adam georgiou's blog

This book scatters some good points around a thesis that contradicts itself. HypnoBirthing claims that the problem with modern births is intervention: doctors getting in the way of an instinctual process that nature has honed over millions of years. Dogs and cats can give birth without lessons or help, so why do humans need an entire team and toolshed? That's a pretty good question. But then the book immediately follows with several chapters of Things You Must Do instead of listening to The Do

The author claims that proximity to a job — ranging from those that do the jobs being close and those that the assign jobs as far — is a good proxy for knowing whether a job is pointless. If the person doing a job thinks it shouldn't have to be done, then it probably shouldn't. And when those people are asked, a lot of them do think their jobs are pointless, and that if they were to stop performing them, nothing would measurably change in the world. I disagree. Do the pistons in an engine ne

I was introduced to Popper by David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity, and also somewhat through parenthetical references made by Nassim Taleb in his books. Both present Popper's ideas clearer than the man himself, in The Poverty of Historicism. Deutsch quotes Popper incessantly, and the ideas he (Deutsch) talks about are awesome. Two that struck me: 1. Most progress is incremental, and more about error correction than consistent correctness. 2. Explanations of sociological facts (lik

Not for me. Might be for you. After having binged a number of Will Self's lectures/debates/interviews online, and having read Tough, Tough Toys..., I wanted to know more. I love his quickness and breadth. I love his disregard for formality and propriety, and complete focus on The Empirically Lived Interesting Stuff of life. e.g., The benefits of nicotine, the state of Brexit, the map to and of creativity, the absurdity of domesticity. Politics, drugs, walking around. it's all on the table, and

Spoilers Incoming The opening scenes of drug dealers and rip offs sets up an expectation that Tough, Tough... will be some dime-store thriller, Cowboys & Indians, 007 and Goldfinger. But that expectation is wonderfully, satirically subverted with the literal crack mine — a pit of crack cocaine one could harvest with a pick axe — and the drop off ending. The remaining stories are similar subversive and satirical. I kept expecting the straight-to-DVD type cliches — "And I would've gotten away wi

Rambles: The idea that collective intelligence is its own independent entity, that we can contribute to, from the bottom up. You more commonly hear about how collective centralized planning fails, and less about how trade and specialization succeed. Liked that. There's a lot of talk about how the infrastructure for sharing ideas has improved dramatically over the years — i.e. the internet — and how that allows for a new scale of prosperity, since prosperity is based on the sharing of good idea

Probably prescient, but a few things lose this book a star or two for me: 1. There's a skewed moral undertone: the author seems to imply that the predicted thriving of sovereign individuals is not only inevitable, but right. Which very well might be the case, but at the same time the book has no problem writing off all the "left behinds" as a calculated externality, neither right nor wrong, just part of the physics of the thing, no more good or bad than inertia. To

Interesting: the minority rule, lindy effect. Less interesting: shit talking, wrapping up explanations in wit and attempted epigrams, obscuring those explanation's point for the sake of...

This is revealing in ways the author didn't mean. It's juvenile, not heroic or enlightening. Stories about high heels, trips to Paris and Germany, being absurdly overpaid, deserving to explore love interests outside of her marriage, first class tickets, three star meals, therapeutic purchases of overpriced handbags, sex in the back seats of cars, the I'm chic for still liking grunge bands in her 40s, the burden of guilting parents who still managed to provide for all the middle class expectatio

I couldn't get through it. I thought The Magic Mountain would either be (a) an explicit exposition of pre-war and war time, mixed with some kind of class analysis; or maybe (b) an investigation of exceptional personal sickness and being surrounded by those also sick, while all together trying to come to terms with mortality and material expectations; or maybe (c) it'd be some arty analogy, painting Europe at the time in the form of a sanatarium. Perhaps I just don't have the background of the

You don't remember people's faces or what they say, but you remember all the inconsequential details of that one time you were embarrassed by work 20 years ago? You don't have the courage to do something about your grandmother sitting in her own piss for several days, as you clean the house you let her fester in for years? Your brother hasn't introduced all his children to their own blood? Your father is a worthless alcoholic, he dies, and you dedicate a whole book to describing your react

