Code Yarns Personal Blog

Links of March 2026

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 05:22:15 +0000

The Economist is wrong on the Robin Hood state: "Many of America’s richest people use the tried-and-tested tactics of the tax-avoidance playbook: avoid salaries, avoid selling and inherit wealth. By using their stock as collateral for loans, the very rich can free up capital to support lavish lifestyles without triggering a taxable event or surrendering control of their businesses. In addition, because heirs can borrow as well, no income taxes need ever be paid on this growing wealth as it passes through the generations."
A once-proud tradition is becoming awkward for elite universities: This article has an interesting plot of percent of US adults who cannot swim versus household income, for different races.
Americans’ electricity bills are up. Don’t blame AI: "A study last year by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed that data-centre load was not the main cause of the rate rises in the five years to 2024. It fingered grid upgrades and rising costs of power-generating equipment and raw materials such as copper."
Data centres in space: less crazy than you think: The feasibility of orbital data centres depends on launch cost ($/kg), specific power (how many watts of processing power can be provided per kilogram of satellite), satellite cost (in dollars per watt of processing power) and reliability of AI chips in space.
Economics of Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers: Interactive online tool to fiddle with the costs associated with data centers in space and on ground for comparison.
Ali Khamenei hoped his legacy might last for ever: The Economist obituary always throws up a surprise about the person. "He was a literary boy, and the books he most enjoyed—“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, “The Grapes of Wrath” and, especially, Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”—were about the struggles of the poor."

The Perfectionists

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 01:14:25 +0000

The Perfectionists is a romp through science using precision engineering as an excuse. We travel in time through many interesting science stories, from the discovery of the ancient Antikythera mechanism of the Greeks (which could predict celestial events), to the modern microprocessor.

We start first in Britain, with the precision of clocks pioneered by John Harrison helping Britain at sea, while manufacture of precise cannons by John Wilkison in 1774 helped James Watt launch the steam engine in 1776 and thus the Industrial revolution. Joseph Brahmah made percision locks that were unpickable in 1784 and Henry Maudalay pioneered the manufacture of the lock's precise parts and later pulley blocks for the navy in 1808. The precise manufacture of parts revolutinized gun manufacture in France and later helped the US fight the British. Whitworth's precise screws helped manufacture to unthinkable levels of precision.

In the automobile age, we are entertained by the story of 2 pioneers. Rolls-Royce made absolutely marvels of precise cars, while Ford invented the assembly line and in order to make the Model T precise bought over the gauge block business of Carl Edvard Johansson. The next leap in precision was with the invention of jet engine by Frank Whittle. His struggling journey to prove that this was the next step in air travel was proven right with the Gloster E28/39 jet plane.

We get into space with the Hubble Space Telescope, whose miniscule mistake in the manufacture of its giant mirror made it unusable. NASA engineers invented a way to work around the flaw and fixed it on their next space shuttle trip. We get to the precise atomic clocks and how they enable GPS.

Finally, we get to the tiniest most precise things manufactured by humans: microprocessors. Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs, but he came to Palo Alto to set up Shockley Transistors in 1956. His employees left to create Fairchild Semiconductors in 1957 and left again to form Intel in 1968. Now, we are down to atomic size of transistors that require EUV (Extreme UV) light to etch them and ASML is making these amazingly precise giant machines.

The book ends pondering about the human pursuit of precision and how we have almost reached the physical limits in this domain. There is an entertaining story about the history of Seiko and the creation of the metric/SI systems.

Simon Winchester is an old school story teller, and his writing delights with the use of vocabulary and language and he was able to engage me into each scientific tale. He researches all sorts of odd details about the scientists, their life and times to make the stories super interesting. Almost everything in this book was novel to me and thus I was thoroughly engaged.

Rating: 5/5

ISBN: 9780062652553

Excerpts

If you describe something with great accuracy, you describe it as closely as you possibly can to what it is, to its true value. If you describe something with great precision, you do so in the greatest possible detail, even though that detail may not necessarily be the true value of the thing being described.

The fact that the Harrison clocks were British-invented and their successor clocks firstly British-made allowed Britain in the heyday of her empire to become for more than a century the undisputed ruler of all the world’s oceans and seas. Precise-running clockwork made for precise navigation; precise navigation made for maritime knowledge, control, and power.

Every great advance replaces traditional complexities by a new simplicity.

Air was drawn in through a cavernous doorway at the front of the engine and immediately compressed, and made hot in the process, and was then mixed with fuel, and ignited. It was the resulting ferociously hot, tightly compressed, and controlled explosion that then drove the turbine, which spun its blades and then performed two functions. It used some of its power to drive the aforementioned compressor, which sucked in and squeezed the air, but it then had a very considerable fraction of its power left, and so was available to do other things, such as turn the propeller of a ship, or turn a generator of electricity, or turn the driving wheels of a railway locomotive, or provide the power for a thousand machines in a factory and keep them running, tirelessly.

Aurora

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:28:33 +0000

Aurora is the interstellar journey of a generation ship in the hopes of resettling on a moon of that name in the Tau Ceti system. This massive ship is designed as two massive rotating rings holding the different biomes from Earth. Devi, the main ship engineer is informally the leader, and she lives her entire life worrying over the innumerable problems on the ship that throws the delicate life cycle off-balance. The ship reaches Aurora and discovers a desolate land of extreme winds and water. Some of the humans land and start to explore, find a habitable place and start building the infrastructure necessary for permanent resettlement. Their hopes are dashed when mysterious prions start killing the visitors and they are not able to find a defense. There is a violent civil war on the ship between Stayers (who want to try living on a nearby moon Iris) and Backers (who want to return to Earth and supporters of Devi's daughter Freya). The ship's AI finally steps in to take control and the Backers end up helping the Stayers reach Iris and then begin their journey back to Earth. The ship has been falling apart since the demise of Devi and they only make it back thanks to the awakened AI and transmissions from Earth on the science of cryo sleep. When we finally reach the solar system, slowing down becomes an incredibly hard problem and the AI performs some amazing stunts to finally make it.

This is a hard sci-fi book of massive vision and scale by Kim Stanley Robinson. The long journey to Aurora and resettling there reminded me The Children of Time. The details of the ship structure, functioning and life aboard it reminded me of Rendezvous with Rama. What makes this book unique though are the real scientific, biological and social challenges of such space travel and settling and the humans deciding to return back to Earth. A lot of these problems are what A City on Mars cautions us about. There are a couple of great twists, when we discover that the narrator was the ship's AI all along, and when we discover that there had been a 2nd sister ship on this journey. What I found unsatisfying was how easily they gave up on the prions problem, the non-existence of a leadership structure on the ship and many long sections that could have been skipped. I still enjoyed the journey of this book, am amazed by Kim's thinking and would be reading more of his books.

Rating: 3/5

ISBN: 9780316098106

Excerpts

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.

Early dreams of terraforming Mars quickly, and thus having a second Earth to walk around on, had come to grief, mainly because of four physical factors overlooked in the first flush of optimistic plans: the surface of Mars was almost entirely covered by perchlorate salts, a form of chlorine salts that had given Devi fits as well, as only a few parts per billion gave humans terrible thyroid problems, and could not be endured. Worse yet, there turned out to be only a few parts per million of nitrates in the Martian soil and regolith, an odd feature of its original low elemental endowment of nitrogen, the reason for which was still a source of debate, but meanwhile, no nitrates, and thus no nitrogen available for the creation of an atmosphere. And so the terraforming plans were faced with a radical insufficiency. Then third, it was becoming clear that the fines on the Martian surface, having been milled by billions of years of drifting in the winds, were so much finer than dust particles on Earth that it was extremely difficult to keep them out of stations, machines, and human lungs; and they wreaked damage on all three. And last, the lack of a strong magnetic field meant that a thick atmosphere was really needed to intercept radiation from space, before the surface would be very safe for humans to be on.

"No starship voyage will work. This is an idea some of you have, which ignores the biological realities of the situation. We from Tau Ceti know this better than anyone. There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have captured your fancy, and perhaps these problems can be solved, but they are the easy ones. The biological problems cannot be solved. And no matter how much you want to ignore them, they will exist for the people you send out inside these vehicles. The bottom line is the biomes you can propel at the speeds needed to cross such great distances are too small to hold viable ecologies. The distances between here and any truly habitable planets are too great. And the differences between other planets and Earth are too great. Other planets are either alive or dead. Living planets are alive with their own indigenous life, and dead planets can't be terraformed quickly enough for the colonizing population to survive the time in enclosure. Only a true Earth twin not yet occupied by life would allow this plan to work, and these may exist somewhere, the galaxy after all is big, but they are too far away from us. Viable planets, if they exist, are simply too—far—away."

They Thought They Were Free

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:39:04 +0000

How do ordinary people support and participate in extraordinarily cruel movements like the Holocaust? This is what journalist Milton Mayer tried to find out in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, by talking to 10 normal people in the small town of Kronenburg a few years after the Nazis were defeated in World War 2. The people he interviews are truly working class in the town, such as student, baker, inspector, teacher, policeman, fireman. Starting from 1933 and until 1945, we see these people slowly exclude Jews from their social circles, start to agree with the stereotypes about Jews, participate in the burning down of the town's synagogue, turn a blind eye when their Jewish neighbors are sent away and silently benefit from the property and businesses of the Jews who are gone.

In these detailed interviews, we see that these people are not fanatics spewing hatred or venom. However, they truly believed in the national pride and sense of purpose that the Nazi movement brought, experienced improvements to their lives after the mismanagement of the Weimar Republic, and started to believe in the propaganda. We also see that Hitler turned the screw slowly over the years, little by little, making the people accept increasingly brutal acts as right. It also helps that most of the Holocaust brutality happens away from their eyes, so they are able to turn a blind eye to the disappearances.

With the increasing fascism, racism, nationalism around the world, this is a very pertinent read. It is a great idea to interview the actual people who lived through, willfully participated in the Nazi movement, learnt about the scale of the atrocities after the war ended and still believed they did no wrong. The author is able to get these people to open up and share their deepest secrets. However, after the first section of the interviews, the book spends a lot of time re-hashing interview content or delving into other content which I found to be distracting. A shorter tighter book would have had a potent message.

Rating: 3/5

ISBN: 022652583X

Excerpts

Man (says Erasmus) learns at the school of example and will attend no other.

Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany—not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.

I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. [...] If I—and my countrymen—ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm. For there is no harm that anyone else can do to a man that he cannot do to himself, no good that he cannot do if he will. And what was said long ago is true: Nations are made not of oak and rock but of men, and, as the men are, so will the nations be.

Foreigners speaking of the "National Socialist Party" miss the point, said the younger Schwenke; it was the National Socialist German Workers Party, "the party of the little men like me. The only other was the Communist." Emperor and Führer both required the consciousness of littleness in the Germans, but Führer, bringing bigness down, lifted littleness up.

When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, "Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did."

There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy.

A good man—even a good American—running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train; and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by.

The Nazi slogan in 1932 was, If you want your country to go Bolshevik, vote Communist; if you want to remain free Germans, vote Nazi.

