I have long liked Owen Hatherley because his appreciation of architecture is so far above and beyond mine. He can look at a building, a neighborhood or a city and see history, politics, economics, culture and fit, where I am dumbly fascinated by the look and feel. His latest book, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances, appears to be more of his great analysis, but it turns out that architecture is just a small part of it.

Hatherley is a blogger in England, so he writes at length on whatever he feels like. And he feels like pop music and pop…

It is always entertaining for me to read philosophy. People with immense knowledge of history, linguistics and philosophy, go after each other over the tiniest perceived faults in their logic, their opinions or even their choice of single words. They can argue about anything and everything. It is the only discipline I know where everyone is busy attacking everyone else’s work, while solving no problems at all.

Into this scenario stepped Richard Rorty (1931–2007), who gave a series of lectures in the 1990s that are only now being published in English, the language in which they were delivered. (They have…

At first blush, the idea of creating a star on Earth is absurd. Our sun, a thousand times as big as Earth, is just average size as stars go. It needs its minimal kind of mass to pack the core densely enough to reach ignition. It can burn out of control and fling gigantic flares of plasma into space without fear of hitting anything. Plus the heat and radiation might cause worry in some quarters. And yet, at least 25 private companies around the world, as well as several major nations, are working on doing just that- creating a star…

Everybody recognizes bullshit when they hear it. Or assuming they’re paying attention, they at least think they do. But psychologist John Petrocelli has gone much farther and deeper into the doodoo. In The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, he has researched an exhaustive compendium of circumstances, stereotypes, job classes and ulterior motives that make life a minefield. BS is everywhere, all day long.

Petrocelli teaches bullshit detection and has a bs detection lab at Wake Forest University. Not the typical day job, but an endless one, as it seems one can never really get to the bottom of it all…

For the Uyghurs of China, just being a Uyghur is a crime. They are targeted, monitored, restricted, interned, brainwashed and destroyed. In Geoffrey Cain’s stomach-churning book The Perfect Police State, the tone is set right up front where readers learn that when a husband is disappeared, the state replaces him with one of their own, sleeping in the wife’s bed with her, ensuring she doesn’t try to change what teachers indoctrinate her children with, and that no criticism of China, the Communist Party or its chairman is ever breathed among them. If you can imagine that. The wife cannot ever…

There appears to be no bottom to the deception, self-dealing and criminal behavior that is the US healthcare system. In Never Pay The First Bill, healthcare investigative reporter Marshall Allen has collected a well-rounded and well thought-through range of stories to understand the enemy, and successfully fight back. His advice could save numerous bankruptcies, both corporate and individual.

Allen doesn’t mince words. He calls the system a “moral travesty” and “a predatory industry built on deception and price gouging.” …

The brain is not a telephone switchboard, and it is not a computer. It is a kingdom unto itself, ruled by the prefrontal cortex. The PFC contains the giant lobes above the eyes, behind the forehead. It takes 21 years for it to fully grow out, and when it does, it takes control. The result is we only see what it wants us to see, and make connections that it allows us to make. It is what takes away our childhood wonder and excitement, and filters out (what it considers) irrelevant and unfocused factors. …

A book extolling the virtues of drunkenness in 2021 had better be unimpeachable. As Edward Slingerland acknowledges, society has turned its back on alcohol, becoming an intolerant prurient shadow of the thousands of years since alcohol was tamed and made part of civil society. His book, Drunk, travels the globe and plumbs history in a multitude of societies to prove its worthiness of our consideration. If not for all the negatives we’ve had drummed into us, it seems it would be an easy case to make. …