Cultish takes a linguistic approach to understanding the behavior of fringe sects. For Montell, cults are distinguished primarily not by their authoritarian structure or novel theology, but by a unique use of language. We're speaking animals, and language is how we perform and enact our reality. Cultish is the unique language a believe uses to indicate their membership.

This book is best when it sticks closest to Montell's personal experiences with Los Angeles lifestyle fitness centers and multi-level marketing. Crossfit, SoulCycle, and a host of organic-weight loss-wellness-essential-oil MLM scams are what Montell and her peers experience most. Sections on Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, and Scientology are retreads of material better presented elsewhere.

Montell makes a solid argument that humans need ritual space to build meaning and connection in our lives, but that pathological cults don't ever ring the bell to end the ritual. You're always inside the sacred world of the cult, and attempts to get out, say spending time with non-believer relatives and friends, is met with thought-terminating cliches. Cults don't brainwash, but there's a conscious choice not to think about hard issues that the cult can't solve.

I do wish that there had been more about the language of love-bombing, which seems super common, or how New Age gurus are drawing on a language of quantum vibrations that has its origins in Scientology. But these parts, like the final section on QAnon, are at surface-level, a drive-by rather than a deep dive. This book is a lot of fun, and has some interesting if not 100% novel insights, but I wish it had gone deeper into the strange language of cultic belief.

Robot Artists and Black Swans is a collection of short stories written by Italian fantascienza author Bruno Argento, the alter-ego of Texan cyberpunk and futurist Bruce Sterling (my favorite author) These stories, mostly first published in Italian, are a love letter to the city of Turin.

They're also, if I might be honest, merely okay. "Kill the Moon", a short critique of an Italian moonlanding in 2061 as a dumb publicity stunt by a billionaire and his actress girlfriend has some bite, "Elephant on Table" has some quality ironies and turns of phrase. "Robot in the Roses" gestures towards a grand conflict between art and science in the post-Anthropocene, as two elites from different secret groups follow a robotic artist and debate its merit.

But on the whole, the stories meander and don't really develop plot, character, or aesthetics. The dialog declaims in archaic cyberpunk grandiosity that doesn't match the stakes of the stories.

If you haven't read General Butler's polemic War is a Racket, you owe it yourself. Short, sharp, and incisive, Butler explains the reality of empire with the clarity of bloody hands. Katz's book is a valuable companion, explaining the context of Butler's life when the actions have slipped from current events to untaught history.

Smedley Butler was born in 1881 to a prosperous Quaker family in Philadelphia. As the Spanish-American war heat up, Butler spurned his pacifist upbringing and gave into the jingoism of the times, joining the Marines as an officer candidate. He missed major action in Cuba, but was soon thrown into the bloody invasion and occupation of the Philippines, a colonial war which saw the death of approximately a million Filipinos with brutal "anti-bandit" tactics. Butler rose rapidly through the ranks, a true Old Salt Marine with an unbreakable devotion to the Corps and his men. He saw action in China, Panama, Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, France (though not the Western Front command he craved), and China again, with a brief interlude as an ani-corrption police chief in Philadelphia.

As Butler himself would describe, his career was marked with heroism, including two Medals of Honor, but this heroism was carried out entirely in the service of American companies, including United Fruit, Standard Oil, and Morgan Stanley. American foreign policy involved manufacturing an incident, a cassus belli to send the Marines, using superior firepower to knock out local resistance, and then setting up a pro-American gendarmie, while maintaining American control over customs and key strategic resources. Haiti is perhaps the most demonstrative case, as Butler's Marines stole the national gold reserves in a bank heist, deposed Parliament when they balked at a new constitution which would permit foreigners to own land, and used forced corvee labor to expand the national road network.

