One of my favorite aspects of my job is the opportunity to work with interns during the Utah legislative session. We usually hire several interns from the colleges and universities across the state, and they help us during the state legislative session as we track legislation and communicate with staff and legislators. They are all […]
Book Thoughts | The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
2019-06-13 · by ·
Review | Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam
2019-04-11 · by ·
Let’s talk about immigration for a moment. It’s strange. In a country that was entirely founded, built, and peopled by immigrants and their descendants, few policy debates are more divisive than those dealing with immigration. Politicized to the extreme, the issue polarizes us. Few seem willing, or able, to compromise. Racism and resentment and limited […]
Review | Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt
2019-03-30 · by ·
Rarely have I enjoyed a piece of political commentary as much as I did Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. In William Shakespeare’s day, it wasn’t safe to disagree with power. Unlike today’s America, where we are protected by the First Amendment’s grant of free speech, his world was governed by the near-absolute power of […]
Review | Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
2019-01-16 · by ·
I recently finished reading the Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction novel set in the near future (well, a few hundred years in the future, so maybe not that near). It tells the story of the interstellar journey of a generation ship, and its enormous crew, as they cross the depths of space. Their […]
Extremely short review | Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
2019-01-10 · by ·
Well, it’s a book. And it has a lot of assumptions. And it’s interesting. But is it true? Is it useful? I don’t know. I think Harari makes a lot of assumptions to get to his conclusions, and I’m not sure how many of them I could actually pick up on as I was reading, […]
Book Thoughts | Trust me, I’m Lying: The Confessions of a Media Manipulator
2019-01-04 · by ·
This book is Ryan Holiday’s mea culpa. He’s a media manipulator or was at one time, and after a pang of conscience over the effects of his actions, he’s coming clean. As one friend put it when I described the book to him, the techniques Holiday describes and decries in “Trust Me, I’m Lying” feel […]
Book Goals for 2019
2019-01-02 · by ·
UPDATED 6.4.2019 I don’t typically make plans or goals for reading, other than a generalized goal to read as much as I can. I usually pick a topic for the year and will, among the other books I bump into along the way, focus on it. Two years ago, Britt and I were planning a […]
2018 Reading Stats in Review
2018-12-31 · by ·
In 2018, I read a few good books. Find the full list of books at the bottom of this post. Here are a few statistics and general observations gleaned from the list: SHEER NUMBERS: Total pages read (or listened to) was 19,925. RATINGS: I rate books out of 5, with 1 being a bust (and probably […]
A few thoughts on Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
2018-11-26 · by ·
I read Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House. Lots of thoughts. But I’ll just put a few brief observations here to start. First, you should read it. A book does so much more justice to history than tweets, news stories, commentator hot takes, and social media rants. Do yourself a favor, and […]
5 Books for the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day
2018-11-11 · by ·
As chance would have it, I happen to have a few recommendations for this 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, or what we now call Veterans Day. 1. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Written from the perspective of a German soldier in the last year of the war, it has […]
