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2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 |

For some reason, I did not read nearly as many books in 2025 as in previous years. It was a busy year on many fronts, and I hope to make up for it in 2026.

2025

“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” Omar El Akkad (2025)

This book is not for the squeamish but might open your eyes and mind to our own status quo in our own “comfortable” liberal lives.

To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say "these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day." To repeat the famous phrase about "who they came for first" and "who they'll come for next." But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted upon them, they would tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.
No, there is no terrible thing happening coming for you in some distant future. But know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity. Forget even the dead, if you must. But at least fight against the theft of your soul.

In the hierarchy of migration, “expat” is largely reserved for white Westerners who leave their homes for another country, usually because the money’s better there. When other people do this, they might be deemed “aliens” or “illegals” or at best “economic migrants.” As with most criteria of segregation, everyone knows, instinctively, how thy will be labeled. It’s a matter of self-preservation to know.

Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it’s hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation’s increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else’s increasing tolerance for worse.

Check out writer Erik Anderson’s review of this book in the Cleveland Review of Books (https://clereviewofbooks.com/omar-el-akkad-one-day/):

Late in life, the writer and critic George Steiner confessed that at no point had he ever been politically active. He joined no party, supported no program, voted in no election. He acknowledged that his refusal “empowers and in a sense justifies” all manner of horrific governance, but ultimately he concluded that humans, while often good and decent, are more frequently monstrous, as exemplified by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and the “undisguised plutocracy” of the twenty-first. For Steiner, who just barely escaped the Holocaust as a child, sadism predominates, and equality is nothing more than cant. All he hoped for from any political regime was that it allowed him a little breathing room. The most he asked for from any government was that he be left alone.

It’s a tempting position. But it’s a little like refusing to bail out a lifeboat, letting others keep at it while you sit quietly on your plank. If “negative resistance” has a flaw, it’s that you may wish to be done with politics, but politics is never done with you. Nobody, with the possible exception of the oligarchs, is that free. El Akkad seems to better understand this than Steiner. “I live here,” he writes, “because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles.” He lives here, he says, not because of the intellectual freedom it allows him (as Steiner claims), but because he is afraid.

Wanting Democrats to win elections only so that Republicans don’t (or vice versa) is a zero-sum game, not a workable politics, which is what I suspect most people want: a politics that works for working people and entails a livable future. Democrats will continue to play that zero-sum game at their own peril. Or they could begin envisioning another future.

“Trickster’s Point” William Kent Krueger (2012)

One of the underlying values of the Ojibwa culture had always been a lack of interest in stockpiling wealth. What you had, you shared, and it was the sharing that was esteemed, not the having. Now, no matter how much people were given in casino allotments, it never seemed enough. Dealing with this sudden influx of money wasn’t always an easy affair for someone raised on nothing and less than nothing. If, for example, you were disposed to drinking, you probably drank more. If you were into drugs, you plunged deeper. If you’d been given to coveting the things you saw in other people’s houses—particularly the homes of white people on television sitcoms and dramas—you bought items you didn’t need or didn’t know how to use or didn’t even really understand the purpose of, and they accumulated and forced you to buy a bigger home or a longer trailer, and despite all you had, you still weren’t happy.
Welcome to the white man’s world, Cork thought.

“Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson” Robert Polito (1995)

Hobohemia was a complex and highly politicized social institution with its own unwritten system of laws, etiquette, mores, and division of labor. Although “tramp” and “bum” were sanctioned synonyms, “hobo” specifically designated a wandering laborer (the word probably derives from the “hoe boy,” a seasonal farm worker). A catalyst for hobo culture and traditions, the jungles operated as nomadic democracies, welcoming all arrivals regardless of race, nationality, or personal past. As migrant workers, the Texas hoboes affiliated with the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. IWW publicity touted the itinerant bindle stiffs as “the guerrillas of the revolution” and remarked that the “nomadic worker of the West embodies the very spirit of the IWW. His cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of Bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of morality, make him an admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism.” The more stable jungles sometimes excluded any oil tramp not carrying a red IWW membership card.