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by "politics," which was only a cloak for corruption.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Starter Villain

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:47:29 +0000

Substitute teacher Charlie Fitzer is barely making ends meet in a Chicago suburb when he is contacted by Morrison, the assistant of his long lost uncle and billionaire Jake Baldwin. The uncle recently passed away, and in his will he is offering a new life to Charlie if he can handle his memorial service. It is at this memorial service that Charlie discovers that his rich uncle is not just a parking lot baron, but a super-villain. He is also shocked to discover that his pet cats Hera and Persephone are super-intelligent spies created by his uncle and can communicate with humans using keyboards. Charlie has to take over his uncle's villain business at his volcano island lair (where else?) in the Caribbean, deal with a labor dispute of super-intelligent dolphins and handle the other super-villains at their Lombardy Convocation.

Starter Villain is a funny, easy read by John Scalzi. Charlie's life in the suburbs and the initial initiation into the villain business are really witty. The whole "villainy as a business service" to the world is a clever idea. The second and third acts get pretty meh though, with the fallout of the Lombardy Convocation taking over the entire plot. The talking cats and the swearing dolphins are a cool idea, but they get boring fast. This is a good pick if you are looking for a light read to get out of a reading slump.

Rating: 3/5

ISBN: 9780765389220

Excerpts

"Your uncle is in parking garages because they fund his more important work," Morrison said. "Which is to seek out, fund and create the sort of technologies and services that bring disruptive change to existing industrial and social paradigms, and offer them, on a confidential basis, to interested businesses and governments." "That's a great mission statement," I said. "But it doesn't say what he actually did." HE WAS A VILLAIN, Hera typed.

"He was of the opinion that animals didn't have legal standing to form unions," Morrison said. "How do the cats feel about that?" "Most of them are in management."

And what I heard was that villains, at least for the purposes of this particular human resources presentation, were not bad people, and not evil people. What they were, were professional disrupters: the people who looked at systems and processes; found the weak spots, loopholes and unintended consequences of each of them; and then exploited them, either for their own advantage or the advantage of their client base. These activities, Yang explained, were neither inherently good nor bad in themselves—their "goodness" or "badness" was entirely dependent on the perspective of the observer.

"A stupid villain threatens, Charlie. A smarter villain offers a service."

Napoleon said it the best: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

Links of February 2026

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:50:08 +0000

The Bones of Children’s Mouths Are Being Wrenched Apart (The Atlantic): David Engber asks why "Everybody’s being told they have a narrow jaw, and everyone's being given an expander?" In the choice between expansion or extraction, the latter was what was practiced generally, until expansion took hold in the last decade. The secondary benefits of expansion on breathing and sleep apnea seem to be unproven. The only proven situation where expanders help is posterior crossbite, the article says.
The Robin Hood state is coming for the rich (The Economist): In America, the 1% paid 40% of income tax in 2022, up from 33% in 2001. The tax burden on America’s bottom, second, third and fourth quintiles--80% of the population--is far lower today than it was in the 1960s or 1970s.
Donald Trump’s schemes to juice the economy (The Economist): In a paper published in 2025, Nathaniel Hendren of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors estimated that $1 spent improving the IRS’s capacity to audit richer taxpayers yielded $12 in extra tax revenue. The richest 5% of people are responsible for about half of all unpaid taxes, estimates the Yale Budget Lab.
The killing of Mexico’s most powerful narco will please Donald Trump: Has a Mexico map showing violent events linked to organized crime.
Modernisation is making South-East Asia more Islamic: "Indonesia and Malaysia challenge an assumption that modernisation naturally leads to secularisation. Despite their economic progress, religiosity is intensifying, not weakening. This contradicts a pattern seen across East Asia and Europe, where economic development has correlated well with declining religious observance."
Anthropic says China’s AI tigers are copycats: "Today, cutting-edge models learn by trial and error, attempting tasks repeatedly and reinforcing only the approaches that work. That eats at the limited computing power of chip-constrained Chinese companies. Distillation helps. [...] Copycats can ask models to do tasks and simply harvest their solutions, without all the trial and error."

The Killing Moon

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 06:09:27 +0000

I felt a heavy influence of ancient Hindu mythology and culture (in a good way) as The Killing Moon drew me steadily into its dreamy fantasy world. The story is centered around the city-state of Gujareh, where terminally ill or corrupt people (dreamers) are visited by Gatherers who harvest their dreamblood and send them off into the Ina-Kareh afterlife. A famed Gatherer named Ehiru is training his acolyte Nijiri when he is asked to gather Sunandi, an ambassador from the neighboring land of Kisua. She reveals to him that she is innocent and that The Prince of Gujareh has been building warships and recruiting foreign soldiers in a bid to attack Kisua. Ehiru does not believe this initially, but the appearance of a brutally killing Reaper and some stunning discoveries change his mind. The trio become fugitives and try to warn Kisua before The Prince unleashes his darkest plans using dreamblood and the Reaper on the Kisua army.

Written by N. K. Jemisin this book is the first in the Dreamblood series. Her main innovation is narcomancy, the use of dreams and dreamblood as a magical potent force, and build an entire literary universe around it. (Reminds me of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.) The story is super intriguing with memorable characters, interesting stories and many dark surprises. I felt like she truly created a convincing alternate world steeped in its own language, words, myths, religion and culture. The fictional cultural names all felt like ancient Egypt or India and there was absolutely no Anglo fantasy vibe. All 3 acts were exciting, with the climactic battle ending in a whimper. But then, it also makes me want to read the 2nd book to see what else she has up her sleeve.

Rating: 4/5

A Gentleman in Moscow

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:47:53 +0000

Prepare to get lost on a most beautiful journey in A Gentleman in Moscow. We start a little after Lenin's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, with a Count (the gentleman of the title), being placed under house arrest at the prestigious Hotel Metropol in Moscow. He is forced to vacate his luxurious room and possessions and is moved to servant's room in the attic with his books. Accepting his fate with surprising calm, the Count settles down to live in the hotel the entire rest of his life!

Through his limited window into the outside world, we witness the Soviet Russia of 1922-1960, rise and fall of Stalin, the ups and downs of Russian life and its effect on the people coming through the hotel doors. We witness the Count's punctual and perfect lifestyle and etiquette, his vast knowledge of literature, history, culture and languages in intimate detail. He gets to enjoy a slice of fatherhood with the precocious "girl in yellow" Nina (or maybe relive his departed sister Helina). He watches as the fate of his old working class friend Mikhail rises and later falls with the great Communist experiment. Also throw in a love interest with the movie star Anna Urbanova. And finally all of his talents come to bear as he steps in to run the acclaimed restaurant at the hotel along with his chef friends Emile and Andrey. In a nailbiting climax, we ride along a thrilling escapade he plans for his god child and possibly his own escape?

From the first page to the last, this book by Amor Towles is an extremely joyful experience. We sample a seemingly infinite spectrum of foods, culture, language and etiquette. Through the hotel doors arrive an endless array of interesting characters who enter the Count's life and ours. And throw in the historical era of Russia this story is placed in and throw in a few delightful surprises. Every page drips with wise quotable quotes and made me taste them over and over again before moving on. All three acts are tight and even at 450+ pages, the story could have continued and I would have hung on. What we get is a multi-layered cake where every layer delights on its own and together it is a literary smorgasbord. Truly a great pleasurable novel, akin to a Dickens classic.

Rating: 5/5

ISBN: 9780670026197

Excerpts

We come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

Adversity presents itself in many forms; and that if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.

It was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one’s friends had no desire to venture in.

A new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.

"Manners are not like bonbons, Nina. You may not choose the ones that suit you best; and you certainly cannot put the half-bitten ones back in the box."

Pomp is a tenacious force. And a wily one too. How humbly it bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street. But then, having quietly bided its time, while helping the newly appointed leader on with his jacket, it compliments his appearance and suggests the wearing of a medal or two. Or, having served him at a formal dinner, it wonders aloud if a taller chair might not have been more fitting for a man with such responsibilities. The soldiers of the common man may toss the banners of the old regime on the victory pyre, but soon enough trumpets will blare and pomp will take its place at the side of the throne, having once again secured its dominion over history and kings.

If a room that exists under the governance, authority, and intent of others seems smaller than it is, then a room that exists in secret can, regardless of its dimensions, seem as vast as one cares to imagine.

The Bolsheviks assembled whenever possible in whichever form for whatever reason. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.

Fate would not have the reputation it has if it simply did what it seemed it would do.

What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.

When a man has been underestimated by a friend, he has some cause for taking offense—since it is our friends who should overestimate our capacities. They should have an exaggerated opinion of our moral fortitude, our aesthetic sensibilities, and our intellectual scope. Why, they should practically imagine us leaping through a window in the nick of time with the works of Shakespeare in one hand and a pistol in the other!

If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue.

With Chekhov and Tolstoy, we Russians have set the bronze bookends on the mantelpiece of narrative. Henceforth, writers of fictions from wheresoever they hail, will place themselves on the continuum that begins with the one and ends with the other. For who, I ask you, has exhibited better mastery of the shorter form than Chekhov in his flawless little stories? Precise and uncluttered, they invite us into some corner of a household at some discrete hour in which the entire human condition is suddenly within reach, if heartbreakingly so. While at the other extreme: Can you conceive of a work greater in scope than War and Peace? One that moves so deftly from the parlor to the battlefield and back again? That so fully investigates how the individual is shaped by history, and history by the individual? In the generations to come, I tell you there will be no new authors to supplant these two as the alpha and omega of narrative.

Jazz seemed a naturally gregarious force—one that was a little unruly and prone to say the first thing that popped into its head, but generally of good humor and friendly intent. In addition, it seemed decidedly unconcerned with where it had been or where it was going—exhibiting somehow simultaneously the confidence of the master and the inexperience of the apprentice.

There is nothing more essential to the enjoyment of a civilized lunch than to have a lively topic of conversation.

Unlike adults, children want to be happy. So they still have the ability to take the greatest pleasure in the simplest things.

Did he remember those days when his children were almost certainly six? When there was a pitter-pat in the hallways an hour before dawn? When every object smaller than an apple was nowhere to be found, until it was right underfoot? When books went unread, letters unanswered, and every train of thought was left incomplete?

"I gather you are an early riser, Alexander Ilyich," he said after a moment of silence. "Men of purpose usually are."

Every country has its grand canvas, the so-called masterpiece that hangs in a hallowed hall and sums up the national identity for generations to come. For the French it is Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; for the Dutch, Rembrandt’s Night Watch; for the Americans, Washington Crossing the Delaware; and for we Russians? It is a pair of twins: Nikolai Ge’s Peter the Great Interrogating Alexei and Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son. For decades, these two paintings have been revered by our public, praised by our critics, and sketched by our diligent students of the arts. And yet, what do they depict? In one, our most enlightened Tsar studies his oldest son with suspicion, on the verge of condemning him to death; while in the other, unflinching Ivan cradles the body of his eldest, having already exacted the supreme measure with a swing of the scepter to the head.

A room is the summation of all that has happened inside it.

It is the role of the parent to express his concerns and then take three steps back. Not one, mind you, not two, but three. Or maybe four. (But by no means five.) Yes, a parent should share his hesitations and then take three or four steps back, so that the child can make a decision by herself—even when that decision may lead to disappointment.

What matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.

