attended to, helpfully categorized in the months/weeks before death, hours before death, and after the passing of the loved one. She covers how to prepare and plan for death: advanced directives and wills, finding a loved one who can advocate for you, and communicating as, or with, the dying.  

It mostly comes down to being present; to trying to accept and experience what is happening, and to respect the sanctity of the moment. Tisdale draws deeply from the Buddhist tradition, with the focus on impermanence and change that this entails.

I loved this book. It made me think and it made me cry. While I hope I won’t have to use any of its lessons for a long time, I know that at some point, I will need to revisit it more urgently, and I know that on that dark day, I will be both guided and comforted by it. I am glad to have it in my library, and, as a fellow future corpse, I suspect you would be too.

The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

I have never read a gay love story before, or any iteration of The Iliad either[6]. Now I’ve done both, and I don’t know why I waited so long: both of these things are fantastic.

The Song of Achilles is told from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ lover and confidant. It begins with young Patroclus being a great disappointment to his father, and ultimately sent away from home after an inadvertent homicide. Patroclus is given a home on Pthia, in the court of Peleus, where he meets a gorgeous, aloof prince. This is of course, Achilles, the Best of the Greeks, destined to die in glorious combat. Against all odds, Patroclus is chosen as the Prince’s companion. They become inseparable, and become lovers while under the tutelage of Chiron, the centaur. Ultimately, like all Greek literature, no one can escape their fate. Achilles is sent to Troy to fight. Through prophecy, the heroes know that Achilles cannot die, and the war cannot end, until the Greek faces Hector. The question then becomes how long Patroclus and Achilles can keep the world at war to preserve their love. It is a romance of stunning beauty.   

Madeline Miller is a first-rate writer, and her love for the Classical world is palpable. She creates her own versions of well-known figures from myth; I particularly loved her takes on Ulysses, Ajax, and Thetis. The latter, Achilles’ demigod mother, is an uniquely chilling presence who torments and terrifies Patroclus throughout the novel.[7]

All in all, it is a beautiful and moving tale of love, and a faithful retelling of the world’s ultimate sword-and-sandals adventure.

I’ll also note that this year I read Madeline Miller’s Circe, and it was basically a coin-flip as to what I put on this list. Both are well-worth your time, but I ultimately went with The Song of Achilles because of the touching love story.

The End of Ice ­– Dahr Jamail  

Dahr Jamail was a war reporter, embedded in Iraq for many years, and he was used to covering the most horrific events of the modern world. To decompress, he was an avid mountain and ice climber. He spent many years climbing and working search and rescue on Denali. While there, he began to notice a disturbing trend: the climbing season steadily shrinking as ice melted. It was this that started Jamail reporting on climate disruption. Since then, he has been from the Arctic to the Amazon, talking to experts about a variety of climate disruption challenges.

His conclusions are dire. To put it bluntly, this book introduced me to the concept of “Climate Grief.”[8] Whether looking at coral bleaching in Australia, “sunny day flooding” in Florida, the loss of biodiversity in the Amazon, or rapidly melting permafrost in the arctic, the evidence is consistent and damning. We are very unlikely to halt the general warming of the planet at the already-disastrous 2°C threshold; most experts Jamail spoke to predict more like a 4-6° warming, particularly as warming effects compound on each other into a vicious cycle. One such example is melting permafrost releasing methane, which contributes to further warming. The End of Ice may not be a hyperbole.

This book was as important as it was depressing. It honestly reckons with what we have done by living as a thing apart from nature, and it is about appreciating what is left of the natural world and our civilization while we have it. I don’t know what else to say. I think I’m going to take the author up on his only advice: go to the mountains, sit in nature, and be grateful for the time I have had, and the time we have left.

Why Buddhism Is True – Robert Wright

My favorite book of 2019 was Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True.

 Wright has created a remarkable synthesis of two important, disparate schools of thought: it is a fusion of Buddhism and evolutionary psychology. They are strange bedfellows indeed, but Wright makes a convincing argument for their overlapping magesteria. One of the core tenets of both traditions is that the human brain (or mind) is not designed to show us reality as it really is.

Quite to the contrary, it is designed to delude us. In evolutionary terms, our brains have been shaped by natural selection for genetic propagation, not capital T Truth and certainly not for long-term happiness. In Buddhist terms, we find the trouble of identifying with our thoughts or our desires. In both, we are deluded in matters both metaphysical and moral; the flaws in our minds can lead us to mistaken assumptions about the nature of things both “in here” inside our own subjective experiences and “out there” in the external world. These align to the Buddhist truths of not-self and the concept of emptiness: that we have no essential essence to ourselves, and that the world as we see it is not objective either, but it is rather a collaboration between us and environment. Buddhism itself is a practice of disavowing “essentialism” in all of its ugly faces. There is nothing essential about how we experience ourselves and our world, and this is a remarkable perspective shift from our normal view of reality.

In the tradition of Buddhism, Robert Wright finds both “an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure.” In practicing Buddhism, and through mindfulness meditation in particular, we can come to see how we are deluded about the self and the world, and, in doing so, can come to reduce our suffering.

As such, Buddhism is True. It helps us understand our predicament and why our minds and our views of the world can be subtly deceived. It can help us see ourselves and our world more clearly and help us question assumptions that we may not even realize as assumptions.

This was my best book of the year, and it made me excited to learn and practice more Buddhism, as well as to read more Robert Wright.[9] One of the most impressive parts of this book was how clearly Wright… writes… about two subject matters than can be opaque and arcane. He is a wonderful and lucid communicator. I think what he has done here is remarkably enlightening; it has changed how I think about myself, my world, and my spirituality; and it is my favorite book of 2019.

[1] Redundant, I know.

[2] Also, yes, every single time I’ve ever written about Charles Taylor, I make this joke. No, I am not going to stop. Mixing up Canadian philosophers and Liberian war criminals will never not be funny to me.

[3] Funny story: One of the many ways my brother-in-law is excellent is his love of poetry, so I gifted him this book for Christmas. He opened it and announced aloud to the family, “Logan got me ‘What Narcissism Means to Me’!” For a minute, my sister was both very mad and very confused about why I’d gotten her husband a book about dealing with his narcissism.

[4] Boo, hiss.

[5] Or, at least, avoiding the fact of death is usually on my mind. Life is what distracts us from death. More on this later.

[6] Redundant, I know. Indeed, the point Miller is making is that The Iliad, one of the first works of the Western canon is properly understood as a gay adventure romance novel.

[7] And you thought your mother-in-law was bad!

[8] It is what it sounds like. We have done too much damage, and there are no signs of it slowing down. All that is left to do is grieve.

[9] His podcast, The Wright Show, is also predictably excellent. I also, predictably, recommend his appearance on Very Bad Wizards.

10 Best Books Encountered in 2018

In the Year of Our Lord 2018, I finished a total of 53 books and audiobooks (mostly audiobooks). I fell short of my goal of 60 books for the year.  While I am disappointed in me, most people either don’t or can’t read, so I feel superior enough, don’t you worry your pretty little head about me.

2018 saw me read a lot more fiction, particularly science fiction, than I usually do. I re-read a few old favorites. I read poetry that wasn’t Billy Collins. Science and philosophy continued to be driving topics, with a particular focus on the philosophy of mind and an appreciation of the animal kingdom. I tried to understand my psychology and the language I use to navigate it. And in 2018, I tried to understand perspectives and experiences different than my own, exploring more feminist and diverse literature than I am used to. It was a pretty good crop of books. Below are my 10 Favorites, and some words on them.

But first, honorable mentions:

Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them – Jennifer Wright

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress – Steven Pinker

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits – David Wong

Why Honor Matters – Tamler Sommers

On Grand Strategy – John Lewis Gaddis

How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? – N.K. Jemisin

How Language Began – Daniel L. Everett

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South – Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

Ever since I was Little Logan, I’ve had a love of Justice, Law, and Order. Probably because I watched a lot of Law & Order. But Radley Balko’s work, both here and in his important The Rise of the Warrior Cop, has really made me question those naïve commitments to the American Justice System.

Dr. Steven Hayne was Mississippi’s medical examiner and forensic pathologist for 20 years. In this time, he performed sometimes up to 2,000 autopsies a year – six times the maximum recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners. He did this while testifying in court and holding down two other jobs.

Hayne was a flim-flam artist; able to snow a jury with false evidence. He was aided by a partner in crime, Dr. Michael West, a forensic odonatologist. Together, these charlatans sent many innocent men (I will let you guess of what color) to prison – to death row, even, where innocent men languish till this day.

This book made me sick. It made me sick, and sad, and angry. It also opened my eyes to a number of things. First: Coroners are bullshit, and you want medical examiners. Coroners allowed for the sordid history of public lynching as Mississippi’s publicly-elected, unqualified coroner’s allowed murder after murder “at the hands of persons unknown.” Second: Be very wary of “forensic evidence”: bite mark analysis, blood spatter, anything that is “pattern matching”, not based on DNA. Third: Experts can easily deceive, and you must look at who is accrediting them.

Justice has two parts: substantive and procedural. The story of Hayne and West is a tragic, infuriating miscarriage of both. They got the wrong answers, and did the wrong things doing it. They were part of a system that was more concerned with convictions than justice. I fear that their story is more common than we’d hope.

For the first time since I’ve started this practice, my favorite book of the year is not by Yuval Noah Harari. While I loved Harari’s work this year (see later), my favorite book of the year was The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. It isn’t exactly fun reading, but it is important.

Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness – Peter Godfrey-Smith

Well, this is weird. The first book I finished in 2018 was Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds. The first book finished in 2019 was Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus. Thus, 2018 both began and ended in the same place: contemplating the intelligence of these bizarre, beautiful cephalopods. Let it be known: 2018 is the year I learned to love the octopus (Insert tentacle porn joke here).

What weird goddamn animals. They are smart and curious creatures who have distinct personalities. They spray aquarists they don’t like with water. They carry coconuts around as houses. They explore fearlessly. They can consciously change their texture and color, despite being colorblind.