“Goofy” Gander in the book The Kill-Off: Once upon a time, there were two billion and a half bastards who live in a jungle, which weighed approximately six sextillion, four hundred and fifty quintillion short tons. Though they were all brothers, these bastards, their sole occupation was fratricide. Though the jungle abounded in wondrous fruits, their sole food was dirt. Though their potential for knowledge was unlimited, they knew but one thing. And what they knew was only what they did not know. And what they did not know was what was enough.

“Burning Angel” James Lee Burke (1995)

“Escape Clause” John Sandford (2016)

“The Lightest Object In the Universe” Kimi Eisele (2019)

“Kingdom of the Blind” Louise Penny (2018)

“X On the Road & At the Crossroads” Michael Hyatt (2025)

“In To Deep” Lee Child and Andrew Child (2024)

“So Cold the River” Michael Koryta (2010)

She smiled. “You’re too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all of this, and then figuring out how to control it. That’s how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters in the world is under your control. You don’t dictate, you adapt. That’s all. So stop trying to control this, and start trying to listen to listen to what it’s telling you.”

“Before She Disappeared” Lisa Gardiner (2021)

“Hard Cash Valley” Brian Panowich (2020)

“The Escape Artist” Brad Meltzer (2018)

“On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” Timothy Snyder (2017)

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens than trade real freedom for the fake safety.

“The Dark Corners of the Night” Meg Gardiner (2020)

“Martyr!” Kaveh Akbar (2024)

It was invented, language. The first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we get it so wrong.

At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. The old joke, that two Iranian men could never get on an elevator because they’ll just keep saying “you go,” “no you,” “no no please,” “I insist,” as the doors opened and closed.
Midwestern politeness felt that way, too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes on your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

Cyrus wondered sometimes how much ideas of leadership in the West (a term he was also dubious of—west of what? The earth is a sphere where every spot is west of every other—calling America “the west” and Iran “the Middle East” placed the center squarely in Europe) had to do with notions of an infallible Christian God. How the best leaders in America professed to be moving toward “godliness,” that’s what they always said, that was the horizon leaders were always trying to approach, “godliness,” with all its intractable convictions. Cyrus thought about President Invective, a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of Hell seemed specifically conceived. The sort of man whose unwavering assertions of his own genius competence had, to the American public, apparently overwhelmed all observable evidence to the contrary.
Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt them still hurt.

It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the Ten Commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can still a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

“Hard Rain Falling” Don Carpenter (1966)

The whole idea of a good life was silly. Because there was no such thing as good and bad, or good and evil. Not the orphanage way, with good equaling the dull and painful and stupid, and evil the bright and delicious and explosive; and certainly not the simple reverse of this—it would be all very well to live purely to have fun, but what did you do after you had all the fun you wanted? It would be like aiming your whole life at getting a sandwich, the then getting it, eating it, and having nothing left. It was just as stupid to spend your whole life avoiding pain, because you could see right away that this would logically mean locking yourself up in a room and letting the authorities take over, bring your food, take away your excrement; even if the authorities provided entertainment for the senses, you would still be a prisoner…

Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.

By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive. By then he would understand that fulfillment was only temporary, and desire the enemy of death.

It was an arrangement, coldly conceived for sexual gratification, without even words that first time, but limited by coldly precise and rational language from there on out. The terms were that they would use each other’s bodies for that ornate form of masturbation called Making Love, but there was to be no question of emotional involvement, or prying into one another’s soul. This, they decided coldly, would keep them from going crazy.

He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid furnished rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream.

How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course, that was the problem.

“Wild Dark Shore” Charlotte McConaghy (2025)

Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.

“Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.”