The Melancholy of Resistance

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:00:11 +0000

The Melancholy of Resistance reminds me of the many torturous, but pointless pursuits that people excel in to enter the Guinness World Records. Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai takes us to a small town in cold winter. Trash is piling up on the streets, stray cats abound and a Mrs. Plauf has returned to her home by a much-delayed night train. In the next few days, the town is beset by numerous lurkers from neighboring towns who have arrived to scalp and watch a circus that has arrived in town with the body of a giant whale. As the women's commission head Mrs. Ezster jockeys for power, her home-bound husband Mr. Ezster and his simple-minded disciple Valuska try to feel out the changes in the town. The director of the circus and a mysterious leader The Prince lead the lurkers to ransack the town, and are put down by the army that rolls in with a tank.

The standout feature of this book is that every single page is a literal wall of text. The entire book is an endless stream of extremely long stream-of-thought sentences, with no breaks for paragraphs. If you look away for a moment, you cannot find your way back easily and if you read quickly, it feels breathless. This is probably the unique literary technique for which Lazlo got his Nobel. Unfortunately, just this literary style was not enough to justify the lack of any plot. The entire 300+ pages could be summarized in full detail in a few pages. This is because nothing really happens in the hundreds of pages, except for Mrs. Plauf's train journey at the start (which was somewhat interesting). The unending river of text does not really wow you with any detail, or imagination, and nor is there some twist or revelation at the end that makes the torture worth it. And I do not believe there is anything to fault here about the English translator George Szirtes either since the problem with the book is not the telling, but the lack of a tale of any consequence. This is one of those rare books which I would strongly recommend avoiding.

Rating: 2/5

ISBN: 9780811215046

Excerpts

Uncomprehendingly, and with a certain degree of envious contempt, she realized that her noisy fellow travellers—most likely coarse peasants from the darkest nooks and corners of distant villages—were quickly adapting themselves even to such straitened circumstances: to them it was as if nothing unusual had happened, everywhere there was the rustling of greaseproof paper being unwrapped and food being doled out, corks were popping, beer-can lids were dropping to the greasy floor, and here and there she could already hear that noise ‘so calculated to offend all one’s finer feelings’ but, in her opinion, ‘perfectly common among common people’ of munching and crunching; and what was more, the party of four directly opposite her, who were among the loudest, had already started dealing a deck of cards—till only she was left, solitary, sitting even more stiffly among the increasingly loud human hubbub, silent, her head determinedly turned to the window, her fur coat protected from the seat by a sheet of newspaper, clutching her clipped handbag to her with such terrified and resolute suspicion that she hardly noticed the engine up ahead, its two red lights probing the frozen darkness, drawing uncertainly out into the winter evening.

Mrs Eszter genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror, confining her to bed with the most shocking migraine and a strong tendency to bleed; one of that class, in other words, for whom cold, not the glowing fireplace, is the natural medium that offers protection from unremitting Evil, those who seem practically resurrected once terminal frost sets in and polar winds sweep round corners, for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats;

According to her convictions, if there was a bed, a wardrobe, a lamp and a basin, and if the roof didn’t leak in ‘the living unit’, all possible human needs were satisfied.

He confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters.

They proclaimed that the period they were living in was ‘an unfathomable hell between a treacherous future and an unmemorable past’.

Our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars.

Links of January 2026

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:33:49 +0000

What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now?: 3 things online that parents need to be careful for their kids: online gambling, Roblox and AI chatbots. I see online gambling video ads on Tubi every day and it is frankly disgusting that this home-wrecking activity is so freely being allowed online.

Movies and TV of 2026

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 02:42:43 +0000

Movies

Species

This is one of those movies that was famous in my teenage years for obvious reasons and it was interesting to see it again as an adult. SETI scientists receive a reply from space with DNA information and scientists use that to create a human/alien hybrid named Sil (Natasha Henstridge). She breaks free, going around LA mating with guys in order to reproduce and spawn, while she is hunted by a team of Ben Kingsley and some decent actors. The movie hits a niche of multiple genres (sci-fi/erotic/horror), there are some great surprising moments and is still intriguing to watch today.

Rating: 4/5

Species II

The sequel to Species starts off well - astronauts on the first mission to Mars get infected by the same alien pathogens as the first movie. The lead astronaut (a male this time), goes around mating with women, while the scientists (who seem to have learnt no lesson from the first movie) have created a second Sil (played by Natasha Henstridge again). This movie gets more and more bizarre as it goes along, with the astronaut reproducing 20-something boys who he keeps in some desolate ranch house so they can get into the cocoon stage. The plot is god-awful absurd, the dialogue is terrible and there is nothing redeemable in this movie.

Rating: 2/5

The Fugitive

Harrison Ford is an acclaimed Chicago surgeon who runs into an one-armed attacker at home and finds his wife dead. He escapes from his death sentence when the prison bus has an accident. He is now a fugitive on the run from Tommy Lee Jones, all the while trying to find the one-armed killer with a prosthetic arm and his motive for killing his wife. This movie is thrilling from start to finish, never resting for a minute, all the while keeping the viewer guessing.

Rating: 5/5

Mary Poppins

Our family was delighted and entertained by this 1964 children's classic by Disney. The story and characters are based on the children's books by P. L. Travers. However, the fantastic songs and music are totally original and created for the movie by the Sherman Brothers. Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke as Bert and the delightful children Jane and Michael are all wonderfully cast. The story is set in 1910 London and taken in that context, the movie has not aged at all. A parent discovering how he is neglecting playing with his children is a timeless message.

Rating: 5/5

An Immense World

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:39:01 +0000

Back in 2022, I read an article in The Atlantic by Ed Yong about the disruption to wildlife from the light pollution created by humans. It was an excerpt from his book An Immense World and the article was so fascinating that I knew I had to read the book, which I got around to doing only now.

The main idea of the book is that we perceive the world through our umwelt, a tiny slice of the outside sensory world for which our sense organs are acutely sensitive to. Every animal has its own unique umwelt, defined by its unique set of sense organs, so we (humans) will never be capable of experiencing how a bee or a bird or a whale experiences its surroundings. The book spends a chapter each on the well known senses like smell, taste, light, color, and sound. But what it sets apart is it also delves into sensing of pain, heat, contact, flow, surface vibrations, echoes, electric fields and magnetic fields which many animals can do.

Ed dives deep into the latest research findings in each of these many senses, showing us an amazing diversity of organs that different animals have developed and how they are able to perceive these complex signals to live, eat, reproduce and survive. He supplies a seemingly endless series of surprising facts and discoveries, far beyond anything I previously known about. Along with the researchers he interviews, we travel to every corner of our planet, through jungles, deserts and oceans. As a former researcher, I am always fascinated with the clever experiments these scientists devise to discover these findings.

This is a thoroughly researched, beautifully (almost poetic) written book. Ed avoids 1 of the 2 sins I have found pop-sci books to commit, i.e., confidently stating still-new discoveries as fact. However, he still falls prey to the other sin of sharing every single thing he has learnt. Sorry, I do not want a reference book of a thousand facts and discoveries, which he ends up doing in 450 pages. It would have been a zinger of a book at half its length, if he had focused on a select few amazing animal abilities in each of the sensory chapters.

Rating: 4/5

ISBN: 9780593133231

Excerpts

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

To sense the world, animals detect stimuli -- quantities like light, sound, or chemicals -- and convert them into electrical signals, which travel along neurons toward the brain. The cells that are responsible for detecting stimuli are called receptors: Photoreceptors detect light, chemoreceptors detect molecules, and mechanoreceptors detect pressure or movement. These receptor cells are often concentrated in sense organs, like eyes, noses, and ears. And sense organs, together with the neurons that transmit their signals and the parts of the brain that process those signals, are collectively called sensory systems. The visual system, for example, includes the eyes, the photoreceptors inside them, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex of the brain. Together, these structures give most of us the sense of sight.

John James Audubon, the avid naturalist and artist, was best known for painting North America's birds, and compiling those pieces into a seminal ornithological tome.

Look inside the eyes of a jumping spider, a human, or any other animal, and you'll find light-detecting cells called photoreceptors. They contain proteins called opsins. Every animal that sees does so with opsins, which work by tightly embracing a partner molecule called a chromophore, usually derived from vitamin A. The chromophore can absorb the energy from a single photon of light. When it does, it instantly snaps into a different shape, and its contortions force its opsin partner to reshape itself, too. The opsin's transformation then sets off a chemical chain reaction that ends with an electrical signal traveling down a neuron. This is how light is sensed.

Animals can achieve sharper vision by having smaller and more densely packed photoreceptors. But each receptor now collects light over a smaller area and is thus less sensitive. These qualities—sensitivity and resolution—seesaw against each other. No eye can excel at both. An eagle might be able to spot a far-off rabbit in broad daylight, but its acuity plummets as the sun sets. (There are no nocturnal eagles.) Conversely, lions and hyenas might not be able to resolve a zebra's stripes at a distance, but their vision is sensitive enough to hunt one at night.

It takes time for photoreceptors to react to incoming photons, and for the electrical signals they generate to travel to the brain. In killer flies, evolution has pushed these steps to their limits. When Gonzalez-Bellido shows these insects an image, it takes just 6 to 9 milliseconds for their photoreceptors to send electrical signals, for those signals to reach their brains, and for their brains to send commands to their muscles. By contrast, it takes between 30 and 60 milliseconds for human photoreceptors to accomplish just the first of those steps. If you looked at an image at the same moment as a killer fly, the insect would be airborne well before a signal had even left your retina.

Imagine looking at a light that flickers on and off. As the flickering gets faster, there will come a point when the flashes merge into a steady glow. This is called the critical flicker-fusion frequency, or CFF. It's a measure of how quickly a brain can process visual information. For humans, in good light, the CFF is around 60 frames per second. For most flies, it's up to 350. To its eyes, a human movie would look like a slideshow.

Most “color-blind” people are also dichromats, because they're missing one of the three usual cones. They still see colors, albeit in a narrower range.

Our experience of pain depends on a class of neurons called nociceptors. The naked tips of these neurons pervade our skin and other organs. They are loaded with sensors that detect harmful stimuli—intense heat or cold, crushing pressures, acids, toxins, and chemicals released by injuries and inflammation.

A region [of the brain] called the somatosensory cortex deals with touch. Different sections of the somatosensory cortex receive inputs from different parts of the body, and the relative size of these sections can hint at an animal's major tactile organs. In humans, the hands, lips, and genitals are most heavily represented.

All of these creatures create and respond to vibrations that travel along the surfaces around them, whether branch or beach. Scientists call these substrate-borne vibrations.

Ears can have exceptional temporal resolution or exceptional pitch sensitivity, but not both. “The auditory system that does fast stuff is completely different from the auditory system that does frequency stuff”.

It is no wonder that bats are so successful. They're found on every continent except Antarctica, and they account for one in every five mammal species.

The strange ability of electric fish became known as active electrolocation. The electric organ in the fish's tail is like a small battery. When it switches on, it creates an electric field that envelops the animal. Current flows through the water from one end of the electric organ to the other. Nearby conductors, like animals (whose cells are essentially bags of salty liquid), increase the flow of that current. Insulators, like rocks, reduce it. The fish can detect these differences using sensory cells called electroreceptors.

