Writing and failure go together like a horse and carriage. Would-be writers see it as romantic, or life-saving, or at very least remote work. But ultimately, it is all about failure says Stephen Marche (citing George Orwell) in his book On Writing and Failure. Marche is a successful (in my…

The United States is not the first nation to have civilians in charge of the military. But as one of a very few, the difficulties with that arrangement are exposed for all to see. In Cage Fight, Bruce Thornton of the Hoover Institution (which analyzes war and the military) uses…

In my ever-growing (and quite unintentional) research into the endless failings of the criminal justice system, I had never considered autopsies to be a major source of fraud. Or even of any real interest. How naïve. Dr Michael Baden sets this straight in American Autopsy, based on his nearly 70…

Robert Kaplan is renowned for his keen insight in covering foreign wars and the politics associated with them. Unusually for a journalist, he has had the ear of past American administrations. Such is his reputation and credibility. How strange then, that his latest book, The Tragic Mind, is entirely about…

There is a parallel incarceration system thriving in North America. As much as the US leads the world in attaching residents to its criminal justice system, the mental health incarceration system is even larger. According to Rob Wipond in his painful and terrifying book, Your Consent is not Required, Americans…

In school we learned about all the wonderful, brave, heroic explorers from western Europe who discovered the western hemisphere, and began the long, arduous process of civilizing and Christianizing it. But it turns out there was plenty of traffic in the other direction too. In On Savage Shores, Caroline Dodds…

I don’t know which was less likely: a new book by the late, great David Graeber, or a new book on pirates (of all things) by David Graeber. But there it was and I grabbed it. As usual, I was not disappointed. In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber…

It is with no small amount of bafflement that I announce reaching the milestone of 50,000 followers on medium.com. I thank you all for your confidence in me. As Gilbert Gottfried said, What a crowd! …

A shooting star rose out of the eastern bloc — Slovenia of all places — to dominate and inspire the Left, while entertaining the masses all over the world. The unlikely story of Slavoj Žižek is told in terms of his intellectual pursuits in Slavoj Becomes Žižek by Eliran Bar-El. …