Having never read any of Rilke's poetry, I was told by a friend to read this, my expectation being that it was profound and beautiful. I ended up rolling my eyes through most of it. Rilke comes off as some sniffly blowhard hipster. School is too difficult, Paris is impossible to focus in, Christmas is a drag, Italy's art is too temporally disconnected to be taken seriously. I would send you some of my work, but I'm so poor that I can't afford to; please go buy a publication, Dear Mr. Kappus. Di

Warning: this text may contain spoilers My main problem was this: if you imagine the male characters female and the females male, the story reads entirely the same, with most of the consequences of power being stereotypical, over simplified, bond-villain-style tropes of masculinity. The ending confirms the suspicion, that the premise of the book is this: power corrupts universally and simply. And for that, the book loses impact. I don't agree with the premise. People are complicated. Organizat

On point, a bit ornamental, but in a white suit in winter kind of way. And subtle. It's like: you want to know what happens after and under all this acid talk. Give me some direction or deep explanation, but instead you keep getting this flowery alliterated enumerations of all the stuff the hippies are talking about. Which after a while, one realizes, it's a perfect mirror of the acid movement itself. Another subtle, subversive, satirical yet steel-manned criticism from Tom Wolfe. (Perhaps a

Mind of a cynic? Reminds me somewhat of Catcher in the Rye, except rather a redeemable Holden Caulfield coming to age, in Notes from Underground you've got a character who never got over the inauthenticity and naiveness of the real world. What happens when this perspective goes to its extreme? Answer: you get the narrator and his notes.

When I was a kid going to church, I got a prescription that was top down: Christ is god, Heaven is real, be good or else, believe what the books say. All other explanation was filling in the gaps below these claims. If Christ lived, what was his life like? Enter the Gospels. If God is all powerful, what exceptional work has he done? Enter the stories of the Old Testament. This was religion by deduction, with Christ being the unquestionable axiom. The literal truth of the story was all important,

I'm not sure who this book was written for. It wasn't me, which is fine. Best case, this was written for other strugglers, those curious and intelligent enough to want to break out of their own binds, but who are limited without the right model of their own problems or the right example of a feasible solution. It's written at a high school level, not in the sense that it has grammar issues or is incoherent, but in that it's so simple and full of cliches and unironic tropes that only someone who

There's good advice in this book, clouded by a lot of senseless drama. The story of how Goggins survived his childhood abuse, got through his military training, and accomplished so many athletic goals is impressive enough. The challenges he makes to the readers and the explanation of the battle in his mind, the description of what it takes to run 100 miles, that's interesting and useful. But to me, it is made much less impressive by his deciding to run on broken legs, push through kidney failu

Somewhere in the middle of this book I had begun to think that Circe was a simple instrument for playing back the popular stories of Greek mythology in a short, indulgent form. Circe, The Greek's Greatest Hits, a mixtape by Madeline Miller. The writing is pretty and elegant (e.g. Aeetes describing his godhood as a column of water, Helios's regality, etc. gotta come back and edit in actual quotes, but don't have the text with me); the stories are familiar (e.g. Prometheus, Icarus, The Minotaur)

I wanted this book to be more. I thought its reputation meant it was more than just a time-passing novel, and perhaps it'd be something of a psychological dissection. Like, maybe this was the book that would get into the details and provide the palpable empathy of what it was like to be a slave, and further what it was like to participate in the actual underground railroad. Maybe it'd describe the atrocities in independent and full color detail. Where a high school education might tell you that

War is abstract for people like me. Occasionally I'll watch Mark Wahlberg kill terrorists over a beer, and that's only ever during the downtime between bouts at work, a place where I'm saturated with idiosyncrasies that are even further removed from politics and culture and the contention they stir up. Bush's got his mission, Obama's sending drones out, Trumps doing Syrian things, I'm thinking about whether the corporate software I write could be 7% faster and if I should eat eggs for dinner or

At first I thought this book was a bit rough. It starts out with what feels like this exaggerated character: a quiet loner type kid, with synesthetic skills in visualization and spatial awareness, develops into this fantastic mathematician simultaneously obsessed with his extraordinary work, yet casually involved in multiple prodigious side projects, and also socially capable and involved in enough personal relationships to sleep around with half a dozen distinguished women, taking the occasiona

Identity Politics, as a title and as an argument, has been exhausted for me. I didn't really have a horse in the race, and was and am interested in other things. I'm in a privileged position, sure -- not that I accept, blindly or meekly, all the handicaps of empathy and understanding that that work is supposed to damn one to. But I do realize that my experience is different and easier than others'. As are most my friends', regardless of their group affiliations, self-ascribed or otherwise. But