Whenever lightning strikes the ground, electric charge moves upward, so the upper atmosphere ends up with a positive charge and the planet's surface with a negative one. This is the atmospheric potential gradient—a strong electric field that stretches from sky to ground. Even on calm, sunny days, the air carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter off the ground.

The geomagnetic field envelops the entire planet and guides animals over migrations that can span continents. Magnetoreception remains the sense that we know least about, even though its existence was confirmed decades ago.

This is how science is meant to work. Scientists check each other's findings by repeating each other's experiments, building upon what can be replicated and debunking what cannot.

When animals move, their sense organs provide two kinds of information. There's exafference, signals produced by stuff happening in the world. There's also reafference, signals produced by an animal's own actions.

When an animal decides to move, its nervous system issues a motor command -- a set of neural signals that tell its muscles what to do. But on its way to the muscles, this command is duplicated. The copy heads to the sensory systems, which use it to simulate the consequences of the intended movement. When the movement actually occurs, the senses have already predicted the self-produced signals that they are about to experience. And by comparing that prediction against reality, they can work out which signals are actually coming from the outside world and react to them appropriately.

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:40:05 +0000

I first read Arundhati Roy when she published Walking with the Comrades in the Outlook magazine. I came away truly impressed not just with this crazy revealing journey she took, but also with the quiet power and impact in her writing. In her amazing ability to wield the English language in a completely new way that grabbed me by the throat. That ability continues in her latest memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me. This is a book written about her mother Mary Roy and the junior's complicated and strained relationship with her. But what the book actually is, is the closest we will get to an autobiography of Arundhati Roy, since she covers her entire life in the book.

The mother is a steely woman, who quickly separates from her drunkard husband in Assam's tea estates and moves back to her father's home in Ooty with toddler Arundhati and her older brother. She is later kicked out from there by her mother and brother and ends up back in her home town of Kottayam. Mother Mary has a volcanic temper and attitude that erupts on everybody, but especially on her children. She starts a school there that ends up being her life's work, as it expands and becomes highly successful. Arundhati is surrounded by a bunch of highly talented and accomplished aunts and uncles, probably from whom she gets her talent with the English language. Not being able to tolerate her mother's torture, she leaves to Delhi to study architecture at the first chance she gets. Her travails in the Delhi school of architecture, lead her to screenwriting and movies and finally to writing. On the way she also gets involved in political activism, which is where we find Arundhati today. Though a violent character, Arundhati continuously acknowledges that it is her mother who gave her excellent education, language skills, and a bold temperament, having fought the Travancore Christian Succession Act all the way to the Supreme Court and won it.

The book is easy and fast to read. Arundhati's life is broken down into chapters that are short and easy to finish. The writing has her usual quiet dark humor, about her mother, herself, her relatives, friends and the general state of India. The author does reveal (mostly anonymously) about her first crushes, her multiple partners in her life and also the men who harassed her. I clearly felt like this book was the collection of details of her own life and opinions on her mother that she had to get out of her system. While her mother is interesting, it is Arundhati's life itself that is far more colorful, having taken surprising turns at every corner.

Rating: 4/5

ISBN: 9781668094716

Excerpts

I have seen and written about such sorrow, such systemic deprivation, such unmitigated wickedness, such diverse iterations of hell, that I can only count myself among the most fortunate. I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself.

I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible. Once I left, I didn’t see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew.

I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination—and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.

To bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she left for those whose lives she touched and the thorns she set down for me, like little floaters in my bloodstream--fishhooks that still catch on soft tissue as my blood makes its way to and from my heart—is why I write this book. It is as hard to write as it is not to.

I think those years in Ooty were harder for him than for me because he remembered things. He remembered a better life. He remembered our father and the big house we had lived in on the tea estate. He remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn’t.

In these strange and manifold ways, this constellation of extraordinary, eccentric, cosmopolitan people, defeated by life, converged on the tiny village of Ayemenem.

In the Rotary Club my brother and I would help Mrs. Mathews and my mother to sweep up the cigarette butts and clear away the dirty cups and glasses left by the members. (All men, of course. To whom it would never occur to clean or clear away anything.)

Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding. On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.

The Naxalite movement was quickly crushed, but every now and then it rose (rises) in another part of the country. It’s like a dreadful thermometer that takes our temperature from time to time and tells us how sick we are.

Like most people in the world, then as well as now, we grew up between shouting and silence. Some of us made up our own minds, others had their minds made up for them.

She kept her married name she said because choosing between a husband’s name and a father’s name didn’t leave a woman much of a choice.

I sat on the steps exhausted and oddly relieved. My brother appeared from nowhere and sat next to me. The silence sat between us like a third person. A well-loved friend.

My education, the class I came from, and, above all, the fact that I spoke English protected me and gave me options that millions of others did not have. Those were gifts bestowed on me by Mrs. Roy. At no point, no matter how untenable my circumstance, did I ever forget that.

I didn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate Delhi’s male commuters who thought of women passengers as snacks they could help themselves to whenever they felt like it. The indignity made me oscillate between self-pity and violent fantasies of vengeance. There were days when I would get off a bus mid-journey and walk, hating myself for the tears of shame and rage I could not control. Millions of women put up with this every day.

I said goodbye and shook the hands of those who had hands to shake.

Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds. Kipling, Shakespeare, the opening passage of Lolita, G. Isaac’s sentences purloined from Joyce’s Ulysses—“Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir”—streaked like comets across my reading sky. I waited for “crude sunlight on her lemon streets” (which never came) and mornings that would qualify as “rosy-fingered dawn” (which did). I shuddered at the thought of Leopold Bloom slipping a kidney wrapped in paper into his pocket and taking it home for his wife’s faintly urine-scented breakfast.

Even then I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. By mine I don’t mean mother tongue, and by language I don’t mean English, Hindi, or Malayalam, I mean a writer’s language. Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn’t a nonviolent, vegetarian dream.

Micky and Mary Roy. Thinking about them as a couple makes me laugh. I cannot imagine them being married for even five minutes, let alone five years. Which God, which stars, in which heaven made that happen? He, defeated in every possible way. She, successful, admired, and loved—adored—in every possible way. His spirit so light and rascally. Hers so heavy, so unhappy. But often, in her own way, extremely naughty, too. Their paths must have crossed while she was angrily rolling her rock uphill and he was cheerfully hurtling downhill with his.

Indian mothers and their obsession with their sons. They’ll blindside you. Come at you from every angle. Even if they criticize their sons, quarrel with them, they cannot see beyond them.

It was a clear, beautiful night. We passed a buffalo cart with a lantern tied behind it for a taillight. The driver of the cart was lying on his back, singing to the stars, confident that his buffalo would take him home. I remember feeling jealous of him. I remember thinking that no matter how long and hard we fought, in India no woman of any religion, class, caste, or creed would ever feel safe enough to sing to the stars on a lonely highway while her buffalo took her home.

Houses--inherited houses--own people and not the other way around.

I wasn’t Christian enough. I wasn’t Hindu enough. I wasn’t communist enough. I wasn’t enough.

Cat's Cradle

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:49:21 +0000

I got a second taste this year of Kurt Vonnegut's dark humor with Cat's Cradle. The story is narrated by Jonah, a writer who is interested in the life of the now-deceased scientist Felix Hoenikker, who apparently gave the world the atom bomb and has also bequethed his 3 children Ice-Nine which can freeze all water that it touches. We learn that Felix was a recluse and unempathetic person and meet his 3 children: Angela, Newton and Frank. The narrator ends up taking a plane ride to the Carribean island nation of San Lorenzo, where Frank has become the 2nd in line to the island's aging dictator General Papa Lorenzo. A series of crazy events on that dirt-poor island lead to Jonah becoming the next leader and ends up freezing the entire world over!

The entire book is written as small chapters of a page each, so reading it feels fast and easy. Most of the characters in this story are influenced by a religion named Bokononism and its crazy edicts and practices pervade and entertain. The plot is a dark sarcastic look at dictatorships, American neo-colonialism, capitalism, religions and cults, and the inhumaness of scientific progress. It is written in a style that is truly unique to Vonnegut and much like his Player Piano is very unpredictable and enjoyable.

Rating: 4/5

ISBN: 9780385333481

Excerpts

The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."

"Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead."

"Back in Chicago, we don't make bicycles any more. It's all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan."

The major point at which his reason and his sense of humor left him was when he approached the question of what people were really supposed to do with their time on Earth. He believed firmly that they were meant to build bicycles for him.

The Jakarta Method

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:52:27 +0000

It is no secret that USA meddles in the affairs of poorer non-Western nations for its own gains, not hesitating to tear down democratically elected leaders and propping up dictators. The Jakarta Method delves into the horrific details of one such meddling in the early years of independent Indonesia in the 1960s and how the US would apply a similar method in many nations around the world.

After World War 2, Sukarno and Hatta ended the 300-year colonial rule of the Dutch and formed Indonesia in 1945. Over the next 2 decades, the democracy would have the world's 3rd largest Communist party (PKI) participating in elections. Sukarno and Indonesia also played a pivotal role in the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) along with Nehru. The CIA and the US state department were vary of the Communist rise in East Asia and were taking an active role in curbing it. In Indonesia, the CIA dropped bombs and provided arms to anti-communist rebels.

On 30 Sep 1964, there was an alleged coup attempt by a few Communist-aligned army generals. General Suharto, allegedly helped by US, took charge that day, had the generals killed and kicked off a mass murder of all pro-PKI citizens. By March, Sukarno had handed over the reins of the nation to Suharto. In these months, almost 1 million people suspected of being pro-PKI would be killed and PKI would be ended forever. Soon after, US businesses were allowed to enter the nation, especially in the exploitation of natural resources. Though the coup attempt is widely publicized in Indonesia to this day, the scale of the following massacre is hidden. No truth commission or national reconciliation process would ever be held in the nation about this.

Written by journalist Vincent Bevins the book is based on the accounts of the survivors of that massacre and de-classified State department documents. Bevins further describes how this Jakarta Method of quelling Communist forces would be applied by the CIA around the world in Brazil and South America, in Central America and Africa. Since I have traveled in Indonesia before, I was surprised by how this massacre is covered up in the nation. This method continues to be employed to this day, however only in non-Western nations, while Western European nations live freely. I liked the fact that this book reveals the post-WW2 histories of many nations of the world. It also showed how a majority of the world's population was and continues to be interested in charting their own destiny, and not being aligned with US or Russia. A real problem with this book though, is the extreme sympathetic brush with which the author paints the Communist forces of Russia/China, constantly describing them as innocent bystanders in the world geopolitics.

Rating: 3/5

ISBN: 9781541724006

Excerpts

The United States, a Western European settler colony in North America, emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state on Earth. This was a surprise to most Americans, and to most of the world.

Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population.

The First World consisted of the rich countries in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, all of which had gotten wealthy while engaging in colonialism. The “Second World” was the Soviet Union and the European territories where the Red Army had set up camp. And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.