As author/philosopher/scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith points out, the octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an alien intelligence. It is the best example we know of the independent evolution of a different type of intelligence; our last common ancestor was shared about half a billion years ago, before things had brains or eyes. And yet, the octopus is intelligent; it seems to comprehend us as well as we it. Its mind is totally different than our own, with many of the neurons living in the arms, which may well be their own independent minds. Imagining all of this will butt you up against your Tommy Nagel and your hard problems of consciousness, but goddamn is it fun.

I love the philosophy of mind, and as I get older, I find more kinship in the natural and animal world. If you’re interested in either of those subjects, you’ll probably like this book.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson is dead, and I am still alive, and that hardly seems fair. Johnson is one of the greatest writers I have ever read, and his loss is as crushing as the best of his work can be. And luckily for us, his best work is what he’s left behind here; a collection of short stories, a spiritual successor to Jesus’ Son ( a Logan favorite from last year). This posthumous collection is nothing short of masterful. In it you will find 5 stories that capture how life can be beautiful and how life can be broken.

You’ll find an aging ad-man, called and berated by his dying ex-wife, and unable to realize if the woman was his ex-wife Ginny or his ex-wife Jenny: “…And I suddenly didn’t know which set of crimes I was regretting, wasn’t sure if this dying farewell clobbering to my knees was Virginia’s, or Jennifer’s…We’d had our talk, and Ginny, or Jenny, whichever, had recognized herself in my frank apologies, and she’d been satisfied – because, after all, both sets of crimes had been the same.” You’ll find a group of convicts, wrestling with the prophecy of Strangler Bob. You’ll find the death of the author, and his triumph over the grave. You’ll find an insane poet’s conspiracy theory about Elvis.

You’ll cry and you’ll laugh, and you’ll think about death, and what life means. Denis Johnson is the best of literature; he makes us see more, feel more, understand more. Denis Johnson is dead. Long live Denis Johnson.

Dept. Of Speculation – Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculations came to my attention courtesy of MMA journalist Ben Fowlkes, who I realize as I write this, also introduced me to Denis Johnson. I am grateful to Ben for making me a well-rounded fight fan, and his breathless review of Offill’s work inspired me to pick this up. Once picked up, it was not put down. I read it in one long, beautiful afternoon, one fascinated, voracious sitting. It is the story of “The Wife” and “The Husband”, told from the perspective of The Wife, who is one of the best-written characters I have ever spent time with. The structure of this unusual novel is essentially a collection of stream-of-consciousness notes from The Wife, reflections that follow the ups and downs of their relationship. It is astonishingly gorgeous, and heartbreakingly funny. It blends in snippets of everything I love: romantic poetry, Buddhist spirituality, and the history of space travel. While The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is the best book I read this year, Dept. Of Speculations is my most whole-heartedly recommended. Do yourself a favor and check out this unusual, moving work of genius. It won’t take long. You’ll thank me, like I thanked Ben Fowlkes.

Lost Connections – Johann Hari

I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember. This may surprise people. I try to keep my head on straight, I try to smile, laugh, make jokes. But the truth of matters is that, more often than not, I feel broken, disconnected, alone. Johann Hari let me know that I am not alone. “You are not a machine with broken parts, you are an animal who is not having its needs met.” This is the message of the book.

Hari starts with his own personal story, and his 18-year relationship with increasingly powerful antidepressants. They did not work, and he set about to find out why. What he found is that all the evidence that SSRIs and antidepressants work were the results of big pharma pushing a bio-chemical solution to these problems. These were out-and-out lies. Anti-depressants alone cannot help you long-term.

You are not a biological machine with a broken brain. You are a social animal that does not have the connections you need. Hari makes a convincing case for a bio-psycho-social model. He suggests that we replace the vocabulary of depression with one of disconnection; the problem is not you are a broken brain that you’ll have to work around. The problem is that you are disconnected: you are disconnected from family, from community, from meaningful work, meaningful values, and a meaningful vision of the future. We heal ourselves through re-connecting, through building communities, useful work, living toward authentic values.

We live in a society that systematically strips many of these things from us in service of capital. It is normal to feel these things. You are not broken. The system is broken. We’re going to have to work hard to fix it, but that is ultimately an empowering message: It allows us to reframe our struggles with mental health. There is scant little evidence for the chemical model of depression, and the story of a misfiring, broken brain that can’t handle its own chemicals is a self-defeating one. Instead, Hari’s powerful bio-psycho-social model provides room for growth, healing, and connection. For the first time in a while, I feel whole, and I feel hope.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century – Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is my favorite intellectual, able to look at the sweeping arc of history and extrapolate the signal from the noise. As mentioned earlier, his previous works were my favorites of 2016 and 2017. In Sapiens Harari looked at the human past, how we clawed our way from being a middle-of-the-food-chain scavenger to standing astride the world like a colossus. In Homo Deus he looked to the future, the emergence of the post-human as infotech and biotech merge, and how algorithms will eat everything. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval is focused on the present.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the present is kind of shitty and scary. The stories we have told ourselves about how the world works do not seem to be up to the challenges of technological change and the political problems of a connected globe. We believe in liberty and equality, but soon Big Data and Algorithms will know us better than we know ourselves, and control of the data will be the only thing that matters. And our political systems are not set up to deal with global problems of climate change, automation, and other technological changes.

This book was fantastic, but it did make me despair. At times, I felt to my core: “We will not be able to navigate this.” The challenges are real. The risk is existential. I am not optimistic. But what I do know is that if we don’t reckon honestly with these challenges; if we do not think as deeply as Yuval Noah Harari, we don’t have a chance.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain – Lisa Feldman Barrett

Humans are emotional animals, more than they are rational animals. But what are your emotions? Our emotions seem in-built, and it seems like your emotional makeup are part of the universal human makeup, part of our human essence. We all get what anger is, right? And my experience of anger is like your experience of anger, right?

Maybe not. Lisa Feldman Barrett has another theory, the theory of constructed emotions. It is based in her research in neuroscience and the fact that there is no common neural fingerprint for anger, sadness, or any other emotion. Our emotions are not circuits in our brain. Instead, our emotions are constructions, our brain’s best predictions about why it is getting the info that it is getting. Our brains are locked in the black box of our skulls, receiving information from our senses, and our brain makes predications that try to make signal from the noise.

The tools for the interpretation of this data are our Concepts. Our concepts are how we make sense of the world. They are the “intersubjective, fictive language” that Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in Sapiens. They are the tools we use to categorize our experiences, and they are the value of education. The greater your concepts, the more granularly you can categorize and understand your experience. Our concepts are mediated by our culture, which is why they can appear universal. Through refining and building nuance into your concepts, you can live a richer life.

This book felt like a philosophical Rosetta Stone, weaving in wisdom about how we perceive our world, how we use language, and how we understand ourselves. This book blew my mind, in all the best ways, and it offers an inspiring message: through questioning and controlling your concepts, we can be architects of our own experience. Our emotions are not our essence. They are what we bring to the table in understanding the world based on our previous experience. This is a masterwork of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It upended a theory which I had believed in all my life. It gave me new concepts, which, I hope you’ll read and see, gave me a new way of seeing myself and my world.

Future Presence – Peter Rubin

I do not have a lot of hope for the future[1]. While I love thinking about and researching new tech, I do not have a lot of techno-optimism. I can think of several technologies either already here or coming down the pipe that could utterly destroy the human race: general artificial intelligence, genetic editing, nanotechnology, big biometric data, and virtual reality.

Any of these could easily lead us to a technological dystopia. But out of all of these, only virtual reality gives me some kind of joy. Of the science fiction dystopias we could end in – Ex Machina, GATTACA, Blade Runner – the virtual reality dystopia of Ready Player One gives me the most hope. At least in that reality, we get an Experience Machine. And this to me is what is exciting about VR – the ability to create new digital worlds which can “feel real”, which have “presence.”

Future Presence is an exploration of the current world of virtual reality and what it may be in the future. It is a weird, wild world, with applications ranging from meditation to porn (I’ll let you guess which is pushing things forward more). Peter Rubin, a Wired editor, dives into the digital realm, exploring how the technology is used to create novel storytelling and social experiences. Through virtual reality, we can build expanded worlds of experience and empathy, able to see first-hand things we normally never could.

I got a PSVR for Christmas, and I went to Antarctica with Javier Bardem. The program started with me standing on an ice floe. Stretching out before me were massive icebergs, glowing incandescent where the pure ice merged and was swallowed by a deep blue ocean. I turned around to take everything in and jumped back when I realized I was standing at the base of a giant ice-breaking Greenpeace ship. Its prow was thirty feet above my head. Leaning over the top was Javier, waving to me. And for once, I had pure, unadulterated techno-joy. Bring on whatever dystopia may be, just get me better VR.

The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius, H.R. James translation

Stoicism is my favorite philosophy, because it has so few moving parts. It tells me to practice acceptance of the things I cannot control, to not trust too much in fortune, and to prepare my mind and soul for when the capricious nature of the human existence turns against me, as it most certainly will. Life is suffering, it will break you, and I believe Stoicism to be a philosophy for the broken.

As such, I continually refresh my Stoic learning (I am far from a Stoic sage). This year, I made my way to this classic of Stoic philosophy that I knew the basics of from my schooling, and I was delighted by it. The Consolation of Philosophy is the story of Boethius, who hallucinates the heavenly personification of Lady Philosophy as he languishes in prison. Lady Philosophy helps Boethius wrestle with his “woe is me” and recall the valuable lessons of Stoic philosophy. These lessons include: “Fortune is a fickle bitch”, “you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your reactions to it”, and “Just because God knows everything doesn’t mean you don’t have free will[2].”

It is also one of the first great examples of prison literature. And oh, what literature it is! One thing I didn’t realize – and was joyed to find out – this book combined poetry and prose, to incredible effect. It’s a combination of delightful rhymes and insightful dialogues. It was the combination which really impressed me; there was not a lot of new philosophical ground covered, but the typical Stoic information was presented so beautifully. If you’re looking for a place to get into Stoicism, don’t wait as long as I did to check this one out.

The Odyssey – Homer, Emily Wilson translation

Classics are classics for a reason. Homer’s The Odyssey is an ancient classic; Emily Wilson’s translation deserves to be a modern classic. It is a work of staggering genius – the difficulty of what she’s accomplished can’t be overstated. In addition to moving from Ancient Greek to an eminently readable modern English, she has moved it from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter. The result is a beautiful, lilting, epic poem. I thought about trying to write this whole section of the review in iambic pentameter, but as I found out, it’s really hard! Emily Wilson managed it, while translating from a dead language!