“Orfeo” Richard Powers (2014)

Every seven days, Peter Els brings the man the best that his green soul can generate. Kopacz sits and scans El’s systems in silence. Then he tosses the scores back, saying, Lots of traffic and no cops, or Too many peaks, not enough valleys. For days afterward, Els rages against the man’s glib dismissals. But a month later, he’s always in complete agreement.

Something like the space shuttle pulled into the slot next to him. Its running board came up to the middle of the Fiat’s window. Waves of pounding bass passed through the hulls of both vehicles and shook Els’ torso like a Vitamaster belt massager. Whole windshield-shattering subcultures had grown up around that sonic violence; DB shoot-outs, video sites featuring women whose hair whipped about in the winds of sound. Deafness as the price of ecstasy: any composer had to admire the bargain.

Then the shadow falls in Shostakovich. The composer asks his powerful admirer Marshal Tukhachevsky for help. Tukhachevsky appeals to Stalin to spare Shostakovich. Soon the marshal himself is arrested and executed.
Brittle, tense, and close to suicide, Shostakovich works on. But the piece that comes out of him is worse than the first offense. The Fourth Symphony: filled with audible treason. Days before the premiere, Shostakovich suppresses the piece and chooses to go living.
To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power…ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.

“Dixie City Jam” James Lee Burke (1994)

Or were they still sailing beneath the waves, their skins pickled in salt, their uniforms nests for moray eels, their plan to turn the earth into a place of concertina wire and guard towers still on track, as certain in prospect as the phosphorescent and boiling wake of a torpedo streaking toward a distant ship silhouetted against an autumnal moon?

Most of the psychological mutants with whom a police officer comes in contact daily are bumbling, ineffectual losers who sneak through life on. Side streets and who often seek out authority and self-validation through their adversarial relationship with police and parole officers, since in normal society they possess about the same worth as discarded banana peels.

“Deadline” John Sandford (2014)

“Paradox Hotel” Rob Hart (2022)

I thought these men were just greedy. But no. It’s worse than that. They’re zealots, and the only thing they believe in is themselves. They’re so used to getting what they want, to being told yer that the word no doesn’t even exist in their language, at least not when directed at them. The very idea that they could want something and not have it is something they can’t process. All light, all gravity, bends around that.

“Blood On the Tracks” Barbara Nickless (2016)

“A Dangerous Man” Robert Crais (2019)

“The Drowning Game” Barbara Nickless (2024)

“The Big Gamble” Michael McGarrity (2002)

“Pro Bono” Thomas Perry (2025)

“Northwest Angle” William Kent Krueger (2011)

“There There” Tommy Orange (2018)

When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like “sore losers” and “ move on already,” “quit playing the blame game.” But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it,” This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.
If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

“Time’s Agent” Brenda Peynado (2024)

“How to Stand Up to a Dictator” Maria Ressa (2022)

To understand terrorists’ reaction to authority, I turned to the famous experiments of Stanley Milgram (remember “six degrees of separation”?) and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Milgram found that most people follow instructions, even when told to administer potentially lethal shocks to other people. Zimbardo’s study has been challenged, but he stands by his findings: that people lose their individuality and take on the characteristics of the roles they’re given. In other words, authority can give us freedom to be our worst selves. These experiments would come to my mind again later in the context of social media: how easy it is to rile up a mob against a target.

The medium that carries the message shapes and defines the message itself, I told the students, invoking the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work, “The Medium Is the Message.” Social media’s instantaneous nature had accelerated the speed at which the revolutions had taken place. Authoritarian governments couldn’t keep up or control the messaging because those protest movements were modeled on the networks of the web: loose, nonhierarchical, leaderless. Dictators didn’t know whom to arrest: there were no political parties to tear apart, no underground revolt to dismantle. This was the people, and any government that fought its people would ultimately fail.