In 1948, on the island of Java, independence forces were battling an army that had arrived from the Netherlands in the attempt to reconquer its colonies in Southeast Asia. They had lost this vast archipelago to the Japanese during World War II, and refused to recognize the government set up by locals in 1945. During the war of independence, right-leaning republican forces clashed with communists within the revolutionary movement around the city of Madiun, East Java. The communists were defeated, with the support of independence leader Sukarno, and the head of the Indonesian Communist Party was killed in what became known as the Madiun Affair. The huge nation that Sukarno would go on to lead after the Dutch were finally expelled in 1949, now called Indonesia, was seen as willing enough to put down communist uprisings to be of long-term advantage of the United States.

Whatever their reasons, the United States established a reputation as a frequent and violent intruder into the affairs of independent nations.

But to Eisenhower, Wisner, and the Dulles brothers, Sukarno’s behavior was no joke. For them, by now, neutralism itself was an offense. Anyone who wasn’t actively against the Soviet Union must be against the United States, no matter how loudly he praised Paul Revere.

Throughout the course of the CIA’s history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The Agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the Agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess.

This new approach dovetailed with a growing consensus within the United States that the military should be given more power and influence in the Third World, even if it meant undermining democracy. In the 1950s, an academic field of study called Modernization Theory began to gain influence in Washington. In its basic approach, Modernization Theory replicated the Marxist formulation that societies progress through stages; but it did so in a way that was highly influenced by the anticommunist, liberal American milieu in which it emerged. The social scientists who pioneered the field put forward that “traditional,” primitive societies would advance through a specific set of stages, ideally arriving at a version of “modern” society that looked a whole lot like the United States.

Brazil imported almost five million human beings from Africa, far more than the United States did, and equal to almost half of all slaves brought to the Americas. Just as in the US, enslavement in Brazil was unimaginably cruel. In addition to the whip, stocks, and iron collars studded with spikes to prevent escape, slave owners affixed iron masks, which prevented the slaves from committing suicide by shoving earth into their own mouths.

It was very clear to Francisca why Europeans were allowed to experiment with social democracy and even communist politics, while her country had been taken away from her forever. “Racism, very simply. White Europeans are offered tolerance and sympathetic treatment, while we are not.”

The United States dropped three times the tonnage on Cambodia that fell on Japan during World War II, atom bombs included.

To put down the freedom fighters, the Indonesian Armed Forces killed up to 300,000 people. From 1975 to 1979, while both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter sat in the White House, Washington’s closest ally in Southeast Asia annihilated up to a third of the population of East Timor, a higher percentage than those who died under Pol Pot in Cambodia.

The Round House

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 17:44:13 +0000

The Round House is set in an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in the 1980s. The story is Joe's recolletion of his 13th summer, when his mother Geraldine returns home from a violent sexual assault and an attempt on her life. Traumatized, his mother does not speak or leave her bedroom, leaving it to Joe and his lawyer dad Bazil to figure out who they know in the reservation did this. This time is also a prime summer in this teenager's life and he has great adventures on the reservation with his buddy Cappy, plays tricks on the Catholic priest Travis, they fall in love with the visiting missionary girl Zalia, act out their crushes on older women, and participate in their community's secret rituals. In the end, Joe finds the attacker, and needs to make the decision of whether to kill him himself.

Written by native American author Louise Erdrich this novel is less of a whodunit and more of a coming-of-age story steeped in the reservation life, history and practices. I have been fortunate to have read Bad Indians and A Council of Dolls recently and so their grounding helped me fully experience the telling here. Louise is masterful at pulling us into intriguing people and events, while the genocidal elimination, oppressed history of her people, the influence of forced Catholic conversion, Catholic boarding school, poverty and alcoholism in reservation life loom silently in the background. The real shocker of the book is the powerless justice system in the reservations, since the US justice system does not allow them to prosecute non-Native people who commit crimes on reservation grounds. The characters all get their own interesting back stories and so remain memorable. Native American way of speaking, native names, words, are all weaved naturally into the writing. None of the conversations are double quoted in this book, which was a surprise. I think this was a great book, not just about Native American life and tragedy, but also rich enough to let me soak again in my childhood summer memories.

Rating: 4/5

Excerpts

They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth.

When you are little, you do not know that you are screaming or crying—your feelings and the sound that comes out of you is all one thing. I remember that I opened my mouth, that is all, and that I did not shut it until I was back with Mom.

My mother was up, in the bathroom making brushing and washing sounds. I listened to the shower water rattle down. The hotel curtains were so heavy I didn’t know that it was pouring outside too. One of those rare August rains that tamp down the dust flares on the roads had just begun. A rain that washes the whitened dust-coated leaves. A rain that fills the cracks in the earth and revives the brown grasses. That grows the corn by a foot and makes a second cutting of hay possible. A gentle rain that lasts for days. There was a chill in the air that persisted all the way home. My mother drove with the windshield wipers going. The coziest of sounds to a boy drowsing in the backseat. My father stayed alert beside my mother, covered with a quilt. From time to time I’d open my eyes, just to see them. He had his hand across the seat, resting on her leg above the knee. Occasionally she took one hand off the wheel, reached down, and rested her hand on top of his.

As happens sometimes drifting out of an unexpected sleep, I did not know exactly where I was. I kept my eyes closed. My mother’s voice and the childhood sensation of her hand stroking my ankle, which was always how she woke me, flooded me with peace. I allowed my consciousness to sink to an even younger hiding place where nothing could touch me.

Every Living Thing

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 23:33:09 +0000

Every Living Thing is a popular science book about the 18th century race to classify and name all natural life and the rivalry between naturalists Buffon and Linnaeus.

From Sweden, we have the pompous Linnaeus who published the Systema Naturae (The System of Nature) in 1735. He created a 5-level hierarchy to classify all known plants and animals divided into kingdoms, classes, orders, families and species. He would spend the rest of his life refining this classification system and classifying all the new species that were being discovered around the world. In hindsight, his most controversial move would be to divide humans into 4 races to which he attached stereotypical characteristics.

In France of the same era, we have eminent naturalist Buffon who started publishing volumes of his epic Histoire Naturelle in 1749. By the time of his death, this included a massive 36 volumes and would set him as the most prominent naturalist of that century. He was not only the first naturalist to write about hundreds of species in exquisite illustrated detail, but he also questioned the Linnaean taxonomy, racial categorization of humans, slavery, virginity, evolution, extinction and the Genesis.

These two naturalists would fight a battle of thoughts through most of this century while pushing the boundaries of natural discovery and the creation of whole new areas of science. The book also goes into the French revolution and the rise in popularity of Linnaeus after that. It also put into perspective Darwin, Huxley, Mendel and the arrival of evolution at the gates of science.

This book by Jason Roberts is thoroughly referenced and detailed and is in a similar vein to The Discovery of Nature which is about Humboldt. I loved that it helped place all of these happenings in natural history in the right historical context. I also learnt a ton of etymology behind the common words in science and their historical origins. Buffon's work and life is unbelievably massive and it is not surprising that he is considered France's most eminent man of science. The book has a lot of the illustrations of the men and the creatures of that era, but I felt that it could have used more. The biggest problem is that, yet again, we have an author who knows too much and forces us to read about every single acquaintance, correspondence and happening of their lives. This book could have been condensed down from its 400 pages down to 300 easily and would have been a fantastic recommendation.

Rating: 3/5

Excerpts

Buffon famously read drafts aloud to friends, asked them to paraphrase what they heard, then rewrote anything muddled or misunderstood, a process he repeated up to seventeen times for a single chapter. "Good writing is good thinking, good awareness, and good execution, all at once" was his dictum.

To say that Histoire Naturelle was a bestseller is an understatement. Hailed as both a landmark of science and a work of literature, it was a publishing phenomenon that made Buffon the most popular nonfiction author in French history. Each new volume’s release sparked a flurry of sales and a round of public debate.

The family had no name. This was common in rural Sweden, where surnames were rarely necessary; one’s lifelong presence on ancestral land served as identity enough. Most males, when required to provide one, adopted the simple patronymic of adding -son to their father’s given name, a practice that would eventually populate Sweden with a healthy percentage of Johannsons, Petersons, and Svensons. But in the fall of 1690, a sixteen-year-old named Nils made a different choice. Instead of becoming Nils Ingemarsson, he decided to commemorate his family’s tree by adopting the surname Linnaeus. It meant “man of the linden tree,” not in Swedish but in Latin.

Many professional scholars adopted Latin versions of their surnames, which is why Michel de Nostredame is better known as Nostradamus, and why Nikolaj Kopernik is remembered as Nicolaus Copernicus.

Aside from a few items such as tincture of opium, drugs in the modern sense of the term did not exist. In their place was an arsenal of salves, poultices, elixirs, and other concoctions collectively known as physicks, a term that gave rise to calling the doctors who applied them "physicians."

One of the books he’d read during his Dijon self-exile was Analysis of the Infinitely Small, an early French treatise on the new mathematics of calculus. It was his first encounter with Sir Isaac Newton.

In the Europe of 1731, higher education remained rooted in the practical. The professor of mathematics, for instance, taught the subject of geometry through the task of building fortresses, then through an analysis of artillery trajectories needed to destroy them. Learning not only had purpose at its core, it was also demarcated differently. Today we make distinctions between sciences and humanities, but in Buffon’s time the great division was between history and philosophy. Both words had very different meanings than they have today. In the modern sense, history means "things that happened in the past," while philosophy means "concepts and ideas relevant to existence." At the time, history meant all that was tangible, occurring in observable reality—things as well as events. Conversely, philosophy concerned itself with the intangible—ideas and principles, which might manifest themselves in the physical world but exist on their own as abstractions. History and philosophy were in turn bisected by a single criterion: whether or not they pertained to humans. The word natural was applied to all non-human phenomena. This reflected an important divide in the perceived nature of knowledge. Botany and zoology, both studies of living things, came under the rubric of "natural history," a label that also encompassed astronomy (the sky above) and mineralogy (the earth below). Yet theorizing—seeking to understand why life manifested and behaved as it did—belonged to the entirely different discipline of "natural philosophy," where it kept company with mathematics and what we know today as physics. Natural historians surveyed and catalogued, leaving principles to be discerned by natural philosophers. The quantitative and the qualitative were separate realms.

What happens when you can’t count all possible outcomes? Buffon invited his audience to imagine a needle tossed onto a square-tiled floor. What are the odds of it landing so that it intersects a tile’s edge? Calculating all the permutations, every single possible site and angle of a dropped needle, becomes a task that quickly approaches infinity. Does that mean the odds are unknowable? Not at all, Buffon asserted. Take an entire box of needles and dump them on the floor, he directed, so that they scatter in a single layer. Count the number of needles crossing a tile, then gather them up. Toss and count them again. Repeat a dozen times, or a hundred. Average up the results of each toss and count, and you begin to arrive at an approximation. The full power of Buffon’s insight, however, became clear when he pointed out the process could be reversed. Want to count all the needles in a very large box? Instead of laboriously tallying them all, it’s a much quicker matter to scatter them all on the tiles, then count only the intersecting ones.

Our current popular understanding [of the word species] is that it means a particular kind of lifeform that exists as a distinct population, one capable of propagating itself over time. To Linnaeus’s generation, the concept was far more fluid. The word is simply Latin for "appearance." When a botanist used the term species in 1729, it was a shorthand for "plants that have this appearance."

