This book collects two unrelated award-winning novellas from classic author Fritz Leiber. Ill Met in Lankhmar describes the first meeting of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the city of Lanhkar, and is a sword-and-sorcery classic, with our two heroes up against the evil Thieves Guild, first as part of a drunken con, and then for bloody revenge. Ship of Shadows is scifi, a story of a man named Spar, lowly crewman on massive spaceship falling to pieces, trying to figure out what is happening through an alcoholic daze.

Leiber had the misfortune to win Hugos for two of his worst novels. At his best, which this is, he writes richly layered gothic fiction that is both imaginative and thrilling.

The Book of Skulls is a very heavy period piece, a pressure cooker story of early 70s style New Wave SciFi paranoia. Four roommates at an elite East Coast college (it's Yale) are on a quest across America for a monastery that holds the secret of immortality, guided by an ancient tome found in the library stacks. But there's a catch. Mystery Nine states that life must be paid for by death: two members of the group will live forever, one will commit suicide, one will be murdered.

We meet our characters in rotating first person narration. Eli found the tome; he's a classicist, a neurotic New York Jewish intellectual. Ned is Irish Catholic, gay and/or bisexual, a self-styled Poet. Timothy is old establishment money, trust-funds and country clubs and a lineage back to the American Revolution. Oliver is a scholarship boy from Kansas, an intense youth who aims to become a doctor to defeat death.

They roadtrip across America, discussing their belief in their quest and its object, the various grades of friendships and animosities within the group, and sexual desire. There's an authenticity to very collegiate mix of shallowness and profundity. These boys have deep cracks, that have yet to be filled with the liquid of adulthood. Upon reaching the monastery, they are inducted into various mysteries and tested to see who will live, and who will die. Of the characters, Eli rings the trustest (his biography is close to Silverberg's), while Ned's frank homosexuality was bold and forthright for the period, but it hasn't held up very well (on the other hand, I wasn't there. Maybe a gay Boomer would find his portrayal more accurate). In the end, though, we know where these characters are headed, and their revelations, and the revelation of the true nature of immortality, are not as wrenching or interesting as I'd want. Silverberg, as always, turns a good yarn, but I've set to see him write a truly great one.

Who among does not have trouble Getting Things Done? I'm conflicted about this book. The core advice is solid, but the follow-through to the hard parts is often skimpy.

The goal of Getting Things Done is a productivity flow state, or what Bruce Lee called a "mind like water". Allen's insight is based around the cognitive-psych wisdom that working memory is a very limited resource, and that anything you have on your mind, even minor stuff like a mental to-do list or inbox, is taking up resources that should be used to make important executive decisions; you are after all an important business executive, right?

The first tool for doing this is a mental model of do-defer-delegate-delete. Anything that hits your awareness should either be done immediately, if it can be done so, deferred or delegated to the right person or future block of time for a complex task, or deleted. Most things in the universe are spam. The second tool is a rigorous system of alphabetical folders, which should contain every pieces of paper in your life, and every piece of information similar to paper, especially emails.

I buy the importance of these two tools, the need to reduce clutter, and the need to block out large chunks of time for purge and organization to set up the system. Allen also recommends that you add your personal life to the system. After all, a successful business executive like yourself would never let family and friends waste away because they aren't on the agenda. The thing is that setting up a knowledge management system across multiple email accounts, computers, cloud file systems, etc, is legitimately hard, and there's not much there. Allen also recommends a weekly review session to make sure that there's alignment between long term goals, your projects (something you intend to finish in less than a year), and what you're doing right now, but didn't have much to guide these review sessions except "think wisely".

Getting Things Done is not actively wrong business advice, some of which I've read, but there's a major gap between what's recommended and what's doable, and I'm not sure how well the half-measures work.