On retirement, Butler became a staunch anti-militarist. In one of the odder moments, he alleged that a Business Plot, orchestrated by bond salesmen Gerald P. MacGuire and Grayson M–P Murphy, had approached him to lead an army of veterans in coup to overthrow FDR. There is little evidence for the Business Plot, aside from Butler's testimony, and the investigation at the time was certainly bungled. The outline is plausible, except it's unclear why anyone would pick Butler as their man on a white horse when Douglas MacArthur is right there. Butler spent the 30s campaigning against fascism, war and Wall Street, and passed away in 1940 of stomach cancer.

Katz mixes the history with a contemporary travelogue to the places Butler touched, looking at how American Empire is remembered by the descendents of those who experienced it. I'm mixed on the blend. We live in a world Butler warned us about, decades of anti-Communist containment blending easily into the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, a bloody empire where as Butler warned and Fanon described, the violence of the frontier has come home to the metropole. But Katz is much less engaging as a subject than Butler himself. Butler's 'small wars' are the direct ancestors of today's counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency tactics, and while anyone who's paying attention can see the parallels, I wish more words had been used in analysis than on tourism. Still, there might not be an easier way to demonstrate the blunt fact that America's Empire is not a matter of the past, an embarrassing colonial interlude by our great-great-grandparents, but a live and going concern.

Born to Kvetch is a study of Yiddish idioms, and a delightful exploration of Ashkenazi culture. The word kvetch literally means "to press or squeeze", like you'd do to get juice out of oranges, and its use in culture where there is so much to complain about has risen to an art form. The kvetch is a way of making sense of a world where the blessing of the Torah is met with the pain of exile where the demands of a righteous life involve deliberate low level antagonism of the goyish world in which Jews are embedded, lest the two become intermingled.

Yiddish is spoken these days mostly by Hasidic communities and a handful of Jewish language nerds. Even if my community, American Reform Judaism, is several generations away from Yiddish, this idioms get at my modes of thought, what it really means to be Jewish, in a way that few other books have. Bravo!

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is an often funny, often tragic account of two major threads in American life that crossed in the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire.

The first is the Ideal of Liberty (caps intended), the notion that America was founded as a place where you could be free to live your life as you want, without inconvenient laws and regulations and especially taxes. Grafton has a long history of collective and individual tax evasion, backed by rural Yankee skinflint attitudes towards money. In 2004, a few of the locals decided that Grafton would be an ideal location for their Free Town experiment. They'd recruit Libertarians from the internet and pack the apparatuses of government with supporters, and then dismantle the state from the inside.

There were a few problems with this plan. First, Grafton is incredibly economically depressed, with essentially zero industry or commerce. While land is cheap, transportation is not. Second, internet libertarians willing to move to a small town are by definition difficult people. As newcomers squatted in various wooded shacks and tent encampments, tempers boiled over in a thousand small way, stressing the town's legal system. And third, there were the bears.

The bears are the second major theme. White settlement in New Hampshire was literally hacked from bear infested woods with musket and axe. But as small farms retreated and the conservation movement rose, bears returned in force. Bears are clever survivors, and humans leave lots of food lying around their property, from chicken coops to bird feeders to trash. Donut Lady, a local resident who started feeding the bears, is the headline, but the real story is a new ecology at the ursine-human interface, with bears as very large and very dangerous racoons. The bear population of New Hampshire has exploded, leaving Fish and Game totally overwhelmed. And one Grafton resident was mauled, while many suffered close scares.

Libertarian attitudes of "I do what I want" haven't helped the bear problem, with complications from laissez faire trash disposal to deliberately feeding the bears, but even organized state responses seem insufficient. The much more prosperous town of Hanover (Dartmouth College) had a celebrity bear, Mink, who was repeatedly trapped and tranqed by fish and game and relocated to deep wilderness at immense expense. Tahoe has a current (March 2022) problem with Hank the Tank, a bear that breaks into vacation homes. What worked, at least temporarily, was a vigilante effort in Grafton that illegally hunted bears and killed at least a dozen. The bear problem would rapidly disappear if people were allowed to open fire on bears sniffing around their garbage cans, use bait, and attack bears in their dens. But such actions are cowardly and despicable, whether done by private individuals or organized under the aegis of the public good.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is a fun story, and a good display of contemporary libertarian politics as emotional reaction against community and responsibility, rather than any kind of actual intellectualism or politics. It points towards changes in how Americans relate to nature, and a possible curve in the conversation movement, though one that hasn't happened yet. Charismatic megafauna is charismatic.