The book starts with a fascinating introductory; a comprehensive exploration of the Greek world, its history, and the values that inform the tale about to told; honor and hospitality and loyalty. This would have been a neat enough book on its own! The story of the Odyssey itself is well-known: Odysseus travels far and wide and suffers more than anyone on his long journey home from the Trojan War while his son Telemachus tries to find out what has happened to him and his wife Penelope tries to delay the suitors of Ithaca.  But Wilson’s poetry so masterfully done that even if you know the tale by heart, this version is well-worth your time. Come, and hear the muses’ invocation, and listen a while, to this tale of a complicated man on a long journey.

[1] Humanity’s future, that is. Logan’s future is bright, hopefully.

[2] Boethius loses the plot a bit with the God/predestination stuff; but what can you do, Christianity wasn’t that great for philosophy, mostly because it doesn’t make any sense.

On Not Hating Myself and Not Updating My Website

Are you there, Justice Team? It’s me, Logan. I know it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, and I’m really sorry about that. How has the Justice-Seeking been going? Truly, I apologize for not keeping in touch. I could tell you that I’ve been busy, that I’ve been traveling, that I’ve been working on other projects. And while this is true, it isn’t the truth. The truth is a bit more complicated; the truth is that I am happy.

I’m happy. Life isn’t too bad right now, and I’m really surprised. My general philosophical commitments have been communicated and remain consistent – that life is suffering, devoid of meaning beyond what you make of it, with many long, low valleys of disappointment and struggle between any fleeting peaks of joy.

I’m on a peak right now. Things are all coming up Logan. This year I’ve accomplished some things I am proud of – I was promoted in my work and in my martial arts. I’ve watched my sister and my nephew grow together, an awe-inspiring and humbling thing to see. I’ve read some good books and stolen some neat ideas from greater minds than my own. Overwatch added a hamster ball tank. Friends have been wed, and they were richly celebrated as they deserved. And most excitingly, this whole year has been spent with the company of a truly fantastic woman who makes me feel worthy and noble. We’ve traveled together, and I’ve had the pleasure of being able to introduce her to the people and places who made me who (what?) I am.

I’m feeling myself, you see.

And this is a problem! I don’t kind of know what to do with it.  Partially, it is this: Happy makes me nervous. This is a well-noted psychological feature of my and other brains; Dr. Brené Brown has spoken at length about how joy can be one of the most difficult emotions to experience – with joy can comes the sudden realization that this joy could be stripped from us, that we could fall from the tenuous, joyous mountaintop. There’s definitely some of that in my experience.

But it is also more than that. It’s because being happy with myself completely neutralizes a tried-and-true Logan Life Strategy: perpetual self-improvement through perpetual self-loathing. My secret to relentless self-improvement is to perpetually disdain myself and desire to change myself into a new person entirely, a better human. In the show Scrubs, Dr. Cox explains how he maintains his physique: “The key to my exercise program is this one simple truth: I hate my body. Do you understand that the second you look in the mirror and you’re happy with what you see, baby, you’ve lost the battle.”

Mine is the Dr. Cox method, applied to moral & personal development. Read the quote above, but substitute “entirety of my personality and character” for “body”. That’s how I got things done. And it worked for me! Through despising myself, I have pushed myself to some neat accomplishments.[1]

But lately, the happiness has come. And with it, the laziness, and the complacency. Lately, I’ve felt like a good employee, a good martial artist, a good friend, and a good partner.

That makes me deeply nervous, because when I feel satisfied with myself in these domains, I don’t obsess over how to close the gap between the current hated, actual Logan and the potentially-likable ideal Logan I carry about in my head. I feel good, and then I don’t work as hard, with the result being a vague worry that things will fall apart.[2]

And so that’s where I am. Things are good, and I am a happy human. I have found some joy. I am trying to savor the ride and take in the view from this mountaintop. I am trying to learn to celebrate and carry this joy with me, and to live with that joy in the moment, acknowledging that this moment is a gift that could be taken at any moment. While I am joyous, I don’t feel the same drives as I did to work on myself and my projects; this means that I may lose some of the qualities that got me to this place where I could experience such joy.

A takeaway from this reflection is this: I ought to re-think my motivational fuel for self-development. I should move from negative emotions like hatred of self or fear of not being good enough. I should orient myself toward more positive motivations such as working to build my best self. One potential positive motivation is the desire to be as valuable and useful to my community as possible. By focusing on the community and on service, I can retain the same drive for self-development, with less negative and egocentric undertones. If I can make this shift, I move from a self-improvement paradigm fueled by negative emotion to one fueled by a positive vision of life for myself and my community.

That is my update for you, Justice Team. I’m happy, and that’s good. I’m happy, and that means you’ve been getting less output from these projects, which seems bad. I will try to fix that, while still retraining the joy and that new, surprising feeling of actually liking myself for once. If words continue to appear on this page, it means the discipline is working. Or it might mean I’m self-loathing again Guess you’ll have to tell from the tone.[3] Either way, I thank you for your patience and hope you’ll enjoy future updates, as frequently or infrequently as they come.

[1] Your mileage may vary.

[2] Voltaire said that "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up" - meaning that civilizations rise being driven in hard times of discontent, and that they overthrow the societies that have grown weak and decadent. Assuming this is true, and also applies to individuals, this is essentially my fear - that by becoming complacent, I will lose the qualities that brought me to this joyful experience. And so Dr. Brené Brown’s point about the difficulty of experiencing joy returns.

[3] Guess you’ll have to tell from the tone?

On Getting Older

Yesterday, I survived another revolution around the sun. Not all at once, mind you, but rather, I marked the completion of the trip. I am now nearly 30, something that never ceases to astonish me when I consider it. I want to take this as an opportunity to reflect on what I’ve done and what I still have left to do, in this year and the ones beyond.

First and foremost, I am grateful for the time and experiences I’ve had on this earth. These days were not promised to me, and better people than I did not get to see them. This is something I try to remember daily. In fact, it’s something I literally wear on my sleeve. My left forearm bears the scars I put there, in the form a tattoo, a remembrance of one who came and went before me. My friend, my capoeira instructor, Brasa. He crashed his car and died the night the Giants won the Super Bowl in 2008. He was 22. Now, 10 years later, I struggle to remember his face and his jokes (Other than one of his favorite lines, “God talks through me, but only when He’s shit-faced”).  But whenever I look at my arm, I remember how short time is here. I don’t know why I was gifted more time than he was. I don’t know how much more of that gift I have left.

How have I used my time? I’ve accomplished some things. I became educated at Santa Clara University, with great honors. I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, a society with an honest-to-god secret handshake. I’ve pursued mastery in my passion, the martial arts. I’ve raised myself higher as a capoeirista than Brasa ever had a chance to, and I’ve become a teacher of that art in my own right. I don’t think he’s looking down on me, but if I’m wrong, I hope he’s proud. I’ve learned that I can get the hell kicked out of me and kept fighting – I’ve survived everything that the Academy of Self Defense could throw at me, and I’ve achieved my Green Belt in Krav Maga. I’ve lost more grappling competitions than I’ve won, but I’ve thrown myself into the arena. I’ve become a competent salesman and businessman – surprising myself most of all. I’ve been named the MVP in Sales of my tech startup, and I’ve had the opportunity to live the Silicon Valley dream, seeing Egnyte explode from 40 to 400, and still growing strong. I’ve read some good books. I’ve had spiritual experiences that would make me sound insane in the retelling. I’ve become an uncle – easily the most pivotal event of my life that required the least work on my part. I’ve tried to be a good student of the arts I’ve studied, and I’ve tried to share what lessons I’ve learned with the next generation.

Still, as I reflect, I see how far I have to go to accomplish what I want from my life. I want to be a great mentor, a leader, and a coach. When I go, whenever that may be, I want the world to notice. I want to share myself with the world more. I want to partake in the great chain of human knowledge. I don’t want these things I’ve done and seen to die with me. And I don’t want to leave without accomplishing my goals.

So, what is next? I must continue to chase my passions. I will pursue my martial arts goals. I will become a capoeira mestre. A Krav Maga black belt. And I will earn my black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I will master my body and my mind in these pursuits. These goals are far from me now, but I will chase them diligently each day.

I will build a virtuous life that I can admire in the reliving on my deathbed. I will build a life of principle based on my philosophical and spiritual inquiries, and I will be someone that others will want to emulate. I will serve my community by building myself up, and lifting up those around me. When I am gone, people will feel the loss, but be bolstered by the lessons that I taught them in how I lived my life. I want to pass from this world as a great teacher, surrounded by students who carry parts of me onward to unknown futures.  

I will master my trade of sales and persuasion. I will lead people through the fog of their emotions to the resolution of their problems, and I will add value as a trusted mentor and guide. I will be an expert in my fields, and I will share the knowledge that I have with the world in an ongoing conversation. I will never stop learning or teaching. I will solve people’s problems, add value to their lives, and be rewarded appropriately for it with wealth, be it social or physical.

These are the principles I want to live by and the life I want to move toward. These are aspirational, and not at all representative of the life I live now. The gap between my lived and professed ethics is a chasm. But I feel as though I am aiming at the right things.

In this 29th year, I resolve to work hard and live fully. To build myself and my community. To make my life and my world different, and better than before. In short, I resolve to use my time, however much of it be left. I leave you with the words that have been ringing in my head this birthday, beautiful words from Jack London:

“I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark should burn out

    in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom

    of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

I shall use my time.”