We take as a given that each species has a representative population, and that this population is subject to change. If meaningful differences arise in the population [of a species] over a long span of generations we call that process evolution. If evolution produces profound enough changes, we declare that population a new and different species. If a population no longer maintains itself, we say the species ends. This process we call extinction.

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, establishes a strict sequence for the arrival of life. It attests that after spending the initial day separating darkness from light, God devoted the second day to raising up dry land, naming it Earth, and willing into existence the very first lifeforms: "plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." Summoning "two great lights" (the sun and moon), adding stars, and fixing them in the appropriate places occupied the third day. On the fourth day, to populate the newly wrought sea and sky, "God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind." Land-based creatures were the sixth day's agenda, "the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind." Later that day, the Lord capped off His work by creating humans, then bidding them to "fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." Plants and trees on the second day. Birds, fish, and sea monsters on the fourth. All other organisms on the sixth. By the dawn of the seventh day, Creation was complete. Thereafter the tableau of existence was static.

In Systema Naturae, Linnaeus divided his subject into 3 kingdoms. "Minerals grow; Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and have feeling," he wrote. He broke animals into classes—fish, birds, amphibians, insects. Drilling down further, he made divisions based on a prominent physical characteristic—the size and shape of birds’ beaks, for instance—which he called orders. He further clustered these into groupings based on physical similarities, which he termed genera (plural of genus, a Latin word meaning "family" or "type"). Finally he arrived at the specific: the category he labeled species, meaning that which could be represented by a single individual organism. Kingdoms, classes, orders, genus, species. Linnaeus firmly believed that these five nested boxes sufficed to contain all animal life.

On the fifth and final hierarchy—the level of species—Linnaeus applied only single-word names. For humans, Linnaeus did not choose the Latin word Humanus but instead Homo, a word the Romans had cribbed from the Greeks, literally meaning "of the same" but understood in Latin as "man." Of the 549 species described in the first edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus knew Homo was the most controversial listing of all. It was treading in dangerous waters to place humans in the animal kingdom, much less in the same genus as sloths and baboons.

The 78-page 2nd edition included anteaters alongside the sloths, monkeys, apes, and humans in the order Anthropomorpha. Far more significantly, the description of the species Homo now included the phrase homo variat: Man varies. What followed were four fateful entries: Europaeus albus (White European), Americanus rubescens (Red American), Asiaticus fuscus (Tawny Asian), and Africanus niger (Black African).

In september of 1749, the first three volumes of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle arrived at booksellers throughout France. The volumes were hefty (417,600 words long, spread across 1,600 cumulative pages), handsomely bound and printed, and bearing the pedigree of the king’s own Imprimerie Royale. Yet despite their length and detail, they examined only a single animal (horse). After an opening salvo on systemists in general and Linnaeus in particular, Buffon spent most of the first volume and all of the second putting forth his theories of the Earth’s formation and development It was not until the third volume that he took up the subject of what Linnaeus had labeled class Quadrupedia, order Anthropomorphia, species Homo.

It was an act of what he confessed as “pérsiflage,” a flattering but patently insincere flutter of words. The incident inspired one of Buffon’s more famous quips: “It is better to be humble than be hung.”

As to the names themselves, Linnaeus established a new structure. Each would henceforth contain two parts: a generic name, identifying the genus, and a specific name unique to the species. To strictly enforce hierarchy as identity, to sweep away all linguistic flourishes in favor of a simple two-part label—that was an innovation that set natural history on the steel rails of standardization.

Adanson unveiled his system of reforming taxonomical names. It operated on 3 principles, which he dubbed the “rules of appointment.” Rule 1: Use the historically oldest name for a species you can find. Rule 2: Name a genus after its most common or best-known species. Rule 3: Standardize spellings and pronunciation.

To Buffon, the essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. “The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial,” he concluded. “The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock.”

Asserting extinction as fact was controversy enough—again, orthodoxy held that the death of an entire species would imply a flaw, an error, in God’s perfect creation. But Buffon pressed on, insulating what he knew to be dangerous ideas by making them islands of text in a sea of general observations about ospreys and otters. As he put it in a private letter to a friend, “One can slip ideas into a quarto volume which would cause a public outcry if they appeared in a pamphlet.”

"Men argue. Nature acts." - Voltaire

Under the Midnight Sun

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:56:54 +0000

I am always up for a Keigo Higashino mystery. Under the Midnight Sun seems to be an older work by him, which also appears under another name Journey Under the Midnight Sun. I read the English translation by Alexander O Smith.

In typical Higashino style, we start off with a homicide. The victim Yosuke is a pawnshop owner who has been stabbed to death and is survived by his wife and son Ryo. Detective Sasagaki, along with an early appearance of our famous Kaga, is able to unravel the victim's affair with a borrower Fumiyo. But she is soon discovered dead due to a gas leak and survived by her daughter Yukiho. Sasagaki cannot make any further headway into the motive or the culprit.

From here on, we get to experience a different kind of Higashino novel. We follow the lives of Yukiho and Ryo for the next 20 years as they go through high school, careers and relationships. Ryo dabbles in shady businesses involving women for pleasure, video games and computer hacking. Yukiho grows up with her rich aunt and develops herself into an elegant woman who is able to seduce any man and grows her own fashion store chain. A whole host of characters walk through their two parallel lives, but we discover how they both manipulate, sexually harass and even kill people off who intrude on them.

Sasagaki returns to the case 20 years later, retired, but still not being able to forget it. He finally makes headway discovering the secret that binds all these primary characters together, what led to the murder and who did it. In the final chase, Ryo kills himself and Yukiho walks away, unemotional to his loss.

Unlike the typical Higashino, this novel is much longer at 550 pages and is a slow burn. This structure was not surprising once I discovered that this book was originally a serialized magazine story. The changes in Japanese society and economy during these 2 decades are a side character that the author purposefully weaves into the telling. The characters Ryo and Yukiho are cold, calculating sociopaths in their own unique way and truly unforgettable from this story. Sasagaki is not particularly smart here and there is not much of the usual Higashino cat-and-mouse chase. While there are several clever tricks, there are a couple of intriguing murders where the author does not fully reveal how they were pulled off and I found that unsatisfying. Except for such minor issues, pace yourself and this is a long, enjoyable and gruesome murder mystery.

Rating: 4/5

ISBN: 9781250105790

Pachinko

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 03:02:24 +0000

"History has failed us, but no matter." begins Pachinko before unraveling its inter-generational drama of a korean family who move to Japan during pre-WW2 Japanese annexation of Korea. Min Jin Lee's central character through the book's ages is Sunja, the only daughter of Yangjin, who barely scrapes by running a boardinghouse for fishermen. Sunja falls in love with Koh Hansu, only to realize when she is pregnant that he has a family in Japan. A minister Baek Isak, whose life is saved by Yangjin, offers marriage to Sunja to save her dignity and moves to Japan to live with his brother Yoseb and his wife Khunghee. Barely scraping by in poverty, their lives are saved from the WW2 atom bombing by Hansu, who moves them and (his son) Noa and (Baek's son) Mozasu to a faraway farm. As Japan rebuilds after the war, Yoseb is bedridden while Sunja and Khunghee eke out a living selling candy on the streets and give a decent education to the kids. Noa is a studious boy and Hansu sponsors his university education, while Mozasu ends up in the pachinko business. When Noa realizes Hansu (a yakuza) is his father he quits university and goes into hiding working at another pachinko parlor. While Mozasu succeeds in life and lifts his mom and aunt out of poverty, Noa tragically kills himself. In the end, we witness Mozasu and his son renewing their residentship in Japan, still not citizens after spending a lifetime there.

This book was a truly engrossing read, enabling me to live through the generations of this family and during this phase of regional history. It is the story of Koreans in Japan, always treated as lower class and never accepted as equals in the country they live in. They have no home to return to either as their home country is divvied up between the Communist and Allied powers. It is also a story of the burdens on women of this generation, as the female characters remind us with "A woman's lot is to suffer", quite a few times in the book. The poverty, classes and inter-generational story are very similar to one of my favorite Dickens book David Copperfield. The descriptions of the characters' life in poverty in Korea and later in Japan of this period are vivid in detail. The writing is beautiful and sensitive, especially to the women, who form the backbone of the story, while the men pass away. It is bittersweet to see that the family is at least financially well off at the end, though never respected in Japanese society. I am not surprised to learn that this book was made into a TV series, this is a great read.

Rating: 4/5

ISBN: 9781455563937

Excerpt

Etsuko had to go back to the restaurant, but she settled on the sofa for a few minutes. When she had been a young mother there used to be only one time in her waking hours when she’d felt a kind of peace, and that was always after her children went to bed for the night. She longed to see her sons as they were back then: their legs chubby and white, their mushroom haircuts misshapen because they could never sit still at the barber. She wished she could take back the times she had scolded her children just because she was tired. There were so many errors. If life allowed revisions, she would let them stay in their bath a little longer, read them one more story before bed, and fix them another plate of shrimp.

The Last Policeman

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:50:49 +0000

I was positively salivating at the premise that Ben Winters cooks up in The Last Policeman. An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, collision is imminent in a few months and humanity is living out their final days. Everybody in the police force has lost interest in solving crime, except our detective Hank Palace who suspects that his most recent suicide case is a homicide. It takes the rest of the novel for him to prove it, while everybody around him are questioning why does it even matter to solve a crime when Earth is doomed.

Our victim is a Peter Zell, an insurance company actuary, who seems to have killed himself in a McDonald's bathroom. Hank cannot find a motive for the suicide, while he starts finding evidence that maybe Zell was killed for something he discovered at his job. His bumbling detective colleagues and boss at the police station are no real help. While the interviews with Zell's boss and his secretary lead nowhere. Zell's sister, who works at the hospital, is suspiciously aloof. And distracting his focus on the case is his own sister Nico, whose boyfriend has apparently gone AWOL at a military base.

I truly loved the premise, this setup is perfect for a great TV series. However, the execution of the plot comes nowhere close to the vision. All the characters are uniformly forgettable, you close the book and no one comes to mind. The plot, though interesting in the beginning, loses steam by the middle, since the clues come way too slowly and nothing interesting really happens to keep the momentum going. And when the final reveal of the murderer happens, I was left unimpressed. This book is the first of a trio (and apparently it gets better), but I have no buzz left to pursue this series.

Rating: 3/5

Caste

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 05:07:46 +0000

Caste is not a book about the caste system of India. Rather it is an innovative attempt by author Isabel Wilkerson to demonstrate that the racism against Black people in the US is yet another caste system. Caste is a rigid hierarchy that people are born into and movement among the levels is absolutely immutable. Isabel defines 8 pillars of caste, including the concepts of divine will, purity, occupations, dehumanization, terror and superiority. In addition to the Indian system which is referenced extensively, she also uses the Nazi Germany as another comparison in her examples. The various kinds of dehumanization and discrimination practiced on Black people from the dawn of slavery in the Virginia colony (1619), through the Civil War, Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, to the current day are all covered in detail. To support her thesis, she also shares many examples of injustice, barbarity and violence that have been enacted on the Black people in the past 4 centuries.