It's 220am, months after I first picked this book up (again, for a third attempt) and I've finally finished the thing. First thing I did was Google "ending explained" 'cause I'm dumb, and I get to an explanation written by Aaron Swartz -- an idealist programmer I used to follow, who killed himself after a dramatic copyright legal battle. So that's weird. And Swartz's concise explanation of the plot, which I make the distinction by mentioning "the plot" so as to contrast against all the themes of

At just over 400 pages in an abridged form, The Gulag Archipelago took me over a year to finish. The way I took it in, it's a difficult book, and I've probably forgotten more than I currently remember. Digression: I need to start taking notes as I read, especially with books like this one: academic books, books you're responsible for reading not because they're fulfilling or gratifying, but because they're informing. Informing in either a direct sense, as in the information is scarce and import

In summary: Viktor E. Frankl takes extraordinary psychological insight and applies it to (and beyond) his incredible experiences within several concentration camps. Are you still allowed to call Holocaust tragedies incredible? The scope and the extremity of the events are hard to believe from the perspective of the widespread peace and prosperity of a different generation and geography, and yet those horrors are also so widely discussed and broadly verified as to be undeniable. Truth is strange

I don't know. I'm about 50 pages into this book, and so far I've got mixed feelings. Australia seems so far boring even to the Author. Slow trains. Bad beer. Empty landscape. Idiot company. Tell me how you're coping in said environment. If you're going to drink beer, go full Bukowski. If you're going to describe the area, go full Bryson. If you're going to be bored, make me feel it because I'm there with you, not 'cause your book has me staring out of my own window. "Alice Springs is a quiet to

Going to try and write thoughts on this as I finish each essay, having learned from past compilations that I tend to lose my perspective of the earlier stuff as I move through the later stuff. Big Red Son Reminds me of a Hunter Thompson piece. I think that's what DFW is going for. It's like his version of Wearing and Tearing, Led Zeppelin's attempt to show they could be punk too, if they wanted. DFW seems to have less contempt for his contemporary than Robert Plant. You get the impression that

Originally got this and thought it was a coffee table book. Nothing more than eye candy. But I later found out that there were actual stories in there and read through 'em, nine in total. Each one is supposed to be about a different type of cabin build (e.g. reclaims, from scratch, geometric, treehouse) but the form ain't all that important. The stories are more about people deciding they're going to do a project and then following through with that project. In any case, they're more or less the

This chick is great. The fact that this was published in '78 is incredible. It's still appropriate, and given the atmosphere of nothing meaning anything and all trends being subjective and personal, it's refreshingly harshly and unapologetically opinionated. Plus it is hilarious. What more do you want? Taste exists and it means something. Who would've thought? Some of the chapters read back like shallow, played stereotypes, but you also get the opinion that Fran might've minted said perspecti

I'm a sucker for this kinda' stuff, but even beyond that this book is excellent. It's so refreshing to read something earthly and bounded, something with conviction, something that makes an attempt at saying here is a section of the world and here is how it works, measuring its success by the fact that there's a large audience of people who agree. A lot of what I read tends to be critical, nuanced, deconstructing, questioning. The latter kind of stuff feeds and grows my cynicism. London's kind

This took me forever to finish, it ending up as my in between book, the one I'd pick up and read a few pages of when I wasn't focused on something more interesting. As a (pretty common) rule I try not to put down a book until I've finished it, but every now and again one slips through, barring me not also damning it as worthless (which is rare). Is this a weird habit? To be in one way principled, to the point of dogma, about finishing what I've started, but then also to have a stack of books, mo

Originally got this and thought it was a coffee table book. Nothing more than eye candy. But I later found out that there were actual stories in there and read through 'em, nine in total. Each one is supposed to be about a different type of cabin build (e.g. reclaims, from scratch, geometric, treehouse) but the form ain't all that important. The stories are more about people deciding they're going to do a project and then following through with that project. In any case, they're more or less the

Another set of independent pieces behind a single cover. How do you review? I'll just react. I started reading this book after making it about 70 pages into Infinite Jest for the second time. I couldn't break past the static friction of the thing, which didn't quite make sense to me given (1) DFW is renowned by people I respect and (2) I've gotten sucked in by many of his in-person interviews and speeches (e.g. through digging holes in YouTube). He's smart, interesting, and capable. Why don't

Best metaphors and imagery in the business. Funny, sexy, fun, smart. Gets a little loose at the end, but interesting and worthwhile. Reminds me of American Gods.