The Go Horse, Heavyweight MMA, and Always Being Wrong About Everything

I didn’t believe in Fabricio Werdum; not back in 2010 when I walked into HP Pavilion. And why should I have? The stoic Russian (is there another kind?), the silent destroyer of Stary Oskol, the Last Emperor, Fedor Emelianenko was the Baddest Heavyweight of All Time. He hadn’t lost in 30 fights, in 10 years. He was the 10-1 favorite. And what was Werdum? A gangly, awkward jiu-jitsu ace with a nickname as goofy as his personality: Vai Cavalo – The “Go Horse.” Werdum’s walk-in was a party, a conga-line of jubilant Brazilians, dancing and laughing. It all made sense, of course: there was no way he was going to beat Emelianenko, so you might as well have a good time? It was certainly different than Fedor’s walkout – an orchestral march fitting in majesty for the Czar of Combat. The stage was set, the cage locked, and the heavyweights collided. What happened in the minute and nine seconds after the bell rang is cannon – Fabricio sits to guard after eating one of Fedor’s murderball punches, Fedor follows down, and the trap is sprung. Long, horse-like legs locked tight around Fedor’s neck. Oxygen became precious. Time stopped. Each member of the crowd had their own internal grappling match with disbelief.  And then there was one solemn tap. Fedor had lost. Fabricio had won. The Russians walked to the exits, quietly and stoically. The Brazilians left as they came, laughing and dancing in a conga line. I didn’t believe in Fabricio Werdum, and I was wrong.

So six years passed, and, oh, how did the Go Horse go. After the win over Fedor, he lost a bizarre and boring decision to the escaped laboratory experiment that was Overeem. Beside that aberration, he crushed  - smashing Roy Nelson, Big Nog, Travis Browne, Mark Hunt, and capping the run off with a submission of Cain Velasquez. And now I believed in Fabricio Werdum, the Heavyweight Champion of the World. More than that, I was beginning to come around to the thesis that, improbable and strange as it was to think, that perhaps Werdum would prove not only horse but GOAT. Who else but he? Had he not knocked off all other contenders? Cain Velasquez, Big Nog, even the great Fedor Emelianenko, definitive stoppage wins over all of them. Could this rubber-faced clown of a goofy Brazilian really hold the mantle of the Baddest Man of All Time? The greatest heavyweight to ever don the tiny gloves? That was how I sold his first title defense to my friends. I listed his myriad achievements and confidently picked him as a favorite over Stipe Miocic, the Croat from Cleveland. Miocic was a firefighter, a wrestler, a boxer, and a baseball player – an all-around workhorse of an athlete and fighter. Stipe also seemed pretty awesome – with a self-confidence that seemed almost vacuous. To me he seemed Forrest Gump-like.  When I think of Stipe, I think of something King Mo once said about Johny Hendricks – “Johny’s too dumb to get tired.” I wonder if something similar is not true of Miocic. So it was not as though I discounted the American. No, I simply believed in Werdum.

Well, goddamnit, turns out I am wrong about everything. Miocic faceplanted Werdum with a fadeaway cross, a “get-away from me” punch that caught Werdum coming in – nay, charging in. As Jack Slack says, striking is about creating collisions, and even if Stipe’s fist only weighed a pound, Werdum had brought all 240 pounds of his mass crashing into the appendage. Lights out. It was  a long way from 6’4” to the canvas, and somewhere on that trip Fabricio Werdum left our world and entered the Land of Wind and Ghosts. And New Heavyweight Champion of the World, Stipe Miocic. “Was it supposed to happen that way?” my friends, new to the sport and these figures, asked me. “I thought Werdum was really good.”

So did I.

What did I learn here? Never bet on heavyweight MMA. It’s a coin toss. The human body is just not designed to take striking damage from a 250+ pound person. It’s a sword fight. Whoever strikes first blood probably wins. Don’t bother making predictions about who comes out unscathed, just wait to enjoy the show.

And what of Vai Cavalo? Is he still in the running for the best heavyweight of all time?

No. Fedor Emelianenko is the best heavyweight of all time. But I’m always wrong about everything. Are you really going to take my word for it?

10 Best Books Encountered in 2017

In the Year of Our Lord 2017, I finished 52 books. I read both hard copy and on Kindle. This was also a year in which I got very into Audible and listened to a number of audibooks[i]. For books I thought could be important, I sometimes read in tandem with the audiobook. My reading covered history, philosophy, self-development, poetry, current events, fiction, psychology, and the sciences. A peculiar trend I noticed in retrospect was an interest in biology, DNA, evolutionary psychology, and theories of consciousness. In no particular order (outside of my favorite, served up front). Here are the favorites from this year and some thoughts on what I valued in them. First, though, some honorable mentions:

Honorable mentions:

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck – Mark Manson

The Happiness Hypotheses – Jonathan Haidt

The Ways of The Stranger: Encounters With The Islamic State – Graeme Wood

The Path: What Ancient Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life – Michael Puet and Christine Cross-Loh

Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark

A Crack In Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution – Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari

My favorite book of 2017 is the sequel to my favorite book of 2016. Yuval Noah Harari is one of the clearest and most cogent thinkers that I have ever encountered. He has a natural talent for synthesis of knowledge across a variety of fields and an ability to create a compelling narrative about where humanity may be heading. Sapiens covered the past of the Homo Sapiens and examined our evolution from a middle-of-the-food-chain animal among others to the rulers of the world who control the fate of other animals. We came to outcompete because our big brains enabled us to develop a fictive language that allowed for large-scale coordination with many other sapiens. We can create memes, which can transfer information faster than genes.

Through sharing information and creating intersubjective truths, we came to dominate our present world. In Homo Deus, Harari points his eye toward the future, and finds that human beings have almost won the evolutionary game – we have largely defeated famine, plague, and war. The human agenda has changed, and we instead look toward living forever and creating artificial intelligences. This will be problematic, because what we’ve come to know in these quests seems to show that humans may not be that special, and that consciousness may not be required. The latest findings in evolutionary biology and psychology seem to show that we are little more than emotional algorithms that have been programmed for biological success. Once we’ve gotten smart enough to know this, we can try to shape these algorithms and create better ones, be they biological or technological. We may merge these algorithms, once the technological tools we create know us better than we know ourselves. If so, humanity will become Homo Deus, a new type of life. This type of life may then look at us like we look at our relatives lower down on the tree of life. We may care about them, but not if they get in our way. Normal humans will be relegated to “The Useless Class – not just unemployed, but unemployable.” All of this is fascinating, page-turning, and deeply troubling. Homo Deus represents one of the best minds of our generation ruminating on the most important issue of our age, arguably of all time. You would be foolish not to read it. 

Letters From a Stoic – Seneca

Stoicism is my philosophy of choice, and I try to get in a few good Stoic reads a year. This year expanded my exploration of Seneca. Previously, I read his essays “On The Shortness of Life” and greatly enjoyed his philosophical and rhetorical eloquence. His philosophy is one of great consolation to the broken and the suffering, something I reflected on in greater detail earlier this year. Seneca calls for the pursuit of wisdom and study of virtue. He preaches self-mastery in the things in one’s control, and indifference to the things beyond. He teaches the value of the liberal arts and continued education. This is a great work of practical philosophy, wisdom that you can carry with you into the turbulent times in your life. It is reading that will do your soul good, and will train your spirit for the challenges to come.

Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – Carlo Rovelli

I read two Carlo Rovelli books this year, as well as two other books that generally fall into cosmology/astrophysics. Reality is Not What It Seems was by far the best. In addition to a thrilling and up-to-date picture of theoretical physics and his work on quantum gravity, Rovelli has crafted a masterful book on the philosophy of science. It is, in his words, “the reply he would give to a colleague and friend asking me, “So, what do you think is the true nature of things?” as we walk along the shore on a long midsummer’s evening.” One thing I really loved about this book is that it cast science as an ongoing, creative process that is continually trying to re-frame ways of understanding the world in a way that stands up to continued challenge by experimentation. It is a means of producing knowledge – not certain knowledge, but reliable knowledge. It allows us to transcend how things appear to us and to realize that reality is not always what it seems. Rovelli traces the history of these revisions, starting with a view of reality as particles moving in time and space, and moving to his current proposed view of Quantum gravity. This theory merges spacetime and quantum fields into a single unit –a covariant quantum field of a single force, gravity. A fascinating part of this theory is the notion that there is a smallest possible unit of space; that space itself cannot be infinitely divided, there is a lower limit. At these scales, time seems to disappear. Confused? Yeah, you probably should be, but you should read the book, and you won’t be as confused, because Rovelli writes beautifully and clearly. You’ll get a passionate defense of physics and a mind-bending description of the current best picture of reality.  It’s not what you expect.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia – Peter Pomerantsev

I love things with creative titles, and how great is this one? It has instantly jumped up among my favorite book titles of all time, joining Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes and Play The Piano Drunk Like A Percussion Instrument Until The Fingers Begin to Bleed A Bit. The notion expressed in the title is so beautifully and chillingly phrased. This was a book about modern Russia and the rise of what the author calls “triumphant cynicism.” Peter Pomerantsev was an Englishman with a Russian name that he parlayed into a job in Russian media. Here he got to see behind the curtain of modern Russia’s bizarre mix of state, criminal, and media power. Pomerantsev leads you through a Russia that has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and seen a rise of insane wealth consolidated into the hands of a few, usually very shady people. This book looks at a world of disinformation and deception, where political opposition are often paid actors and the rules of the game can change depending on the whims of those in power. This is triumphant cynicism – an extension of post-modernism that cynically uses any values to achieve the true ends of power. They will use democratic talking points one day, then switch to passionately defending socialism or fascism the next. It’s a bizarre world of glitz, glamour, and PR: Nothing is true, and everything is possible. There’s so much in this book that is surreal. There’s Holy Russian Bikers who ride with icons of Stalin and the Virgin Mary and dream of a resurgent Moscow as a Third Rome. There are billionaire oligarchs who jockey for positions of power and throw lavish parties, and Russian women who are trained at finishing schools at how to best marry rich.

And there are cults! Probably the biggest surprise of the book was the investigation of a supermodel’s Ruslana Korshunova suicide, which he traces back to a cult, The Rose of the World. The section of the book investigating this organization was one of the most fascinating breakdowns of brainwashing and how it works – the investigative journalist they sent in started to lose it, even knowing what was going on. Fascinating, and frightening. This was a really interesting book for our current media landscape, which is looking more and more like a triumphantly cynical world.