Some wag (probably not Grace Slick) observed that if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. Enough people remembered the 60s that Selvin manages to recreate the sprawling story of the San Francisco music scene 1965-1971. You know the big players, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, Santana, and a host of lesser lights. Moving season by season, Selvin describes the forge of creation, as tightly knit musical families under the influence of large amount of then-legal LSD carved out a new sound at the intersection of rock, blues, folk, and pop, an artistic flourishing intrinsically linked to the counter-cultural nexus of Haight-Ashbury and the radical politics of the antiwar movement.

But the scene rapidly turned sour. The tight-knit communes and proto-hippie neighborhood around Haight-Ashbury exploded under hundreds of thousands of hippie tourists, wannabes, and drifters. LSD was supplement with speed, cocaine, and dope, adding an edge of paranoid violence to a vibe already flying somewhere else. Bands broke apart under the pressures of touring and differences of artistic vision. Jefferson Airplane broke in factions that refused to play with each other, Joplin fired Big Brother, an unscrupulous manager stole all of the Grateful Dead's money. Drugs, alcohol, and the lifestyle began to take their toll, as members of the community overdosed, crashed cars, or withdrew from the petty jealousies of 'free love'.

This book is very much insider gossip about the bands and a few of their supporting characters, particularly concert promoter Bill Graham, who ran the famous Fillmore. Selvin gestures at the end towards his ideal vision of the rock band as a close group pushing the limits of artistic expression, but has little to say about why these people, in this place, at this moment. For all that LSD is centered in the title, the book also has little to say on psychedelia beyond the bare facts of the moment. If there is a vision there of the Acid Society, it can't be captured in words. And there's nothing about the fans, the hundreds of thousands who went to shows, pilgrimaged to Haight-Ashbury, or simply sat in their bedrooms, put on Surrealistic Pillow, and felt like part of the moment.

In this, the Darkest Timeline, you're probably familiar with the essence of Frankfurt's argument about bullshit. Truth-tellers and liars share a common foundation that the truth exists, and that it matters. Liars sincerely want the something other than the truth to be believed, at least long enough for them to make use of the advantage. By contrast, bullshit has no concern with external reality. Instead bullshit is a kind of performative game, allowing the bullshitter to enhance his social status, without concern for the truth or falsity of his statements.

There's a bit at the end that I think captures the essence of Frankfurt's arguments, which move smoothly from Augustine to Wittgenstein. "Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns towards trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature." Sound like a certain very orange POTUS?

More narrowly, I think it'd be an interesting experiment to assign On Bullshit to writing-intensive college course. So much of academic writing is bullshit, in the sense that it is about performing "I am a knowledgeable expert" rather than about making real claims. Professors are just much better at it than students. I'd be fascinating in a class that allowed a student to be wrong, but hit them with the banhammer if they used bullshit. Any takers?

A lot of management practices seem somehow oppressive and cultish. TPS reports, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile, and Scrum. I can't say much about those, but I really enjoyed a workshop on Kanban, and this book was in the bibliography.

Kanban is Japanese for signal ticket. The Imperial Palace Garden has a box of tickets equal to the maximum number of visitors, and if there are no tickets, you must wait for someone leaving the park to drop theirs in the entrance. In management practice, Kanban is a pull-system, where the effective throughput of an organization is estimated, and tasks are pulled from initialization to completion. A large whiteboard of tickets (or digital equivalent) serves to self-organize the workflow, identifying blockages, slacks, and bottlenecks, without hefty managerial overhead.

Anderson describes several near miraculous management turnarounds he saw as part of major tech companies (Microsoft, Sprint), and a smaller stock photo company he was part of. Kanban, when properly implemented, increased the speed by which tasks where accomplished, decreased errors, improved moral, and created resilience and constant quality improvement. Kanban, and management by pull and flow, feels counter-intuitive at first, but I can sense a deep elegance to their logical principles.

The problem with this book is, even after attending a Kanban workshop, and even inclined to be generous to the method, I'm not sure that I know enough to actually implement Kanban. Heck, I'm not even sure that I know enough to properly cargo-cult Kanban, aside from sticky notes on a whiteboard. I'm sure it's good management practice, I'm just not convinced this is the book to explain it.