Isabel is a great author, with a clear control over the language, providing many quotable lines. She defined and described things that I was already aware of from many new perspectives that made me think. She demonstrated the right knowledge of the Indian caste system, the 4 varnas, the Dalits and of Ambedkar in the book. The dehumanized way in which slaves were owned, punished and lynched was hard to stomach. Many of these examples she describe go well beyond what we have already seen in movies or in books. For example, mailing to relatives the gory photo postcards of lynched Black men and women was a popular act in those years. While I knew about the Civil War, I did not know how everything regressed after the 12 years of Reconstruction and segregation was enforced back across the nation.

How many Americans know that the Nazis took the US use of laws to systematically discriminate as a guide to draft Nuremberg Blood Laws, used for ethnic cleansing of Jews? Also surprising was how restrictive the rights for Black people were right until the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. I felt that the latter parts of the book could have used some real structure and maybe not every story had to be described. Caste is a deep and powerful book that fits race into a new mould of caste and thus enables us to look at it from a new perspective.

Rating: 4/5

Excerpts

The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.

The election would set the United States on a course toward isolationism, tribalism, the walling in and protecting of one’s own, the worship of wealth and acquisition at the expense of others, even of the planet itself.

Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Thus we are all born into a silent war-game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing.

It was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channeling the bitter cry of his people in America: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”

Fromm found the working class to be among the most susceptible, harboring an “inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world, and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior,” he wrote. A person in this group “feels: ‘even though I am poor and uncultured I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—I am white’; or ‘I am Aryan.’ ”

Bradley Effect—inflated polling numbers that do not materialize on Election Day due to people telling pollsters what they believe is the socially acceptable answer about their voting plans but then choosing differently in the voting booth. This is what happened to Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley when he ran for governor of California in 1982.

“It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration,” wrote the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has studied cultures of dehumanization. “It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.”

Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough. They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death. A caste system spares no one.

Our Moon

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 03:59:49 +0000

Our Moon begins in spectacular fashion, describing the 1943 Battle of Tarawa, where the US suffered losses from trapped landing craft due to miscalculation of high tides. Starting from there Rebecca Boyle tries to cover everything about our beloved Moon, its origins, influence on our planet and our daily lives and on human society and history.

I was quite surprised to learn that scientists are still not able to decide if the moon was formed by giant impact (Giant Impact Hypothesis) or created together with the Earth. Though the moon appears so small in the night sky, its influence on Earth is huge. Earth and moon rotate around their shared barycenter. Moon's gravitational pull has been causing tides, which have been slowing down Earth's rotation for a long time. For example, back in the early era of fish evolution, Earth had a short 21 hour day. And the moon has kept Earth's axial tilt stable without getting affected by Jupiter's giant pull.

The moon might also have played a minor role in early evolution through life in tide pools and aiding fish to move to the land. There are also undoubtedly many creatures on land and in water that use the moon to decide on feeding, mating, spawning. The problem though is that Rebecca tries to make the case that the moon is the reason for these phenomenon and almost says that these would not have happened without the moon, which I felt was weak.

Sadly for me, this book spends a majority of its pages on the social and historical influence of the moon. Ungodly amounts of ink have been spilt on some ancient moon calendar in warren field pits in Britain, Nebra sky disk and the moon appearing in Mesopotamia and Babylon. She also spends way too much time on Ptolemy's geocentric world and Copernicus's helio-centric world.

Though Rebecca's writing has an inspiring quality, I ended up not liking the book since it is so weak on the science. Missing are all the scientific facts, observations, discoveries and probes to the moon. Though the moon landing is covered briefly, I felt the technological lead up to that event should have been covered in intimate detail. In place of all this, we are hammered with hundreds of pages of maybe theories, extreme lengths of descriptions of a few ancient artifacts and insanely long travelogues of the author in Britain to visit some people who are preserving ancient moon calendars. In conclusion, this book ended up feeling less of a science book, and more of a social sciences book.

Rating: 3/5

The Witch Elm

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:01:16 +0000

I am into what seems to be 100 pages of a single afternoon conversation between the narrator (and prime suspect) Toby and his cousins Susanna and Leon. And I am wondering how is it that I am still so engaged to see this conversation to its long drawn conclusion and hopefully discover something that sheds more light on who committed the murder. That is kind of pull that author Tana French has in her psychological thriller The Witch Elm.

The plot is threadbare, in fact there is nothing to it: after a near-death run-in with burglars, Toby (along with his fiance Melissa) move in to the Ivy House to take care of his uncle Hugo in his dying days. At one of their large-family weekend meetups, one of the grandkids discovers a skull in the hole of an old witch elm tree in the garden. Detectives come by to tear up the garden and discover that the body of Toby's highschool jock friend Dominic has been lying in that tree for a decade. As the days tick by, pieces of evidence that the detective Rafferty puts together starts to point the finger of suspicion at Toby.

Tana is masterful in constructing her world and pulling her reader into that. And once we are in there, she is able to convincingly suspend our disbelief and you too start believing that, yes maybe, the innocent Toby did commit that murder and does not remember it. She sets up such deep and long setups that you forget that you are being deceived and just enjoy the ride. This book was a delightful experience to lose myself in the depths of Toby's mind and memories, his idyllic childhood days at the Ivy House, the big family drama, and how questionable our memory can be. If not for the wholly unnecessary extra murder thrown in at the end, this would have been a near perfect thriller.

Rating: 4/5

Engineering in Plain Sight

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 17:39:39 +0000

Engineering in Plain Sight is a fully illustrated book by Grady Hillhouse, that describes the design and workings of the public infrastructure that we see around us. It covered literally everything including the electrical grid, communications, roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, dams, coastal structures, water supply and construction sites. Full page illustrations with detailed labels accompany almost every page of text and were invaluable in helping me examine and understand these things I see in everyday life.

Page after page, I continuously marveled at the innumerable practical innovations in the engineering of these big and massive projects and the many basic facts that I honestly did not even know about. For example, the supply of electricity from the power plant all the way until the final utility pole in front of my home, is carried through 3 (not 2) wires, each carrying AC current with a 120 degree phase difference with the other! How had I missed this - I went out and was amazed to find the 3 power lines everywhere near my home - from the high voltage towers to the humble utility poles. Another example is the simple twist lock mechanism at the four top corners of containers that enable them to be lifted and placed by cranes, carriers and stackers from its source to its final destination.

The book exceeded my expectations, by getting into brief but deep descriptions of every civil engineering construct around us. The illustrations are truly great and I am surprised that the design firm MUTI and Brad Hodgskiss are not credited as illustrator on the cover. The author Grady is apparently popular on Youtube with his channel Practical Engineering, which I am truly curious to follow. His enthusiasm for observing how everything outside is designed and built is infectious and I have now found myself pointing out these structures to my son when we are driving around. Another aspect that I loved was that I now have the terminology for all the structures and parts of these civil engineering constructs - I have always loved to know the right word to use. The book also has a glossary and an index that make it a great reference work. It is rare to find a book that suddenly unlocks our understanding of such a huge part of the world around us and so I highly recommend this one.

Rating: 5/5

ISBN: 9781718502321

San Diego

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 03:27:43 +0000

San Diego is the 2nd largest city in California and lies at the Southernmost tip of the state. We spend a week there at the start of the kids summer break and they loved it.

Getting there and back

We decided to stay in Carlsbad (to the north of San Diego) and the drive from Los Gatos to there was about 450 miles. To reduce dealing with SF Bay Area traffic and LA traffic, we left early morning on a Monday and returned back on Saturday.
The route is through Gilroy, getting on to I-5 near Los Banos, staying on it all through Central Valley and then through Los Angeles. This is at the limit of how much we can drive in a day with our kids and without risking driver fatigue. We had to take 2-3 breaks along the way for food and to let the kids have a stretch.
I-5 is infamous for having no good places to eat. That problem is solved now - after leaving home early in the morning we found Harris Ranch Restaurant to be a great place to stop for breakfast. After crossing the Central Valley, we stopped at Valencia Town Center for lunch.
On the way back, we had breakfast at our hotel and only stopped for lunch by taking a slight detour to Bakersfield.

Things to do

Since we were going to be in San Diego for many days and planned to visit many places, we found it economical to get the tickets to those places using City Pass. The tickets for everything mentioned below were bought using City Pass and I could pull up the tickets on the City Pass app on the phone to be scanned at the gates.
We spent a day at Legoland California in Carlsbad. It was like a copy of Disneyland, but catering to only young kids. Our kids were able to enjoy almost all of the rides and attractions without requiring any extra line-jumping fare. Our son loved all the 4 roller coasters. The Legoland app on the phone was useful for figuring out the wait times and to find our way through the theme park. I would recommend Legoland highly for elementary and middle school age kids.
We spent a day at the San Diego Zoo. We started off by taking the bus ride sitting on the top and getting a tour of the entire zoo. After this we walked through the zoo the rest of the day checking out the extensive collection of animals and birds. There were also some singing, dance or athletic performances at different places in the zoo that were entertaining. This zoo is quite big and has enough to fill a day, much like the Singapore Zoo and I would recommend it.
We spent a day at Seaworld San Diego. This is a theme park with 2 big shows of dolphins and orca whales and many extreme roller coasters. Our son loved the Manta coaster and the BMX Blast performance with BMX bikes and scooters. But we were disappointed to see that a few of the coasters were closed on that day. There are some big play structures and a few rides that very young kids will find to be fun. Seaworld has enough entertainment for a day, but the food was not good (though it was expensive) and the whole park looks a bit dated.
San Diego has lovely beaches. Unfortunately we were hampered by clouds and cold winds and could not truly enjoy the beaches we visited in Carlsbad.
We spent a day going around San Diego using Old Town Trolley Tours. We parked the car in a lot near the USS Midway Museum and caught the trolley near there. One of the stops we loved was the Coronado island, we would love to visit it again. Another stop was Little Italy, where we had lunch. After returning from the tour, we caught a City Cruises cruise ship that took us on the sea around the San Diego bay, showing us the Coronado island and the extensive military and naval bases and the ships and helicopters that make San Diego home.

We loved San Diego, easily one of the best places we have visited in the US and a perfect place to visit with kids.

Hikes of Bay Area

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 16:10:53 +0000

Sunol Wilderness Regional Preserve

This park is famous for having views that are reminiscent of Yosemite and so people call it Little Yosemite. The Alameda Creek cuts through the park providing many chances for visitors to witness it flowing over rocks and touch the cool water.

We drove here on a Sunday in March when the hills were green. The $5 parking fee was not needed on this Sunday. The park has 6 overflow parking lots, so is able to entertain hundreds of families.

We first went to the cute Visitor Center which has maps and informational displays of the local flora, fauna, Native American and settler history. After that we did a hike on the paved Camp Ohlone Road to the Alameda Creek Overlook to see the beautiful waters flowing over rocks. It is slightly difficult to get down to the rocks and water, but it is totally worth it.

Castle Rock State Park

Castle Rock has a waterfall, elevated views of surrounding mountains and big sandstone rocks.

Visitors who park their car pay the $10 fee at the Visitor Center. The toilets are modern and clean.

We took the trail on the left of the visitor center to Castle Rock Falls. There is a viewing platform which overlooks the falls (which is pretty small), and the view from there is great. We backtracked and took the trail to Castle Rock. The sandstone rocks here provided lots of climbing and exploring for our kids and they were not ready to leave. The rocks here are popular with climbers, every rock had a group of them practicing their techniques.