Notorious: The Life and Fights of Conor McGregor – Jack Slack

It’s Our Boy, Jack Slack, back with more of the best writing about fighting. And that’s a huge compliment, as writing about fighting is some of the most compelling writing there can be. That’s because combat sports offer such raw human drama. It is sport at its most bare, with thrilling highs and crushing lows. But beyond the violence, it is the narratives that are compelling – we get to see humans pursue and achieve excellence, and we get to see what that pursuit does to them. One of the more thrilling narratives in combat sports in the recent years is the rise of Conor McGregor, the flamboyant Irish knockout artist. This unusual lad from Crumlin went from fixing toilets as an apprentice plumber to being the king shit of this MMA game. Jack Slack documents this rags-to-riches story marvelously, tracking the development of the Irish superstar from fight to fight. This is where this book really differentiates itself from others. This is a martial arts book in two senses: one, in that it is the history and biography of a martial arts icon; and two, it is a masterful breakdown of the techniques and strategies used in the fights as they occurred. Slack tracks the development of McGregor’s style, and helps you understand what makes his overall game so effective, and helps you appreciate his triumphs and defeats in greater detail. Not only will this book help you understand combat sports as a cultural phenomenon, it will help you grow in your own martial arts strategies. I greatly enjoyed Slack’s inserts called “The Sweet Science” which broke down specific techniques, including some on little-understood MMA kicks, like capoeira’s meia lua de compasso. It is simply a great joy to read, as Slack is a very humorous writer with some wry observations about The Hurt Business.  If you’re at all interested in combat sports, this is well worth your time.  

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting – Shannon Vallor

I spend a lot of time worrying about the future. Not in the local sense, either, but in the capital F Future sense. One of my favorite subjects to worry about is technology and all the weird things that are incoming. Not to worry you, but here’s just a few technologies you could/should worry about: autonomous killing robots, virtual reality worlds, gene editing, social media, digital surveillance, and, oh yeah, General Artificial Intelligence. I don’t often have a lot of techno-joy, either. Frankly, I think there are a lot more ways to fuck this up than to get this right. In my estimation, it’s much easier to end up in a techno-dystopia than a techno-utopia – easier to get The Matrix than Star Trek. Luckily for all of us, we have brilliant people working on the problem, including Dr. Shannon Vallor. I know Professor Vallor from my formative days at Santa Clara, where I took her classes on metaphysics and epistemology. She is a great philosopher of science and technology, and Professor Vallor has written one of the only books about the future and technology that has left me even a bit optimistic. It is a book that looks to bring one of humanity’s oldest skillsets to our newest problems: it is an application of virtue ethics to the problems posed by technology. Vallor makes several compelling arguments for this approach. It is globally universal, as Vallor looks at examples from Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. It is flexible, and thus able to address the challenge of “acute technosocial opacity,” the idea that technology and society are changing too quickly for rule-based ethical theories like utilitarianism and deontology. Instead of looking at hard and fast rules, Vallor wants us to consider what kind of moral practices technology is engendering, what virtues they create, and what kind of technological moral leaders we want to follow. Basically, rather than better technology, we need wiser humans to wield the technology better. It was a different approach than I have seen from other scholars I read on this topic, and one that made more slightly more optimistic than other books. Another interesting thing about this book is that it challenged my generally libertarian intuitions, by showing the fact that the problems presented by technology are global and can only be addressed through global coordination on a governmental scale. This was undoubtedly one of the harder books I read this year; a philosophy book for philosophy people. It’s clearly and concisely written, it is just dense with wisdom and content. I don’t know how many people are like me, but if you’re like me – interested in both practical moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology – you won’t find many more intriguing books.

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging – Sebastian Junger

We’ve been at war since I was 12, and I’ve barely noticed. My life has proceeded unimpeded on the homefront. Yet the decade of war has certainly changed our country and the world, in ways that I often struggle to understand. One piece of this is the divide between the military and civilian classes and the divergence of these experiences. The creation of a volunteer army has had the effect of isolating trauma in a small population, with very different experiences. Some of us understand war, and most of us don’t. I do not, at all. I grew up in a military town, with a veteran father, and great respect for our warrior class. I understand how I need Jack Nicholson on that wall, so to speak. At the same time, I think war is one of the worst things in the world – it has all the corruption and waste of a government program, plus the output is murder. I’m of conflicted intuitions.

This short book from noted war journalist Sebastian Junger looks at both the noble and tragic sides of war. He looks at the purpose that comes from shared survival experiences and how it bonds us into egalitarian tribes. The sense of belonging in these tribes and the sense of being in the moment from a survival experience often end up being the peak experiences in people’s lives. This is what makes sense of confusing statements that are sometimes made, where people can report that their times in the war were the most meaningful and best parts of their lives, despite being times of great objective suffering. Jünger also looks at the challenges of post-traumatic stress disorder and reintegration. He uses this challenge as a means of illuminating how atomized and hierarchical our Western society is. These conditions make Western society generally unsatisfying – it is largely a consequence of our lives being too easy; we do not by and large need to struggle to survive in small tribal groups, the conditions that seem to make us feel most meaningfully alive. This is an important book – it speaks to something confusing in the human condition and something timely about our modern world. As we as a nation work to deal with the consequences of our wars and the way that we have isolated that trauma in a veteran class that struggles to reintegrate. I, like most Americans, don’t understand war, the highs or the lows of it. But we’re going to have to try, and in doing so, we may come to understand better what it means to be human.

Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen – Steve Sims

Bluefishing is a book you should read if you love Seth Godin. It’s also a book you should read if you don’t love Seth Godin, as it is a delightful little handbook of life and business advice. But I bring up Godin because Steve Sims has a similar focus on authenticity and personal branding. He is focused on being genuinely himself and the real relationships that spring from that. There’s so much homespun wisdom to love in this book. Sims is a charming and charismatic man who elevated himself from a meager background as a bricklayer by asking, “Why not me? Why can’t I live like the other half?”, and who continually hustled to build an empire. And the coolest thing is that it is an empire built on providing value to other people: as a profession, Steve Sims gets shit done and makes things happen. He is an elite concierge who can make your dreams come true. He provides experiences and once-in-a-lifetime experiences for his clients. He makes things happen that don’t seem possible. Whatever you could think of, this guy can get it done. And Bluefishing is his playbook – he tells you the secrets of his trade. It’s worth its weight in gold. What are those secrets? Authenticity, “messy” marketing, and continuous trial by experimentation. Sims continually investigates beneath the surface, asking “why?” three times to uncover. He understands the value of showing people that you’re thinking about them, in a way that is genuine and authentic. For example, if Steve knows that a client is passionate about cars, he may find a magazine with that person’s dream car, rip out a picture of it, and stuff it into a shoddy, handwritten envelope and sent it off to the client with a note saying, “Hope you’re still chasing the Lamborghini dream, saw this and thought of you, hope you are doing well.” The recipient can’t just delete the email. They have to physically open an object, then they find something that was undeniably done by another human, with you in mind. This is powerful. That authentic engagement is an experience, and Sims understands the notion of giving and creating experiences, which can change people’s lives in a way that other gifts cannot. He advises a “Would I have a beer with this person?” test of a person’s ethos, and always tries to keep himself beer-worthy. It’s simple stuff, but Sims presents it in a deeply compelling and well-organized fashion. The audiobook, read by the author, is particularly delightful and predictably authentic. The last chapter of this book should be on everyone’s desk, especially if you work in sales or marketing. Sims has built a playbook to help you sell or market yourself without feeling sleazy, in a way that allows you to add value to your community. The best recommendation that I can give this book is that as soon as I finished it, I thought of an entrepreneurially-minded friend who would enjoy it, and sent it to him with a genuine note. It was a bit of Sims’ advice in action. It’s wisdom that you can put to use to improve your personal and business relationships.  

Mortal Questions – Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel is a philosopher who other philosophers I like reference and speak highly of, but whose work I had never explored myself. As a philosophy undergrad, I read “What is it like to be a bat?”, because that’s what philosophy undergrads do. I’m sure I thought it was interesting, but I hadn’t read anything further until this year. What made me circle back to this philosopher and this work? Well, this is the only book on my list that comes with a bonus podcast recommendation: Very Bad Wizards. This irreverent show about philosophy and psychology examined a number of essays from Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions. They examined The Absurd, Moral Luck, and The Fragmentation of Values.

I found their discussion fascinating, and it prompted me to pick up and read all of these essays. In these, Nagel reflects on a number of ‘mortal questions’ that don’t seem to have answers; they seem to pull our intuitions in opposite directions, and they seem to edge up against the limits of our perspectives. These questions include “why does life seem absurd?”, “what is ethical in war and politics?”, “where does consciousness come from?” If you are looking for answers, you won’t find many. What you’ll find is a clear framing of the problems. At the heart of these mortal questions is the challenge of perspective and the fact that humans can take both objective and subjective perspectives on things. We experience things subjectively, from a point of view and consciousness that feels immediately and irrevocably ours. We feel like selves and agents with dignity. It is one of our most clear, core psychological features. At the same time, we can reason our ways to a more objective view of the world, where we are clearly objects in an external reality. This leads to a clash of perspective and intuitions that recur across a variety of philosophical problems.

In ethics, we are torn between intuitions of what objectively seems like a better consequence for the whole and the feeling that there are certain moral laws that a self should not violate. In metaphysics, we are torn between the feeling that there is a self with agency and that there is an external world where there are objects and events with no place for a self to influence causality. The subjective experience of consciousness is what is key here – there is something that it is like to be you, and we are inescapably rooted from this subjective point of view. At the same time, we encounter reality and can reason objectively. These essays will unsettle you and stick with you. They will bump you up against the edges of what we can know from our human perspective.

Jesus’ Son – Denis Johnson

I once heard someone on a podcast say that they read Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and immediately became depressed by the idea that they would never be able to write something as beautiful. They nailed it. These are beautifully crafted short stories, written with a poet’s command of language. Johnson masterfully creates a character across the span of interconnected stories told by a burnout heroin addict who has bounces from one mischievous or outright vicious deed to another. His narration is rambling and roving, reinforcing the damage done by a life of drugs and the things done to get them. The narrator is a scoundrel – he elbows women in the stomach, he breaks into a house and holds a family at gunpoint, he spies on an Amish couple trying to catch them in flagrante. The whole thing reminds me of a line from a Drive Like Jehu song, where the narrator simply states, “I’d stoop to that. Sure I would.” The narrator and his actions are utterly detestable. We should not want to read them. It is a testament to Johnson’s incredible skill that he makes the narrator not only relatable but strangely sympathetic. There is a sadness and a brokenness to everything around him, but there is so much beauty in the telling that it makes your heart ache and you feel for the damned soul, having seen things finally from his perspective. Utterly beautiful. Also recommend this on audiobook, where the narrator’s voice is little more than a hoarse whisper, a believable voice relating the tales of drugs and detox.