A lot of hyperbolic language has been spilled over trolls and the internet subculture of trolling. I know, because I've added my tiny share (trolls as reactionary guerrillas). Unlike most commentators, Whitney actually gets it, blending intensive ethnographic involvement in two troll communities in the critical period where trolling went mainstream with a rigorous grounding in sociology and folklore.

Phillips argues that trolls are agents of cultural digestion, sifting through the detritus of a heavily schizophrenically juxtaposed media for memetic fragments that can be weaponized "for the lulz." "For the lulz" is the key to the entire business of trolling: the stance that lets trolls win at their own game of emotional damage, while being able to continually shift and redefine and rules. Trolls are as old as discussion on the internet, with a dual definition of either throwing out provocative comments to catch 'honest' discussants, or simply serving as some kind of horrifically regenerating monster.

As Phillips chronicles from her time in 4chan, anonymous moved from a dense world of inside jokes and gross-outs (hello goatse my old friend...) to playing tricks on the mainstream culture. Their triumph was getting Oprah to claim that a pedophile organization 'with over 9000 dicks are raping little children' on live TV, a grandiose and ridiculous claim that made the Queen of Daytime TV the dupe of pimply nerds in dark basements. Maximum lulz.

The symbiotic relationship between the mainstream media and trolling subculture is one of the most interesting parts of Phillip's research, as she spoke with a loose network of memorial page trolls, who would stalk the pages of telegenic dead teenagers to mock the victim and their family. This predatory act is a mirror of the Nightly News' attitude towards crime, the faux-concern that comes down to the primal fact that if it bleeds it leads, doubly so if the victim is white and wealthy. At best, these memorial trolls were motivated to strike against the stance of fake grief taken by strangers.

These days, we live in a world of trolls. 4chan memes are sold at Hot Topic. Donald Trump trolled low-energy Jeb!, little Marco, and Lying Ted Cruz into oblivion in the 2016 GOP Primary (as an aside, Phillips argues that Trump is not a troll, but his /pol/ are his greatest supporters.) Phillips engages with a research subject that is built on ironic detachment and deliberate lies, on desecrating sacred cultural touchstones and then saying "hey man, it's just a game", and does so with impressive clarity and sensitivity. My expectation is that this book will soon become canonical for people studying memes, internet culture, and trolling.

Give me that old time religion! The kind with bloody sacrifice, sacred groves, portents and oracles. By Jove! And Athena, and Serapis, and Ba'al, give me that old time religion.

In Pagans, O'Donnell tackles the question of what happened to the traditional religion of the Mediterranean. How, in the 4th century, did the rites of the old gods up and vanish? The mundane argument is pretty simple. The Emperor Diocletian (284-305) massively reformed the civil service, centralizing power and finances at the expense of local elites. Money, which used to support local civic rites across the Empire, was distributed from Constantinople to new Christian leaders via the mechanism of the military and the Church.

That, of course, is a paltry explanation. Belief that exists only in the presence of cash subsidies is a paltry belief indeed. But that may have been enough. O'Donnell argues that the old religions were transactional. A sacrifice to a god was the human side of a deal, the divine side of which was victory in battle, prosperity in trade, or healthy children. Gods which lost the support of human emperors were no longer worthy of emulation by the masses. 4th century Christians had a number of rhetorical and technological advantages, as their doctrine combined the sophisticated philosophy of the neoplatonists, a strong tradition of public oratory and writing, and the political power of the assembled congregation (Oh, and the True Gospel of Christ's Love). Against this, the old religion had the obscurity of signs and portents, the spectacle of rite and sacrifice, and Bronze Age traditions that seemed sclerotic and obsolete.