In a post from 2014 on the popular Facebook page Pinoy Rap Radio, Marcos Jr. claimed that there was no proof of the Marcoses’ stolen wealth and that his mother had “won every corruption case” against her. Both of these statements are lies.
Still, that Facebook post was shared 331,000 times and garnered more than 38,000 comments and more than 369,000 reactions before it was discovered and fact-checked by Rappler on November 15, 2018. It had spread unchecked for four years within what had become an echo chamber whose members now believe the lie. The fact-check had a pitiful reach: 3,500 shares and 2,100 comments.
This is why propaganda networks are so effective in rewriting history: the distribution spread of a lie is so much greater then the fact-check that follows, and by the time the lie is debunked, those who believe it often refuse to change their views, matching social media’s impact on behavior in other parts of the world.

We have been laughing at memes and forgetting our history. Even our biology, our brains and hearts, have been systematically and insidiously attacked by the technology that delivers our news and prioritizes the distribution of lies over facts—by design.
I have lives through several cycles of history, chronicling the wild swings of the pendulum that would eventually stabilize and find a new equilibrium. When journalists were the gatekeepers to our public information ecosystem, those swings took decades. Once technology took over and abdicated responsibility for our emotional safety, history could be changed in months. That’s how easy it became to shift our memory through our emotions. When that happened, it destroyed the old checks and balances on power and transformed our world. We elected incompetent populists who stoked our fears, dividing us and turning us against one another, fueling and feeding off our fear, anger, and hate. They appointed officials like themselves; their goal was not good governance but power. When termites eat away at wood, we didn’t see that the floor we stood on could collapse at any minute. Concerned with power plays, those leaders ignored the existential problems that demanded a global response.
Technology didn’t do all this alone; it was the accelerant to set fire to the kindling built up by decades of liberal progress. After all, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, Newton’s third law of motion. The more progressive we became—women’s rights, gay marriage, more pluralisitic societies—the greater the nostalgia for a simplicity that never really existed. The election of Barack Obama had an equal and opposite reaction, the perfect storm sparking the reemergence of fascism under a new name: white replacement theory. You only have to watch a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital to know that.
Today, an emergent wave of right-wing populist leaders uses social media to question and break down reality, triggering rage and paranoia on a bed of exponential lies. This is how fascism is normalized and where political outrage meets terrorism, the vanguard of mass violence. These ideas have recurred in history again and again with violent consequences, from Benito Mussolini to the Ku Klux Klan to Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf, “This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is being systematically practiced by the Jew to-day. Systematically these negroid parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent fair-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.”
Here’s the modern-day echo in May 2022 by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbån, who includes replacement theory in state ideology: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations—migrants.”

“The City and Its Uncertain Walls” Haruki Murakami (2023)

“Dead in Long Beach, California” Venita Blackburn (2024)

Coral, the protagonist, has written a dystopian novel titled Wildfire. The passages in quotes are excerpts from that novel.

Debt—All would be inadequate to describe the unsettled minds that inhabit the place. These were people so consumed with the acquisition of intangible things that they might as well have been made of vapor, moving about one another as odorless gas. Everyone crept along their days with practically unseen objectives, as far as we’re concerned. Just like gas, each of them was likely to vanish, never to be thought of again at any moment.

Her job was to obtain the currency due to the Corp. through reasonable means from other people contractually obligated to surrender their funds to her. All of it was quite the illusion. As far as we can tell, there has never been any real currency other than labor and the bodies of the young. All other forms of money were just a suggestion rather than a fact.

The despair of being indebted beyond all hope of ever reaching a neutral point again bloomed, so some people surrendered all their hours on this earth in labor, burning calories, sacrificing their offspring, clogging arteries with cheap sustenance, all to feed another set of humans that ate slightly better food, labored slightly less often, and who themselves paid a debt to another set of humans, who ate even better food and labored a little less often, and so on and so forth, until there was only one person, lazy in his self-concern, divorced from the larger community of his people, paranoid, fat (in the metaphysical sense) with the intellect and physical fortitude of a spoiled Pomeranian. How lovely! How sad. How baffling and defunct the system was. Yet it prevailed. Yet it was in everything.