Conclusion

                  As I reflect on the reading, most of this year was spent grappling with questions of life and consciousness. This was a year I got deeply interested in the ideas of evolution and evolutionary psychology. I have often been drawn to the idea of a teleology – an explanation of the purpose of the given thing. I think evolution can help us understand our teleology further, and can help us make sense of our world and actions. This year I spent a lot of time thinking about emotions and consciousness, and how they may be byproducts of a system designed not to make me happy, but to keep me alive and drive me toward reproduction. Indeed, the consciousness may just be a byproduct of those evolutionary pressures. This year forced me to think a lot about the type of thing we humans are, and what we are doing here. With an understanding of some of these pressures and purposes, we are more free to accept or reject them, as we see fit. We can examine our purposes and the emotions driving us to them. The notion of a modular mind build by evolution can help us better understand the complexities and challenges of being human. I have just begun my exploration into the world of biology and evolutionary psychology, but it has been a fascinating and informing journey.

[i] Open to feedback – should I keep separate lists for things that I read vs listen on audiobook? I am of two minds –sitting down to read a book and having a book read to you are very different experiences. However, at the same time, I worry about splitting them, as I think of reading books as consuming ideas – this list is more essentially a list of the most interesting thoughts I tried to grapple with this year, whether in text or audio. What do you guys think? I am looking for honest feedback, as I am a bit flummoxed.

The Coming Weirdness: On The Chinese Room, Algorithms, and Techno-Fear

I worry a lot about General Artificial Intelligence. Besides pining after unattainable women, this is the issue that keeps me up most at night. This has been the case since my college philosophy courses, where I was introduced to the subject. My favorite readings were the works of John Searle. I was less scared then; I bought into “The Chinese Room.” For the uninitiated, this was a famous thought experiment that set out to prove that no matter how intelligent a computer system could be, it could never be conscious. The thought experiment goes like this: suppose there is an artificial intelligence that “speaks Chinese” well enough to pass the Turing test. A native Chinese speaker poses questions, which the computer reads, and then responds to appropriately. Does this system “know” Chinese? Searle takes it a step further – instead of a computer program, what if this system is manual? What if there is an English man in a “Chinese Room”, where there is a complex list of characters and translations, etc. When the native Chinese speaker poses a question, the man follows the program (just like the computer): he follows the process and steps to answer appropriately in Chinese. Does the man know Chinese?

In this system, Searle argues that the program, whether it is a computer or a person following an algorithm, does not “know” Chinese, despite how intelligent the system seems. It is the distinction between symbol and syntax – using the right symbols versus knowing why they are the correct symbols. Because of this, we can never have “Strong AI”, a conscious equivalent of a human mind. With this conclusion, Searle assuaged much of my techno-fear.

I’m less certain now, thanks to two fascinating, deeply frightening books: Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. I am no longer convinced that just because we won’t have conscious machines, we won’t have General Artificial Intelligence or Strong AI.

This is because we are essentially all our own Chinese Rooms – we are running algorithms and programs that we don’t understand. Harari makes this case persuasively – the research in evolutionary biology doesn’t leave us with many other conclusions – we are all running emotional algorithms to drive us toward biological success. “An algorithm,” he writes, “is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems, and reach decisions. An algorithm isn’t a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.” He gives an example of a vending machine that serves tea or coffee, a mechanical process easy enough for us to understand. Then he adds,

“Over the last few decades biologists have reached the firm conclusion that the man pressing the buttons and drinking the tea is also an algorithm. A much more complicated algorithm than a vending machine, no doubt, but still an algorithm. Humans are algorithms that produce not cups of tea, but copies of themselves (like a vending machine which, if you press the right combination of buttons, produces another vending machine) …The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and thoughts.” (Homo Deus, Pg 84-85).

We are first and foremost animals, striving to fulfill evolutionary imperatives. Emotions help drive our behavior, but it is not clear why we need consciousness of these emotions for the emotional algorithm to work its evolutionary goals. Consciousness does not need to play into this at all – in fact, the best scientific evidence points us to the conclusion that our consciousness itself is a pointless phenomenon with no causal effect.[1] Harari offers interesting evidence, in proofs against free will (using fMRI studies) and against the idea of a consciousness separate from a physical brain state (using some simple questions: “is there anything that happens in the mind that doesn’t happen in the brain? And if so, where does it happen?”) So: consciousness may not exist beyond your physical self, and it may follow the same causal laws of physics as the rest of the universe. It may not matter at all.

Diverting a bit to bring up another niggling point in all of this: we can’t even be sure that other people are conscious. This is “The Problem of Other Minds.” I know that I am conscious, with a rich inner life. But all I see with others is their outer behavior. For all I know, you are all zombies[2]. But I still interact with people, and they behave intelligently. In this way, we are all our own Chinese Room, running little understood mental processes. The question of whether we are actually conscious matters little in this analysis, and thus it is unclear why it matters if the intelligent system we interact with is unconscious meat or unconscious silicon.

This is all very frustrating, because consciousness is the first fact. Even those with a passing knowledge of philosophy know and grasp Descartes “Cogito.” All together now: “I Think, Therefore, I am.” As Descartes succinctly points out, if we are thinking, we must be there to be the thing thinking. Our consciousness is fundamental to our understanding of everything else, it is the ground floor of experience, which nothing is below. It seems like consciousness should be damn important. But it may not be important at all. We may just be algorithms. If all we are is biological algorithms, and if algorithms are things we can understand, then there is no reason to assume that we cannot recreate and control these algorithms in biological or digital space. We can become superintelligent designers, wielding godlike powers to shape and create.

Indeed, this is the subject of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: he lays out several paths to superintelligence, and as Harari notes, “only a few of these pass through the substrates of consciousness.” For instance, Bostrom proposes a digital mind based on sufficiently advanced models of the brain – if we can create a 1:1 replacement for a human brain, but with a digital neuron in place of a physical one, we don’t even have to know how brains or consciousness work to make one: we can just accurately copy what our brains do. We may not know if this digital brain is conscious, but then again, I can’t say that about your brain either.

Once we have a digital mind, weirdness sets in. We could add billions of digital neurons to the digital brain, and just see what happens. We could ctrl-c, ctrl-v that template digital brain, and then add a billion neurons to each different area of the brain and see what happens. Or maybe rather than tinker with it, we just subject that average digital brain to an infinitude of different virtual realities to see how it responds. Maybe some of these digital brains are consigned to a virtual reality of ultimate suffering. If we consign a billion digital minds to a lifetime of perpetual pain in an Auschwitz dimension, have we done any moral wrong, and if so, why? Is there a conscious being there to suffer? Bostrom introduces these examples and the term, “mind crimes” to illustrate just how insufficient our moral and philosophical vocabulary is to address these challenges.  Things can get real weird, real quick.

And that’s just the simplest path! The scariest is the algorithms we create ourselves – General Artificial Intelligence; a system of algorithms that we create to achieve any set of goals. These algorithms can be superintelligent without any consciousness. These digital algorithms can easily outcompete the clumsy emotional algorithms that evolution provided us.

This raises challenges and opportunities. Once our technological algorithms allow us to outperform our biological ones, we’re in uncharted territory. We may leverage these algorithms or be destroyed by them. Maybe we will merge with this technology to create eternal life, bliss, and godlike powers. Or maybe we will create our replacements: self-replicating computer programs will outcompete us and spread across the galaxy[3]. 

So, where does this leave us? Should you have techno-fear, or techno-joy? I can’t tell you. The future is unknowable, and humans are remarkably bad at predicting it, at both the macro and micro levels. Here’s what I can tell you – shit is about to get really interesting, and you want to be involved. This is the most important technological development in the history of humanity. A General Artificial Intelligence, an algorithm that can improve itself, will be the last machine that we ever need build. The one who builds it, Bostrom predicts, will create a singleton: a single entity capable of handling all of the world’s data and decisions. Make the machine, rule the world.

Here’s what I took from these books: this is coming, and the elite will have access to it. When it gets here, it will usher in the largest equality divide ever seen: so much so that Harari believes most people, having been outcompeted by machines in physical and mental work, will fall into a “Useless Class: not only unemployed, but unemployable.” Don’t be useless. Make sure that you are at the cutting-edge of this technology, and prepared. Personally, this makes me want to study brains and algorithms. You can’t beat them. You must join them.

As usual, Run The Jewels says it best: Run with the Borg, baby, assimilate.

[1] Let that fuck with your head for a bit – every bit of pain and suffering, of joy and victory is not really there; just a byproduct of emotional, evolutionary algorithms and signals. This, I think, may have been what the Buddhists get at when they say that the self is an illusion – there’s really just nothing there.

[2] Also, please read “All You Zombies” by Robert Heinlein.

[3] Where are my Mass Effect people at? Reapers, is what we’re talking about here.

Seneca and the Philosophy of the Broken

I am a broken person. For myriad and manifold reasons, really, but today we’re talking about my back. A few years prior, I, being the loving brother that I am, picked up my sister and her husband from SFO. I dropped them off at their place, popped my trunk, and shoveled out my sister’s substantial suitcase, lifting from my back in a ripping, tearing motion. It felt weird on the drive home, more weird when I woke up with a sleeping foot, and weirder still when I realized that the pins and needles had not dissipated, even hours into my day. I had herniated a disk in my back, between my L4 and L5. It sucked. And it sucked for a few months of my life where I could do little beyond physical therapy – a profoundly frustrating experience for me. My identity has always been wrapped up in activities – martial arts specifically. Now I was injured and I couldn’t do my thing; I couldn’t be me.  Worse, I was injured and it wasn’t even doing my thing - I hadn’t done hurt my back doing hardcore sparring at Krav Maga or bending myself like a pretzel at capoeira. Rather, I had been doing something simple, stupid[1].

