The Intuitive Body is an explanation of Wendy Palmer’s techniques and practices for embodiment. These are an amalgamation of several physical and spiritual traditions filtered through her own experience. The result is a healthy helping of California Aikido with some Buddhism-flavored sauce.
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2025-08-14
The Intuitive Body by Wendy Palmer
2025-08-04
Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
The study of history is a peculiar paradox. One would think that the past is known; after all, we were there. This is technically true, but reality is not so straightforward. Even if humanity recorded every event and every thought, there would inevitably be gaps. The simple distance that grows with every passing day means that records are lost, context is forgotten, cultural norms drift, and interpreting what records do survive becomes more treacherous. Our efforts to interpret the past inevitably become part of the past which inexorably drifts into the mist. In “Inventing the Renaissance”, Ada Palmer presents a history of the Renaissance while unpacking some of the baggage around the Renaissance and histories thereof.
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2025-08-04
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
John Green has gone down a rabbit-hole in his distinctive self-aware, obsessive-compulsive sort of way. This slender volume contains histories of Tuberculosis at different scales, from the grand sweeps of civilization to the individual, and the view is alternately bleak and inspiring (bleakspiring?). While technically a writer, Green could be described as a musician of the heart. This is a story of a disease, medicine, culture, but mostly a story of humanity, our mistakes, our struggles, our drive to do better. This is an important story, told skillfully and succinctly. I think the more people who know it, the better off we will all be.
2025-06-13
Escape from Manus Prison by Jaivet Ealom
I am not qualified to author immigration policy. However, I am not convinced that those who are writing immigration policy are any better at it than I would be. I know the view is different from the top, and balancing the inordinate number of competing interests is nigh-impossible (heavy head, crown, etc). However, in many cases there seems to be a complete absence of basic human kindness. And again, I know that national policy is sometimes a numbers game; adjusting conditions so that there is less overall suffering even if some people still do suffer. I can hear the argument forming already, “to speak of kindness at such a scale is naive”. To which I say, read this book. There is no world in which this sort of suffering is necessary. And to enable, to facilitate, to engineer such suffering is immoral.
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2025-05-26
Beaverland by Leila Philip
Leila Philip gives us a brief history of beavers in the United States. For those of you who have not yet heard, beavers were a kind of a big deal before the white man nearly wiped them out to make a buck. They are still a big deal, environmentally speaking, but these days they occupy more of a subculture in the popular consciousness. In any case, Philip provides a personal tour of some beaver-relevant sights and figures: modern trapping, Johann Jacob Astor, Dorothy Richards, Grey Owl, indigenous stories and traditions, a little genocide (no tour of US history is complete without it), and some effluvial geomorphology.
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2025-05-15
Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson partakes of that particular style of travel wherein one checks into a hotel and then just goes for a walk with minimal, if any, guidance. Passing judgement on any place that rates as a city or even a large town based solely on what you encounter within walking distance of wherever your lodgings happen to be strikes me as miraculous. It also sounds, to me, like an entirely unpleasant way to see a place, but Bryson is a seasoned traveler, and I will defer to his experience. The tour that is the subject of this book is a rather unusual one, so perhaps I am being unfair in my judgement.
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2024-11-19
Nudge, the Final Edition by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
This is a welcome revision to a hugely influential book. If by some chance you’ve escaped its influence, this is one of the works that brought many (and the concept of) standard biases to the popular consciousness, and more importantly, explained some practical applications of that knowledge. These applications have become the defaults (see what I did there?) for many companies and governments.
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2024-11-19
Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara
If, upon learning about some awful episode in the history of Western Colonialism, you take comfort in the fact that that age has passed, then this book is for you. That age hasn’t passed, and even in 2024, your life is built upon the exploitation of people whose only crime is where they happen to have been born. Welcome to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If you are willing to look past corporate platitudes and can stomach some unpleasant truths, Siddharth Kara will take you on a tour.
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2023-04-18
Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson
I wish there were more books like this. In fact, I wish most books were like this. You can find any number of volumes about meditation, but these are mostly guides and personal stories that extoll the benefits of a certain practice. This book is different. This is a summary of meditation research written for a popular audience. It explains what exactly has been tested scientifically and what hasn’t. This is a catalog of evidence. The authors go down the list of claims made about what meditation can do and provide a simple reality check. They also provide some essential details, clarifying the differences between different types of meditation, and which types have been associated with which results; breaking up the monolith of “meditation” in the popular conversation.
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