Hiring Data Scientists is a short book on the difficulties of hiring. I've been on both sides of the table, with mixed results. I did get hired once, and I've sat through a bunch of interviews which didn't go anywhere. Hiring is hard, and this book doesn't have the answers, but it does have some good practical advice.

The most interesting parts of the book are interviews with other managers: Julie Hollet at Mozilla, Chris Albion at Wikimedia, Sean Taylor at Lyft, Angela Bassa at iRobot, and Ravi Moody at Spotify. It's an interesting world of data science, with many paths to success. Keyes has picked interesting people and asks good questions, which is a skill.

The more pragmatic thing to consider is that "data science" has expanded to include many diverse duties, and you won't be able to hire a candidate who's good at all of them and has relevant subject matter expertise. So you actually have to think about specific tasks you need done, in the broad areas of explaining patterns to the business, training new machine learning models, and scaling the production operations of data driven software. There are lots of great tables of tasks and skills, which got sadly mangled in my Kindle edition. So it goes.

The other pragmatic advice is that your hiring process is a funnel, and you have to ensure that it works properly. Good job postings are your first step, so be clear about about the skills you need, and the ones you expect to train people on. Most specific technologies can be learned. Asking for more years of experience in a thing than it's been around is an obvious misstep that'll lose you candidates. The next step is sifting candidates. Reading resumes is tiring, and can expose hidden biases. Worse, junior candidates look very similar on paper, so it's hard to distinguish them. Whiteboard coding is very artificial, and the typical 'reverse a linked list' problems not representative of actual work. Takehomes are better, but biased against working people with families, and require even more effort to grade. One useful tidbit, from the interviews is that the only decisions that matter are "hire" and "don't hire", so a ranking scheme should be as binary as possible, rather than trying to pick a candidate from the up wing of a bell curve.

We're still learning lessons as data science rapidly matures as a field. The idea that you can take someone with a PhD, point them at your business databases, and build a recurrent neural network that makes number go up, is thoroughly obsolete. A mature idea of what comes next is still being developed, and this book is a worthwhile contribution to the field.

With Perhaps the Stars, Palmer finally gets to the fireworks factory she's been teasing this whole series. WAR! (Hoo, yeah! What is is good for?). With the Olympic truce over, and those capable of making weapons of mass destruction abducted by the Utopian Hive, the battle lines and alliances are rapidly coming into definition. But before the war can go hot, two key technologies of the world fail entirely. The suborbital flying cars switch to an autonomous flight-denial mode, smashing any object in the air to earth. And the global tracker network, the universal internet of the 25th century, is jammed and hacked, forcing everyone back to line of sight lasers, cables, and messengers. The Hive War will be fought in a style Napoleon would have mostly recognized, even if troops are armed with stun guns rather than muskets.

In a blessed dose of sanity, the narrator for much of the book switches from much troubled, much overwritten Mycroft, with his digressions to the Reader and Hobbes, to the much more direct 9th Anonymous. 9A spends the first chunk of the story isolated in the global capital of Romanova on the island of Sardinia, fighting their own private war to rebuild communications and clarify the messy field of foes in grand alliances of Remaker and Hiveguard. Palmer manages to depict war with great clarity. It is confusion, and fear, and moments of glory are so much moonshine. War is unvarnished evil.

I also enjoyed the revelations of yet another conspiracy. The Gordian Hive, based in Brillist psychodynamics, is revealed to be the architect of plans against Utopia, with the fate of the human race at stake. Their leader, Felix Faust, believes that the Utopian project of space colonization is a diversion from a better goal of immortality via mind-machine interface. With keen insight, they saw the coming war as well, and while Utopia believed that a small war now was necessary to prevent a worse war in the future, Gordian glimpsed a chance to become humanity's visionary branch, and used their skills to move the war in that fashion.