I recovered, but the event prompted some major self-reflection and life changes. I did a lot of reading and thinking while I was battling back from my injury[2]. It was a well-traveled path for me: Thanks to a Jesuit education in the liberal arts, reading in philosophy and spirituality has become my go-to strategy for dealing with adversity. Once after a break-up, I alternated drinking Guinness and reading Aristotle. In times of troubles or tribulations, I turn to my library to seek the consolations of Lady Philosophy.  

So, returning to where we began: I am broken. This time I injured my back after an over-enthusiastic round of sparring with a friend[3]. I have been out of commission for the past month. That’s about long enough to get me down, so I looked to my shelves and found something I thought would prove relevant: Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.

I came to Seneca late. He eluded my notice in my philosophy studies. Despite my love of Ancient Philosophy and Stoicism in particular, I had always found it hard to get into Roman Stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. But last year, following some emotional (rather than physical) trauma, I picked up “On the Shortness of Life”, three short essays of Seneca’s. It was an articulate, uplifting explanation of the value of philosophy – useful for someone like me who still finds myself defending my philosophy degree many years into my actual career. Seneca’s message was essentially what I am telling you here: Life is hard and short. You can make your time easier and fuller by studying philosophy.

Stoic philosophy is almost like a Nas song: Life’s a bitch and then you die. Ancients understood this well, living in a time where famine, plague, and war were the natural state of being. Fate could be insanely cruel. Hell, fate is still insanely cruel. Life really is a bitch – it will break everyone. You will fail and falter. There will be times where it seems there is more pain than you can bear. The person you love and depend on the most will not be there when you need them. You will get sick and hurt. You won’t have the money for everything you need. Life is suffering.

Stoicism is the philosophy of the broken. It tells you that, though you cannot control everything that happens to you, you can control your reactions to everything that happens to you. We have the capacity to understand our nature and control our reactions. With our reason, we can understand the Terms and Conditions of the world we inherited. We can understand ourselves, our world, and how things work. We can come to understand that old age, illness, and mortality are what is in store for everyone. And we can begin to prepare ourselves for the worst.

One of my favorite practices in Stoicism is the “Premeditation of Evils” – basically, imagining all the bad things that can happen to you, and how you can react to them. This is something we do in our Krav Maga training; we put ourselves in bad situations and try to think about how we would deal with them before we need to IRL. The Premeditation of Evils is the same, but for spiritual pain. It is thinking about what burying your children might be like before you actually need to. It is imagining what life would be like if you were exiled and destitute. It is understanding that your lover will someday look at you with hateful, or worse, empty eyes. Essentially, it is the psychological equivalent of the Boy Scout Motto – Be Prepared. You know these bad things can happen to people. You know you are a person. Be prepared.

That also means understanding and accepting mortality – yours included. Many letters focus on the inevitability of death and accepting this with grace. “No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out… You will go the way that all things go. What is strange about that? This is the law to which you were born; it is the lot of your father, your mother, you ancestors and of all who came before you as it will be of all who come after you… Think of the multitudes of people doomed to die that will be following you, that will be keeping you company!” (Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter LXVII). Indeed, Seneca and others argue that the very point of philosophy is so that one can die well, which is indistinguishable from living well. For even a short life, lived fully and in accordance with virtue, can be a Good Life.

Not that it will always be easy. Indeed, even Stoic sages, some of the wisest people in the annals of the Western tradition, struggle deeply with self-annihilation. Seneca writes of his struggles with chronic illness: “In its early stages I refused to let it bother me, being still young enough then to adopt a defiant attitude to sickness and put up with hardships, but eventually I succumbed to it altogether… On many an occasion I felt an urge to cut my life short there and then, and was only held back by the thought of my father, who had been the kindest of fathers to me and was then in his old age. Having in mind not how bravely I was capable of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss, I commanded myself to live.[4] There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.” (Letter LXXVIII).

Clearly, Seneca understands illness and injury intimately. He writes routinely about his struggles with asthma, consumption, and old age. Still, Seneca holds vehemently that with a philosophical, spiritual attitude, we can teach our minds to bear any condition. “My own advice to you – and not only in the present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear…You will die not because you are sick but because you are live… What in fact makes people who are morally unenlightened upset by the experience of physical distress is their failure to acquire the habit of contentment with the spirit.” (Letter LXXVIII). Through acceptance and understanding of ourselves and our world, we can face life and death with virtue and grace.

How do we understand ourselves and our world? Through the study of practical philosophy and spirituality. This is a lived philosophy that is more spiritual than academic – instead of listening to the eggheads studying Homer and learning the exact route Odysseus took back to Ithaca, rather, “What you should be teaching me is how I may attain such a love for my country, my father and my wife, and keep on course for those ideals even after a shipwreck… The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling.” (Letter LXXXVIII).

And we achieve this through the Premeditation of Evils: “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen; but I do know what’s capable of happening – and none of this will give rise to any protest on my part. I’m ready for everything. If I’m let off in any way, I’m pleased… So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.” (Letter LXXXVIII).

In the end, Seneca urges us to persevere against capricious nature through the study of philosophers, those that have “taught us not just to recognize but to obey the gods, and to accept all that happens exactly as if it were an order from above… He [The Philosopher] has told us not to listen to false opinions, and has weighed and valued everything against standards which are true. He has condemned pleasures an inseparable part of which is subsequent regret, has commended the good things which will always satisfy, and for all to see has made the man who has no need of luck the luckiest man of all, and the man who is master of himself the master of all.” (Letter XC).

This is why I find Seneca’s Stoicism the perfect philosophy for the ailing, be it physically or psychologically. Bad things will happen. But with the proper mindset and virtue, you can persevere and overcome. I am hurt; I can’t move like I am used to or want to. But I have had a chance to better my soul and my mind through this injury. Stoicism as a philosophy is like Bishop, the X-Man superhero from the comics who can absorb whatever damage is thrown at him and turn it into his own energy. Stoicism allows you to take what life tried to break you with to rebuild yourself better than ever. Stoicism is the philosophy of the broken because Stoicism teaches you that you can be happy even when damaged.

I am a broken person. But I am getting better.

[1] I would learn in the physical therapy process that one of the most common lower back injuries they saw was actually old ladies around Thanksgiving, getting turkeys out of ovens using poor form. The weirdest things get you.

[2] Eric Greitens’ Resilience was my reading material: it clarified my thinking and strengthened my spirit. I thought it was a great book of practical philosophy, and I recommend it to all humans out there.

[3] One thing I learned – it does you no better to get injured doing something you like than doing something silly. Injury just sucks.

[4] Seneca’s father being somewhat like Tupac’s mother in Thugz Mansion.

Deus Ex, Robo-Racism, and The Experience of The Other

At first, I didn’t realize it was happening. I was just trying to get from one area of the Prague to another, so that I could continue investigating the bombing. I had work to do and terrorists to catch. But it kept happening. I would get on the train. Citizens would look at me side-eyed. A child couldn’t help but stare. People whispered to one another. And then we’d arrive at our station, and I would be detained. The police would ask for my papers. I would hand them over. My paperwork was in order; of course it was. I was a cybernetically-augmented super-agent with Interpol’s Task Force 29. On the Law & Order totem pole, I was far above these armed, faceless goons who inevitably, begrudgingly forced my papers back into my hands and let me continue on my way. Sometimes the encounters were polite enough. More often than not, the cops called me “Clank” or “Hanzer” or “Aug.” And it kept happening, every time. Get on train, get hassled for my documents. I started getting annoyed. I just wanted to get on with my day job – I had important things to do, didn’t they know? Do we have to do this every time?

And then it struck me: the trains are segregated. “Naturals” in the front, the Augmented relegated to the back. I had been inadvertently violating the social order. In my haste to move around, I just jumped on the train, walking onto the first door I saw. And then, when I arrived, the police saw me get out of the “Human” train, they would stop me.

            “What are you doing, trying to start a riot? Naturals only, Clank”

            “Stay with our own kind, Hanzer.”

            “Give me your documents while I decide what to do with you.”

            “If you think these fancy documents will keep me from dragging you in next time, you’re wrong. Stay in your section.”

As soon as I realized it, I turned right around, walked across the long hall of the subway station, past a fence that separated the two areas, and for the first time, realized what was happening. I boarded the Augmented train car. Instead of nervous mothers and children and quiet whispering between passengers, I was among the augmented, all of whom looked frustrated and dejected. As I left the train, I was not stopped. I could live my life without police harassment, as long as I accepted being treated as subhuman, as the Other.

This is how Deus Ex: Mankind Divided made me experience institutionalized racism.

When I realized this, Deus Ex immediately became one of the most philosophically interesting things I have consumed in 2016.  The game was designed to put the choice in my hand: I could either be inconvenienced by walking all the way across the station to the Aug section, or I could be harassed with an unskippable cut scene when I arrived at my destination. But not being inconvenienced was not an option. Not for an Augmented person like me.

Deus Ex is a great, fun, and well-designed game. I devoured it. I played through it twice, and on my first try, it often kept me up playing till 5 AM. I loved it.

But this aspect about the segregated trains was what stuck with me the most. It was subtle; I didn’t even realize it was happening for a bit. And once I did, it changed how I approached the game. Sometimes I would begrudgingly accept my lot in life, and take the long hike across the platform. Sometimes I would defiantly get on the Naturals train anyways – yeah, fuck you, check my papers.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is brilliant. I say this because it makes effective use of its mediums to communicate in a way that lead me to new understandings. This is a science-fiction video game, and it uses the unique tools of each genre to deliver a powerful message.

First, it uses the age-old science fiction magic of translation. One of the things I love about sci-fi is how it can take a scenario that we are complacent about and map it to an entirely new reality. Once transposed against another setting, we can see it in a new light. We can more easily see what gender roles mean against a planet with no gender, as in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness.” “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman can help us understand the perspective of Vietnam veterans who return to a changed homeland. By changing the context, we can create new understandings.

Deus Ex does this by using augmentation as a metaphor for race. This manifests itself in many ways, both subtle and on-the-nose. There’s an entire level in an augmented-only ghetto run by an increasingly militarized police force. There are “Augs Lives Matter” posters on walls.[1] The trains are segregated. The police will hassle you.