In the Clinic for Accidentally Killing the Person You Only Meant to Seduce, we hurt feelings by accident through compliments that feel like judgements. You look nice today. You’ve done something to your hair. Have you lost weight? We are dentists in brightly colored offices meant for children, reciting a phrase over and over like a prayer: This will only sting a little. We say too much and watch the light go out our lovers like the yolk of the sun disappearing over the sea. They are strangled. They are beheaded. They are insulted. They are lost to us.

The Internet was a prison not unlike high school. Some people could navigate the space with minimal discomfort and escape. Most people could not. Most people were forever changed by the Internet and adapted quickly to misery, as all people eventually do. The gradual reduction of freedom is first disguised as a gift.

“The Big Empty” Robert Crais (2025)

“Mad River” John Sandford (2012)

“Bone of the Bone” Sarah Smarsh (2024)

This book features several essays published a decade or so ago in various publications. I only read half of the book before it was due back at the library.

From Freedom Mandate published in Guernica, 2014

For years, members of the religious right have redrawn science standards to make way for natural creationism in biology class, Now, with the passage of Celebrate Freedom Week, they make way for historical creationism in social studies. A civics teacher selectively emphasizing, say, Christian threads of American history isn’t perfectly parallel to a science teacher presenting “intelligent design” as alternative to evolution. History, though we hope it is rooted in fact, is the province of interpretation; biology is data-reliant and less vulnerable to human beliefs. But the trouble with Celebrate Freedom Week’s religious accent isn’t open acknowledgment of the theological influence on America’s framing. It’s the agenda of those behind the legislation to erode the separation of church and state.

Like the war protester accused of hating America or the scientist accused of hating God, Burger (Micheline Burger, Mainstream Coalition’s former president) found herself in the position of defending her own allegiance—in this case to American-history education—to ideological wolves in sheep clothing. “It is hard to explain to people what is wrong with legislation titled in such a positive way; to oppose it would seem to declare war on motherhood, apple pie, and the American way,” Burger wrote.
To some, though, the title is the first sign of mischief. Like a father with a camera telling his kids to smile like they mean it, the law says that you will celebrate how free you are. In naming Celebrate Freedom Week, Green (Rick Green R-TX, introduced the Teach Freedom Act in Texas in 2001) may have successfully employed the linguistic strategies of those people who brought us “pro-life” and Freedom-haters,” but his political portfolio os hardly coded. He facilitates firearms training with his so-called Constitutional Defense class, whose promotional web copy promises, “Even if you know nothing about the Constitutional knowledge and your passion for American Exceptionalism, as well as your handgun skills, marksmanship and safety awareness will all dramatically improve.” He performs across the country with self-described “God’s comic” Brad Stine in a bookable Comedy and the Constitution Tour. A status update on his Facebook page warned that food-stamp recipients could become dependent like wild animals fed by tourists in national parks.

From Poor Teeth published in Aeon, 2014

It can be useful to acknowledge the cultural forces that carve us, or edifying to indulge in the tropes of our assigned narratives, but true distinctions of character, intelligence, talent, and skill exist at the level of the individual, not of the class—or the ethnicity, the gender, the sexual orientation, the religion, and so on. To claim otherwise, as we’ve discovered across time and countless persecutions of our own doing, is at best an insult and at worst an excuse for enslavement and genocide.

From Believe It published in Creative Nonfiction, 2015

Crying “Fiction!” is often a convenient first line of self-defense against stories that blow the whistle on unjust structures. Men balk at women recounting harassment, White people insist racism is over, and the wealthy discount tales of poverty not just because they can’t fathom realities they haven’t witnessed firsthand but because those narratives threaten systems from which they benefit. Belief is a choice, however unconscious, and it self-sustains: we believe what serves our purposes, and the world we’re thus open to seeing validates those beliefs.