This is a thrilling conclusion, so why is this not five stars? Three reasons.

First, while the Utopian project of space colonization and flashy miracle tech is well-defined, their Gordian adversary is not. All scifi technology is ultimately an illusion, smoke and mirrors, but Gordian's "pick a number, pick a color, fascinating" mind tricks are more illusory than most. Utopia's plan is enacting Tsiolkovsky's quote, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” Diaspora is both maturity and distancing, the end of a unified humanity. Gordian deserves a grander vision to match Utopia. Not merely a garden Earth, but one of telepathy, new forms of connection, new depths in the psyche. Gordian is drawn as psychoanalysis+, but what if they inherited from Timothy Leary and Teilhard de Chardin more than Freud, charting new vistas of an intelligent, emotive, psychedelic universe? What if the Utopian/Gordian conflict was about two version of world where dreams have become real.

Second, there are still undigested lumps of Hobbes and Homer blended in amongst Palmer's writing. I reached my limit with these philosophical/theological asides in book 3, and while Perhaps the Stars wastes less time on them, it still wastes time on them. The Ninth Anonymous narrates much of the book, but Mycroft returns, and I'm thoroughly done with his voice.

And third, J.E.D.D. Mason is the pivot of the plot, the single figure who could unite the Hives in his person thereby destroying the diversity of futuristic political systems, and a divine alien visitor brought to this universe by our flawed creator, who can only perceive and act in absolutes. I don't mind religious themes in my science-fiction, but J.E.D.D. reads too often as a ponderous nullity, with Capital Letters a crude effort to capture the totality and strangeness of their thoughts. Where this beam of the story needs to be iron, it is instead rotting wood.

On completion, Terra Ignota is great, but frustratingly flawed. It has some of the best and most original ideas I've seen in recent speculative fiction. It also has ideas which are either so outre or flawed on conception that no other author has chosen to use them, and for good reason.

The Red Knight is an often brilliant, often frustrating fantasy debut. The titular character is leader of a mercenary band with a contract to protect an isolated fortress-nunnery. The Captain and his merry band of sell-swords find that they've bitten off more than they can chew when a tide of monsters from the Wild washes over their stronghold, leaving them to face a perilous siege.

So the brilliant part first. Cameron is a giant historical re-enactment nerd, and he's done everything in this novel short of killing a man with a sword. The personal knowledge of medieval clothing, arms, and sleeping rough shine through in the little details. Where other fantasy writers are working from the literature, he's working from the stuff, and this book has the bronze glow of authenticity about it. Getting the little details right mean that the big stuff, armored knights fighting monsters, absolutely works. You get how utterly dangerous a trained and armored man on a warhorse is.

But there's also a lot of aggravating stuff. The point of view jumps around between characters because that's what Epic Fantasy does, and like constant jump cuts in a movie, this interrupts the flow of the story. There's a lot of minor skirmishes and side stories that don't pay off nearly enough to justify the investment in pages or emotional energy. I kept thinking that Poul Anderson would have written an absolutely crackerjack version of the same basic story that came in at half the word count and hit all the themes better. And while it's a little unfair to compare a first novel to the skill of a master craftsman like Anderson, it's more a matter of the form, the idea that epic fantasy should be 600+ pages a book, rather than the proper length of enough story to cover everything that needs covering while being short enough to be interesting.

The setting and characterization is erratic. I enjoyed the Captain and his mercenaries, and the slave turned Wildling warrior Peter, but the voices of many of the other secondary characters were false or redundant or both. The story is set in an England-expy, with a France-expy and Holy Roman Empire-expy nearby, though the religion is literally Christianity and not Christianity-shaped polytheism. Part of this worked, because even if it's not my religion there's enough culture Christianity around that its notions of holiness had power, where invoking St. Cuthbert would be LARP nonsense, but the mix of real and fictional elements was a little jarring. But finally, if there is a real conflict in this book, it's between the works of Man and the Powers of the Wild, and neither side is drawn particularly clearly. The world of knights lacks the layers of personal relationships, histories, and betrayals that made say, A Song of Ice and Fire so good when it was good. The forces of the Wild are hostile and dangerous, but not as malevolent as a true Dark Lord would be.