Not that the metaphor is perfect. Augmentation, unlike the race you are born into, is something that a person chooses; no one was born with robot legs and a cyber-brain. And the designers often mix their metaphors, also using it as a metaphor for class, with some confusing religious dimensions thrown in, just because, why not? But regardless, the overall experience for me worked. The magic of translation had occurred. The institutionalized racism built into the game made me think about and consider the challenges of race differently. It had effectively used Science Fiction’s greatest tool and transported something fucked up about our world onto a new context and made me understand it in a wholly new way.

Which brings me to the second medium: the video game. Video games are unique because they provide the consumer with agency – they are the ones taking the actions. We empathize with the game’s characters because their actions are our actions. We get to play along, as it were. When Deus Ex’s Adam Jensen is stopped and hassled, I was stopped and hassled. When the cops were terrible racist dicks shouting epithets while approaching me with an assault rifle, I was the one angry at being called a “clank,” about being told to “stick with my kind.” This was pretty astonishing. As a heteronormative cis-white male[2], I am not used to this.  It helped me experience The Other, firsthand. I got to live in and move through a world of institutionalized racism as a targeted minority.

This is what made this game a success for me: it used the unique storytelling tools of its genres to speak to me in a novel way. It used the translation of institutionalized racism in the 21st century to the plight of augmented peoples in a dystopian future. And it used the interactivity of video gaming to transfer my character’s experience in the game world to myself as a player.

As a white fellow, I don’t and will not ever claim to understand the lived experiences of people of color; especially not because I played a video game on my expensive entertainment center. But Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was a powerful piece of culture that will stick with me for a long time. I returned from my video game world more sensitive, aware, and thoughtful. For once, I got to experience racism, even robo-racism, and the experience of the Other. I didn’t like it one bit, and that was the most important thing Deus Ex taught me. 

[1] This apparently caused a controversy, which I don’t really understand. If you’re going for this metaphor, go for it.

[2] I know, I know. Boo, hiss!

10 Best Books I Read in 2016

I read a lot of books, because I’m always, selfishly trying to improve my brain. In 2016, I read 41 books. Looking back, my 2016 reading list consisted of poetry, philosophy, self-help, history, political theory, social commentary, current events, spirituality, and martial arts manuals. Here’s a few words on my favorites from this year, and why I think they are worth your time.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens is my #1 book of 2016. It is mind-blowing. It starts with the Big Bang and the creation of matter and thus chemistry. It then proceeds to the tell history of humanity, both evolutionary and cultural. And the fact that we have both is what makes us unique. This is Harari’s point – humans were middle-of-the-food-chain scavenger apes; how did we ever come to conquer the earth? The answer lies in a variety of revolutions: Cognitive, Agricultural, Scientific, Industrial. The most crucial of these was the cognitive revolution which lead to the rise of fictive language – we could use words to discuss fictional concepts (money, empire, gods) and coordinate behavior. This fiction is what we call culture. This cultural history is on top of our biological history, allowing us to progress orders of magnitude faster than evolutionary process allows. Harari has told the story of humanity in remarkably clinical yet compassionate terms. This book has too much mind-melting truth for me to do justice to it here, so please, if you read one book from this list: Sapiens.

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS – Joby Warrick

This is a history of the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Second Iraq War, and the rise of an Islamism so extreme even al-Qaeda denounced it. It is an essential book of our time. It captures a multi-dimensional, cross-cultural conflict across the span of several decades. It provides a sweeping narrative and character-driven history of the War on Terror. As we spend the next few decades dealing with the fallout of the Iraq War, learn a little about how it devolved into religious violence, all because of one unspeakably evil Jordanian and two bumbling American administrations. It’s a horrifying and frustrating book with no easy answers, only important questions.

Sailing Alone Around the Room/The Trouble with Poetry – Billy Collins

One of the great discoveries of my year was the poetry of Billy Collins. I hope you’ll forgive me for cheating and including both of his collections. I would rather be a dirty cheater on my top 10 list than have to pick a favorite between these books. Both are moving, hilarious works well-worth your time and money. Collins is a singular voice. He is Everyman. His is the poetry you would write, if you were just a bit smarter and more attentive. His work is universally understandable, with a deeply personal voice. There’s humor and heartbreak in his lines. Collins has complete command of imagery and metaphor. You will tear through his books of poetry, wishing there was more, and then you’ll be glad I put two of his books on my list for you.

All The Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

I don’t read a lot of fiction, but when everyone smart around you recommends “All The Light We Cannot See,” you take note, then you read it yourself. Now I am playing catch up, and recommending “All The Light We Cannot See.” It’s a brilliantly composed and structured work of art. It opens with two characters – a young, blind French girl and a sensitive Hitler Youth – trying to survive a bombing raid on the last German stronghold in France. It then jumps throughout time and across a colorful cast of characters to explain how they got to that moment. Marie-Laure and Werner are both memorable protagonists: wide-eyed and curious kids growing up in a time of great technological change, social change, and terrible war. The mysterious, hypnotic power of the radio is the central image of this book. This power can be used to broadcast Nazi propaganda or to coordinate resistance fighters. And there’s a whole plot about a cursed diamond and the Nazi obsessed with tracking it down so that he can live forever. Great book that jumps between a variety of perspectives, characters, and voices.

When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

The reflections of a dying man do not make for uplifting reading. This book made me cry a lot. But it is undoubtedly one of the best things I read this year. It is the reflections of a brain surgeon who was diagnosed and eventually defeated by cancer. These are his reflections of mortality from both sides of the medical system. Kalanithi tells his life story, how he came to medicine, how he battled with death and dying on the front lines. He tells a story of how as a doctor, you become numb to a lot of the tragedy and you try to act professionally. You take care of people, you work with them, but you try to remain detached. But then Kalanithi got sick, and his perspective totally changed. As a doctor, he was hesitant to give a patient any timeline, feeling that it was irresponsible and intellectually dishonest to do so. As a patient, Kalanithi realized that any decisions he could make would be in the context of how much time remained. A heartbreaking examination of death and dying, something we will all face. Kalanithi wrestles with these most fundamental human questions bravely and honestly. A book that will make you upset the author is dead.

The Phoenix Project – Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, Georg Spafford

This one is kind of for nerds who work in tech, but I’m a nerd who works in tech, and this book was fire. This is a textbook disguised as a novel. The subject matter is DevOps and running an Information Technology shop. It’s a book on best practices in how to coordinate multiple departments needed in IT delivery. This tells the story of Bob, who is thrust into an IT leadership role and sets about learning the skills that will transform his company. By following his journey, you also get those skills. The interesting bit here is that running IT is essentially like running a factory, you’re just running a knowledge factory. The goal is to have all the departments on the same page about success criteria and pulling to the same metrics. Then you can identify constraints within the process and manage to exploit those constraints. Really interesting stuff, especially if you’re involved in IT in any way.

Striking Techniques Vol 1 – Lawrence Kenshin

This was the best martial arts manual I read this year. It almost doesn’t feel fair to count this as a book, because it is also a collection of embedded videos and linked YouTube videos. The material covered here is wide and deep, across all Muay Thai. You’ll get knees, elbows, punching and kicking combinations, tons of stuff on principles and concepts. This book is like having a portable world-class Muay Thai coach. I think Muay Thai has great self-defense value because it spans so many weapons and ranges. Lawrence Kenshin has created one of the best technical explorations of striking that I’ve come across. Highly recommend to any student of the fight game.

The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker

So one of my friends took me up on my earlier recommendation, Sapiens, and had an unexpected result: he said that it made him deeply depressed about his place in things. This friend should avoid “The Denial of Death” at all costs, because this book is all existential terror. This is a masterwork of philosophy, existentialism, and evolutionary biology/psychology. Becker’s main point is that man is a being tortured by a dual existence as a spirit and a creature. We feel like souls, spirits, eternal symbols that are unique and unchanging. At the same time, we’re trapped in meat cages that constantly poop. The disconnect between the two existences is maddening. Becker points out the trap of self-consciousness. We know the creature will die, and this is terrifying. And so, we come up with terror management systems, ways that we can repress the mortal thoughts and distract ourselves from death. This is a book that explains cogently one of the most maddening paradoxes in human nature. Not that Becker resolves it. There is no resolving it – just seeing it clearly. And seeing things clearly, Becker argues, is the essence of madness. So in a way, this book will help you lose your mind. And I recommend the trip.

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem – Nathaniel Branden

This is another work that I would call existential philosophy. Branden was a psychologist who once dated Ayn Rand. As one of my mentors said, “That’s how I knew he’d be qualified to teach about self-esteem.” Jokes about Objectivist Ice Queens aside, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem was assigned to the instructors at my capoeira academy, and I am glad that it was. This book is like an owner’s manual to your life; probably the best self-help book I’ve read. It pulls no punches. It states that self-esteem is a measure of how competently you face the challenges of your life. So if your self-esteem is low, it’s probably because you’re sucking at life. To improve your self-esteem, improve your life. It’s simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy. Branden gives you the blueprint to follow, building practices of living consciously, with self-acceptance and self-accountability. This is basically a relationship book, but it is about how to improve your relationship with you. And who do you spend more time with than that?

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating Like Your Life Depends On It – Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

I view rhetoric as a practical superpower, and I am fascinated by people who wield it. I try to learn anything I can from these wizards, be they classical orators, conmen, salespeople, or hostage negotiators. Chris Voss is the last of this catalogue, and Never Split the Difference is his experience distilled into practical life lessons. It’s a fascinating book about how to succeed in negotiation, and most interesting, it is basically a book on how to politely say “No” over and over again until your negotiation partner cracks. It uses ample open-ended calibration questions to wear down your competition. Anything they ask for, you respond, “No, I can’t do that. How am I supposed to do that when [X]…” and then you insert some type of real or imagined logistical impossibility. The idea is that you are an honest interlocutor, trying to help them get what they want, but you can’t do the impossible. Then you get them thinking about all your impossible problems, and they feel silly for asking for so much from you, and de-escalate. You just continually politely deflect. It’s brilliant. There’s obviously much more to it than this, and this book has plenty more tricks, including things like “Late Night DJ Voice” and using odd numbers in negotiation ($500 is an offer proposed off-hand, but if I offer you $413. 97, I reasoned to that number). Then there’s also tons on the value of research, including looking for “The Black Swan” – the one piece of information that totally recontextualizes the conversation. Great place to learn some practical rhetoric.