Visitor Center -> Waterfall Connector Trail -> Saratoga Gap Trail -> Castle Rock Falls Overlook
Castle Rock Falls Overlook -> Saratoga Gap Trail -> Castle Rock Trail -> Castle Rock
Castle Rock -> Castle Rock Trail -> Saratoga Gap Trail -> Castle Rock Trail -> Visitor Center

Mt. Umunhum / Sierra Azul Preserve

Mount Umunhum is one of the tallest peaks in the Bay Area. We parked at the Mount Umunhum Summit Parking Area, where a flight of stairs takes you to the summit. At the summit there are viewpoints with great views of the South Bay. In my opinion, this summit has the most stunning views of the South Bay, you can see all the cities spread out below you in a valley and the mountains ranged all around and the back.

There is a cool abandoned cubical building on top which was a defense radar system. The facilities look brand new (in 2026) and are very well maintained.

We took the Mount Umunhum Trail down from the summit for about 2.5 miles and then back the same distance. The trail was mostly shaded by trees and we passed streams and bridges. It was a relaxing green hike when we did this on a surprisingly sunny day in wintry January.

St. Joseph's Hill Open Space Preserve

We parked in the lot near the Lexington Reservoir County Park near the Alma Gate Entrance. Looking at the weather and energy level of our kids on the spring day, we completed a 2.4 mile loop hike:

Started up north on Jones Trail (0.5 miles)
East to Novitiate Trail (0.2 miles)
South to Manzanita Trail (0.4 miles)
East to Serpentine Trail (0.2 miles)
North to Range Trail (0.2 miles)
West to Navitiate Trail (0.4 miles)
South to Jones Trail (0.5 miles)

Consider Phlebas

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:29:16 +0000

How would you like to experience the scale and fun of the world of Star Wars movies in a novel? Consider Phlebas is the first true space opera novel that I read. Written by science fiction author Iain M. Banks, in this story we journey around space with a bunch of mercenaries while the universe around them is caught up in an epic war between the Idirans and Culture.

Our protagonist is Horza, a shape-changing changer on the side of the Idirans who is in pursuit of a Culture Mind that is hiding on Schar's World. Escaping from Perosteck Balveda, a Culture spy, he hides his true identity and joins a group of pirates led by Kraiklyn on their ship Clear Air Turbulence (CAT). The raid of this gang on the Temple of Light ends up a disaster when their plasma shots bounce off the crystal walls of the temple. To recoup his losses, Kraiklyn decides to take part in the Damage card game being held on the orbital Vavatch before it is destroyed by Culture. While they are there, they decide to steal weapons from an abandoned mega ship named Olmedreca. This raid turns out to be a disaster too, killing most of the crew and Horza crashing on a remote island on the Vavatch.

He is held prisoner by a cult of Eaters and their guru Fwi-Song. Using his special powers, he escapes in the nick of time and returns to witness Kraiklyn's wager in the epic game of Damage. Kraiklyn loses the game badly and during his escape Horza kills him and takes on his shape. He rejoins the reminder of the CAT gang as their leader and along with smart-talking drone Unaha-Clasp and Balveda.

They blast their way out of the Culture ship The Ends of Invention and set a course to Schar's World. They discover that the mind is hiding in the tunnels of The Command System of this world. A renegade bunch of Idirans trouble them and in the final battle Horza dies and the Mind escapes.

This is truly a delicious start to the Culture space opera series and it is real fun to journey to new worlds in search of adventure with a bunch of pirates. The characters are colorful, and the new spaceships and worlds are awe-inspiring and interesting. The novel is really strong in the first act, gets weaker in the second and fizzles out in the long-drawn out third. The author has a great knack for creating incredibly interesting, but unnecessary sideplots, like the Eaters or the Damage card game. Furthermore, the reason behind the Idirans-Culture war is all a bit vague and so are the powers of the Mind. Though I complain, I loved the good parts and I might read the second book in the series.

Rating: 3/5

Nehru Bal Pustakalaya

Sun, 25 May 2025 04:16:20 +0000

Flipping through the news from India I noticed that a prominent astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar had passed away recently. That name seemed vaguely familiar from my childhood and with a little digging I re-discovered that he was the author of one of my favorite childhood books A Journey through the Universe. This was one of the many fantastic children's books from the Nehru Bal Pustakalaya collection that were a large part of my early years.

I first discovered these books when my school had a book fair organized by their publisher National Book Trust. It was a thrilling and unique experience to see a part of your school transform into a book fair for a few days, to get some cash from parents, to sample and shop the books alone or with friends (without parent supervision) and to make the crucial decision on which few books to buy with the limited amount of cash. The few books I bought in this way felt so precious, the feel of that rough paper, the smell of freshness, that iconic rose logo at the top-left corner of each book cover and the beautiful illustrations by Sudhir Dar. I would read these books a thousand times over and they truly showed me what a wonderful world I inhabited.

These books stood out in that era with their style, with each book having its own unique cover and inner art. Also, rare for that era, these were full color covers, not limited 2 or 3 bland shades, but shockingly bright colors in their full glory. Jayant Karlikar's book and the 2-part Inventions that changed the world by Najabat Ali remain the most memorable of the lot to me with superb funny cartoons by Sudhir Dar. These books covered pretty much the every swath of science, from physics to scientists, giving me a taste of things that lay beyond the little world in India of the 80s.

Becoming Earth

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:19:05 +0000

We think of our planet as being shaped by Sun, weather, water, earthquakes, volcanoes and geological processes. In Becoming Earth, the science writer Ferris Jabr tries to show evidence that in addition to the above, our planet has always been shaped by microbes, plant and animal life too. Divided into 3 parts on rock, water and air, each part looks at the author's journeys to various parts of Earth to meet scientists who have discovered fascinating ways in which life shaped and continues to affect Earth.

In the first part on Rock, we travel to deep caves and mines to discover how microbes deep inside the Earth's crust have been chewing through rocks to break them down into soil for millions of years. We travel to the frozen Russian steppe to learn how the stomping around by now-extinct mammoths there might have helped grass emerge from the megafauna of that period. Finally, we visit the author's own backyard in Oregon where he and his partner were able to coax a diversity of plants to grow out of rock-hard ground thanks to the power of the roots of specific plants.

In the second part on Water, we discover the massive scale of plankton in the seas and how they affect marine life and the carbon in the atmosphere. Off the coast of California, we learn about the effect of scale of seaweed and kelp forests in the oceans and how they help in sequestering massive amounts of carbon. Finally, we travel to Kamilo Beach in Hawaii where the planet's plastic trash has been washing up and creating new substrates by fusing with rock.

In the final part on Air, we travel to Brazil to climb the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory to learn how the tall trees of the Amazon and microbes that produce proteins seed ice crystals in clouds and cause rain. In California, we learn how Native Americans uses controlled burns as a land management tool to shape their forests and allow a diversity of fauna to flourish.

This was a delicious well-researched book to read, with the author being adept at weaving together travels to exotic places,scientists, historical events and discoveries together. There are a good set of color photos in the book to aid the narration. There is no doubt that microbes, plants, animals and especially humans have changed the atmosphere and the planet. While it is evident that microbes, plankton and human industrialization can have massive effects, many of the other cases presented by the author (such as megafauna, plastic on a beach) are weaker and sometimes unrelated to the agenda of the book. And as always, I am skeptical of science writers and prefer such books to be written by actual scientists, who are usually far more skeptical and far less flowery in the praise of evidence. Regardless, this book easily takes the reader on a fascinating journey in time and space around the world showing us the wonders of our planet.

Rating: 3/5

Happiness Falls

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:03:07 +0000

How a family of a special needs child deals with the disappearance of their father is at the center of Happiness Falls. We learn about the disappearance through the voice of Mia, the daughter of a Korean mother (Hannah Park) and a white father (Adam Parson). Her younger brother Eugene, who has speech and movement impairments (Angelman Syndrome) had accompanied Adam to a nearby state park and returned home alone. Mia mistakenly assumes her dad is at home and several precious hours are lost before the police are called and a missing person search is started. As detective Janus probes into the hours before the disappearance she discovers that Eugene might have attacked his father in a burst of anger that morning. At the same time, Mia digs into her dad's life and discovers that he and Eugene had been seeing a therapist Anjeli Rapari in secret. As the hours turn into days, the family is drawn into a legal custody battle while also discovering uncomfortable and surprising things about themselves.

The author Angie Kim deftly keeps many balls in the air at the same time - a super intriguing mystery, Asian family drama, and special needs children and their impact on a relationship and family. The book is extremely detailed about the caring, terminology, treatments and upbringing of special needs children. Some great analogies are provided in the book about how society fails to appreciate Eugene's intelligence since it is hidden behind his motor and speech impediments. The author easily takes the reader on a ride, making me believe that Adam was having an affair with Anjeli. The weakest part of the book is probably the over-emphasis on Adam's notes on Happiness Quotient (HQ). Nevertheless, Angie is a tour de force here, crafting a meticulous, intriguing and sensitive tale.

Rating: 4/5

Excerpts

I don’t understand people who pop out of sleep at the first alarm. I love snoozing. A push of a button, elongating the surreal haze of that liminal phase, letting me linger in the delicious afterglow of the dream world where anything is possible, where I can think something and it’s suddenly there the next moment, no transition, no explanation, no logic. It’s like sitting in the theater after a great movie has ended, listening to the score as the credits scroll, giving you time to reflect before you head back to the real world.

As Mom likes to point out, it’s fascinating how it’s called “retirement” when fathers quit their jobs, but “becoming a stay-at-home mom” when mothers do.

She stopped doing therapy homework with Eugene, said she wanted to accept Eugene—“as he is, with no expectations.” (But, as Dad always pointed out, how can you not have expectations of a child? What is a child if not as-yet-unrealized potential personified?)

There are moments when something we’ve idealized all our lives changes and becomes something less. Not by a noticeable amount, just an infinitesimal disappointment. But it’s like going from 100 percent to 99.9 percent—imperceptible quantitatively, but dramatically different qualitatively, from flawless to flawed. After this point, I found myself questioning Dad’s motives, doubting his perspectives, in a way I hadn’t before.

Have you ever had your parents teach/tutor you (or, if you’re a parent, tried to teach/tutor your own child)? In my family’s experience, it’s torture, ending in raised voices and tears for everyone involved. I don’t know what it is, but everything my parents said, even (maybe especially) if delivered gently and lovingly, I couldn’t help but take personally—as an expression of disappointment, a buried wish they had a different child. It made me vacillate between trying too hard, desperate to impress, and refusing to cooperate and giving up, both to cope with the anxiety overload and to punish them for putting me into that state to begin with. If getting better at math or baseball was this fraught, I couldn’t imagine practicing communication with a nonspeaking child—the expectations, the fears, the anxiety magnified ten thousandfold.

Of course you will and can want more. You should want more. But you should also spend time trying to want what you already have. It’s slightly different from “practicing gratitude” or appreciating or thanking a higher force or God for what you have. It means: Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have—your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate that alternate-you would be to get what you have.