O'Donnell writes clearly for the new reader, while placing this work in an ongoing scholarly dialog about the Classics that I don't know enough about to criticize. His most original argument is that pagans as such did not exist. Augustus would never have used the word to describe his beliefs. Rather, paganism was constructed as an opponent by the early Church, a specific kind of rhetorical move to distinguish 'soldiers of Christ' from the ignorant superstitions of the countryside, which is the root word of 'pagan'. Similarly, one should not speak of belief in Jupiter, but rather an assemblage of practices and images relating specific human beings to a common vision of a 'heavenly father'. There's a frustrating skipping around in the arguments and primary sources. These are very much O'Donnell's interpretations, and I'm not convinced they are the interpretations. Still, this is an interesting book for a modern atheist who loves Rome, but knows relatively little about the end of the Empire.

I am a sucker for a good memoir of crime and justice, and this is one of the best. In his early 30s, Robert Wittman quit a career as an advertising man for an agricultural newsletter to try a hand at his dream job of being an FBI agent. A few chance accidents, like working the 1988 burglary of Rodin's "The Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose" from a Philadelphia museum, lead to his true calling as an art theft expert.

As Wittman writes, art theft thrills us in ways that more ordinary crime (drugs, bank robbery, fraud), does not. Art is immensely, insanely valuable. A Leonard da Vinci painting sold for a cool $450 million last year, and while that is an outlier, anything by an artist that you've heard of is probably worth a few million dollars at least. Museums and private collections are ludicrously poorly secured compared to banks and other hard targets. Yet artwork is the furthest thing from fungible. A piece is only as good as its provenance. A famous stolen artwork is impossible to display and very difficult to sell. They must be ransomed back to the legitimate world.

As such, the best move is the undercover sting, a long con played on a thief looking to sell to Wittman's undercover alter-ego, elite gray-market broker Bob Clay. Wittman moves through his career breezily, describing how he took down a New Mexico dealer in Native American artifacts with eagle feathers (illegal to sell in the US, legal to possess in Europe), a Panamanian diplomat selling ancient Peruvian artifacts, and the hosts of Antiques Roadshow. The standard template involved a delicate game to get the mark to bring the goods to a hotel room, where Wittman would confirm authenticity and then signal SWAT to bust down the door. He was good at it, closing dozens of tricky cases and recovering perhaps $500 million in artwork.

Art and artifact theft is the fourth largest crime by financial value, after drugs, weapons, and financial fraud, but you wouldn't know it from how the FBI handles it. Italy has a 300 officer special detachment, the best in the world. France is in second place, and Europe in general well-organized to combat art theft. The FBI's squad never exceeded eight people, and was dissolved with Wittman's retirement. His last case, the appropriately named Operation Masterpiece to recover the paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum, was almost a fiasco due to bureaucratic turf struggles within the FBI.

If Wittmann fails at anythings, it's his stated goal of removing the glamour from art theft. Too often we think of its perpetrators as a Thomas Crown or Sophie Devereaux, a sophisticated and worldly criminal. In real life, they're mostly dumb thugs and dishonest brokers, with the occasional unscrupulous insider. Art theft is a crime against our common soul, a defacement of the human aesthetic legacy. And yet, as ugly as it is, Wittman can't help but take joy in his job. More than justice, it's about winning a game.

And hey, I'm putting together a crew for a job. Going to need a hacker, hitter, grifter, and thief. You in, or you out?

James Comey was at the center of many of the key events that lead to this, The Darkest Timeline. As director of the the FBI, he announced literal October Surprise that there were more Clinton emails, and that he was reopening the investigation. This may have very well flipped the election. When he was fired on May 9, 2017 he released memos of his conversations with President Trump to the press, prompting the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the ongoing saga of Stupid Watergate. His memoir is selling like hotcakes. Does it offer any special insight into the man and his place in history? I borrowed this book, but should you personally support the Jim Comey book tour?