From Liberal Blind Spot published in the New York Times, 2018

Much has been made of the White working class’s political shift to the right. But Donald Trump won (2016) among White college graduates too. According to the Pew Research Center in 2016, 49 percent of Whites with degrees picked Trump, while 45 percent picked Hillary Clinton (among them, support for Trump was stronger among men). Such Americans hardly “vote against their own interest.” Media coverage suggests that economically distressed Whiteness elected Trump, when in fact it was just plain Whiteness.
Stories dispelling the persistent notion that racism is the sole province of “uneducated” people in derided “flyover” states are right before our eyes: A White man caught on camera assaulting a Black man at a White supremacist rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia, was recently identified as a California engineer. This year, a White male lawyer berated restaurant workers for speaking Spanish in New York City. A White, female, Stanford-educated chemical engineer called the Oakland, California, police on a family for, it would appear, barbecuing while black.

In most states, the losing political party receives 30 to 40 percent of the vote. Those millions of people, along with the disenfranchised, are no more represented by their state administrations than liberals nationally are represented by the current president. Calling their home “Trump country” is thus a childish misnomer.
Labels even err when self-ascribed. Into my early twenties, I inaccurately called myself a “conservative” with little understanding of what that meant. One of the most destructive assumptions we make in political discourse is that people’s parties and votes align with their beliefs. In fact, a better indicator of political behavior is one’s place, culture, and social group—conditions we’re born into, by no virtue or fault of our own. Productive dialogue requires that we set aside our assumptions about other people and places and refuse to reduce them to labels—even ones they themselves embrace. We must remain vigilant against easy, reductive frameworks, perhaps especially those that appeal to our own lives.

“The Skeleton’s Knee” Archer Mayor (1993)

“The Investigator” John Sandford (2022)

“Orbital” Samantha Harvey (2023)

It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways—in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines—the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for its knobby of moon. This thing that harbors we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

For a split second Shaun thinks, what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? A tinned man in a tin can. Four inches of titanium away from death, obliterated non-existence.
Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero or an idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.

Or was she saying: look at these men going to the moon, be afraid my child at what humans can do, because we know don’t we what it all means, we know the fanfare and glory of the pioneering human spirit and we know the wonder of splitting the atom and we know what these advances can do, your grandmother knew it only too well when she stepped off the pavement to a sound she didn’t recognize and a flash that seemed both distant and so close it might have happened inside her own head, and in her bewilderment came a kernel of knowledge that this might be it, a knowledge that gave rise instantly to a vision of me, her first and only child, which was the last vision she ever experienced, so I am saying to you Chie, my first and only child, that you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.

Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire—no, the need (fueled by fervor)—to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we stop tyrannizing and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They’re human with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.
It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don’t, but it’s easier not to. When they look at the planet it’s hard to see a place for a trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as thought that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with. They might listen to the news and feel instantly tires or impatient. The stories a litany of accusation, angst, anger, slander, scandal that speaks a language both too simple and too complex, a kind of talking in tongues, when compared to the single clear, ringing note that seems to emit from the hanging planet that now see each morning when they open their eyes. The earth shrugs if off with every rotation. If they listen to the radio at all it’s often for music or else something with an innocence or ultimate neutrality about it, comedy or. sport, something with a sense of play, of things mattering and then not mattering, of coming and going and leaving no mark. And then even those they listen to less and less.

The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first. It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view, just as the sculpting force of gravity has made a spare of the planet and pushed and pulled the tides which shape the coasts, so has politics sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere.
They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down. They don’t even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone—on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars.
The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

And this is just the local scene; a minor scuffle, a mini-drama. We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos drift apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there’s only space, an expansion expanding into itself, an emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing.
We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.

“Blood Is the Sky” Steve Hamilton (2003)

“The Wanted” Robert Crais (2017)