What one thing can you say about a set of mostly independent essays? It seems you're obligated to either (1) give a general opinion on Orwell, himself; or (2) talk about the essays' independent points in succession, perhaps finding and commenting on common threads that join two or more of them. OK, so... Orwell is great. Moving on, here's a few things I found interesting: Firstly, a lot of these essays are criticisms of popular literature from Orwell's era: books I haven't read. And somehow,

I read this book back to back with Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. I am a fan of Anthony Bourdain, and with his book I knew what I was getting into. Marco, however, I hadn't heard of before, but I came out of Kitchen Confidential hungry for more. Bourdain had nodded to White in his book, and Amazon had good reviews of The Devil in the Kitchen, so I rolled the dice and went in blind. I was excited to read another story of a interesting chef, specifically in what I presumed would be a f

This book is a kick to the stomach. It’s a contrast against the candy of pop culture and muzak and advertisement. And it’s also a contrast against the typically inspiring and relatable work of the proceeding Beatniks. Naked lunch is disgusting, but perhaps it’s not meant to be enjoyed. That might’ve been my mistake. This isn’t epiphany or interesting outskirt experience by way of drugs. This is chaos and delirium by way of drugs, described in somehow articulate, if not also chaotic, poetic deta

This isn't a comprehensive categorization and it might also be a tautology, but perhaps it's still useful or relatable: In my reading, there are novels that hypothesize about how the world could be, taking a culture you participate in, honing it down to something fundamental, and then showing how that world might run. And then there are novels that take you somewhere independent of your experience. Hypothetical exploration vs the distillation and clear articulation of what already exists. Lik

I'm embarrassed by and sorry for parts of what I initially wrote -- left unedited, below -- about At the Same Time.  Mainly, I'm sorry for having insinuated that Susan Sontag was intentionally terse or worse unintentionally terse, and I'm especially sorry for having implied that such a criticism was my, and presumably should be your, main take away from her writing, specifically in the noted collection of essays. What a dumb thing to say on my part. My bad. What I did say that I think remains c

The most satisfying answer I've read to the title question. Reading this is looking behind the curtain of life. Maybe that's what all good psychology does? Maybe that is psychology? In any case, The Righteous Mind makes a hell of a good case for why we act the ways we do, and how that then gets articulated as what we call 'politics'. It gives one of the best arguments I've heard for the divide among the left and the right. Or at least it's part of the story. If it is partial, then its tenants

This book was intense and obscure. I feel like there was more to it than I was able to take away. On one level of things, there's the novel and fantasy aspects of the book. The conflict between this guy Shadow, his world, and the gods and schemes that inhabit it. That part of things is interesting, but it drags and it's a bit simplistic. The whole main plot, with Wednesday recruiting people and his devious plan to cause chaos for his own sake, probably could've been done just as immersively in

An intense set of ideas, perhaps not entirely scientific but maybe an extremely useful and elegant explanation of what makes humans and their will to do things important. Felt a little forced into the ender universe, both plot wise and stylistically. If you're looking for a continuation of the adventure of the first book, this isn't it.

A great ethos-based argument for independence, and the value that individual hard work contributes, from the bottom up, to the integrity of the whole. A lot of practical advice, without a lot of political pandering or button-pushing that might rile up the partisan ramblers.

After having read the first two books, I'm frustrated; and having invested my time, I feel I've earned the right to rant a bit. The series began well. It's established a pursuit-worthy concept: strip away some of the juvenile aspects of a typical magic-on-earth type setting, and see how someone might actually, practically come to terms with it. It doesn't build its own universe so much as add on to reality. Relationships exist through believable circumstances. There was no caricatured connect

I got the point: war is absurd and bureaucracy multiplies the immorality and ineffectiveness of fighting to solve a problem. And for what it's worth, to me the book get's the point out there in a really witty way. The entire Milo subplot is hysterical and relatable, and Colonel Cathcart's completely superficial appreciation of his authority and warped sense of responsibility resonates with anyone that's had a shitty manager in their life. Apply it all to war, and then go on to realize that wars