I did enjoy this book, and anything to do with swordfights was amazing, but I'm looking at the next four with aprehnsion rather than joy, and that's not true of a five-star book. This review is more hostile than the book really deserves, but that's because this book is almost great, and that's more frustrating than just being mediocre.

Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli are two Renaissance figures who have earned immortal fame, Leonardo for his fantastical notebooks, artistic masterpieces and proto-scientific approach to the natural world, Machiavelli for his foundational text on the cynicism of realistic politics with The Prince. Cesare Borgia is the most colorful member of the extremely colorful Borgia clan, notorious as the worst thing that ever happened to Catholicism. And for a few key months in 1502, they were in the same place, influencing each other as the world lurched from Medieval superstition to modern clarity.

Strathern spins a fascinating study of these three characters, but one which dissipates in the gaps in his sources. Much of the meat of the story is Borgia's critical 1502 campaign to secure his rule of Romagna as the first step towards a united Italy under Borgia rule. In this case, Borgia outmaneuvered a conspiracy against him, winning a war with treachery and boldness against his dithering and divided enemies.

The second viewpoint is Leonardo da Vinci, a bastard son raised in the rural hinterlands of Florence, who by sheer talent became one of the major artists and engineers of the age. In 1502, Leonardo was a military engineer working for Borgia, creating maps, updating fortresses, and building diabolical engines of destruction. While Leonardo had always had pacifists impulses, he was fascinated by tempests and engines of destruction. Strathern claims that seeing the aftermath of battles and sacked towns traumatized Leonardo, turning him from war, and likely also exacerbated the psychological block that prevented him from finishing his masterpieces or organizing his notebooks.

The third viewpoint is Machiavelli, who was a hard-travelling Florentine envoy posted to the Borgia court, to keep an eye on one of the many titans which threatened to crush his beloved city. Machiavelli is the most normal of the viewpoints, a civil servant who loves gossip and a bawdy joke with his drinking buddies, as contrasted against the genius of Leonardo and the overweening ambition of Borgia.

After 1502, their paths diverged. But Borgia's boldness and fortune did not long survive his father, Pope Alexander VI (and yeah, Popes should not have children, which is about the least scandalous thing about the Borgias), who'd been the strategic force behind Cesare's tactics. Imprisoned by his enemies, stripped of his riches and titles, and eventually exiled to Navarre, Cesare died in a pointless skirmish, a failure.

Leonardo's artistic block got worse and worse, but he found a comfortable retirement with the French and eventually painted the Mona Lisa. His unpublished notebooks are full of wonderous fragments of genius, though the scientific revolution would wait for a century after his death.

Machiavelli suffered the hardest fall. He'd been a major booster of Leonardo's in Florence, and his reputation was damaged when two of Leonardo's projects, an immense fresco and a plan to divert a river in the war against Pisa, came to nothing. Worse, the Medicis overthrew his republic and he lost his office. He wrote The Prince to try and curry favor with the Medicis, but the infamous manuscript doomed his chances when the Medici left power.

This book is often fascinating and plausible, and while there's frustratingly little hard proof of key elements, particularly of a friendship between Leonardo and Machiavelli, it's not like there lots of clever Florentines hanging around Borgia in 1502.

I'm mixed on this book. On the one hand, it helped me get an offer from a FAANG (study up on your binary trees, kids). On the other hand, it doesn't actually do a great job teaching the material, and the reference language is Java (ugh). This is a good refresher if it's been a while since CS101, but the best argument for this book is that it's dragged the world of tech interviews into it's gravitational field.