Well, sort of. Comey starts with his childhood, and his lifelong dislike of bullies. A terrifying home invasion when he was 16 by the Ramsay Rapist, lead to an interest in justice, and in college he switched from pre-med to pre-law. Comey wanders through the early bosses who taught him the basics of leadership with integrity; a devotion to higher principles and a generosity of spirit to those around him. Comey talks about the exact opposite, a style of leadership he learned from the mobsters he prosecuted in his early career, leadership built on lies, an us-versus-them attitude, and loyalty to individuals.

Comey moves through his thinking as Deputy Attorney General under George W. Bush (Deputy AG is a shockingly powerful position, by the way). In this role, Comey opposed wiretapping and torture policies formulated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that he believed lacked legal foundation, despite staunch resistance from the office of Vice President Cheney. The high-point is the dramatic "bedside visit", where Comey and Alberto Gonzales confronted each other by the hospital bed of Attorney General Ashcroft, over the re-authorization of a mass surveillance program. Comey won this bureaucratic skirmishes, though one gets the sense of his perspective and its limits. It's not so much that Comey finds torture and mass surveillance morally opprobrious (though he does), it's that the Vice President's position exceeded the limits authorized by Congress.

Comey is at heart an institutionalist. Public trust is a reservoir built up slowly over decades, and which can leak in a single instance of bad judgment. He talks about some public relations missteps as FBI director under President Obama; a tone-deaf concern over rising violent crime and anti-police attitudes, and an inability to merge the interests of law enforcement with strong encryption. His personal admiration for Obama as a leader shines through. Obama listens thoughtfully, treats people humanely, and exudes an aura of confidence; if anything is wrong with him, he's too sure of his own abilities. Comey has pleasant things to say about George W. Bush and many Bush appointees, aside from Cheney and Cheney's torture lawyers.

Roughly about 2/3rds of the way through the book, we get to the meat of the matter, the Clinton email investigation, and Comey and Trump. Comey reiterates again and again that public faith in the FBI required that he continue an investigation of Clinton's email server, that he announce the Weiner laptop emails days before the election, and that he make extended commentaries on the matter, rather than a terse "an investigation is under way." Comey erases his own power, his own judgment of the realities of the situation, in favor of the stance the FBI must stand beyond politics.

And then there's Trump. Comey has nothing good to say about the man. Self-absorbed, continually talking a stream of nonsense, surrounded by lackeys and lickspittles and broken men. The multiple private meetings, where Trump pressured Comey to leave Michael Flynn alone, were extremely alarming and Comey began documenting those meeting in private memos. When he was fired, now private citizen Comey released the memos, and here we are.

Given the insane and accelerated timescale of the Trump administration (as of this week, new lawyer Rudy Giuliani went on Hannity and admitted that Trump paid Cohen to pay off Stormy Daniels, which directly contradict what Trump said a week ago and is so insane that days later no one is sure of the legal implications), it's good to have an a reminder of where we were a year ago. On the other hand, you can just go back and read the WaPo headlines, and the book on Trump and collusion is far from closed. As a guide to Comey's thinking, it lacks real candor or an honest appraisal. Private citizen Comey is free to speak to the press in ways that FBI director Comey is not, but by withholding the memos until after he had fired, Comey reveals a side that he doesn't talk about much, a belief that he could have private integrity in Trumpland. What if Trump had not fired Comey? Where would we be now?

Comey, in his own image, is a good boss and a decent man. But he failed the most crucial test of leadership, deciding wisely in an environment of confusion, uncertainty, and chaos. No amount of sympathetic "there was nothing else that you could have done" from Congressional democrats can erase Comey's complicity in and responsibility for the present state of affairs. The FBI and the Justice Department should strive to be non-partisan, but as Terry Pratchett so astutely noticed, politics and policeman have the same root of polis, and a senior officer of the law cannot be ignore the political dimensions of their work. When the Republican party has so gratuitously abandoned a concern for objective reality, for the Constitution and democratic norms, and for the notion that the will of the people speaks louder than major donors, non-partisanship is not neutrality, it is aiding and abetting.

History will remember Jim Comey. Like it remembers Pontius Pilate.