The Blacktongue Thief is a lot of fun. The summary lays out the plot pretty well. Cynical and very in-debt junior thief Kinch is given a Quest to join up with the knight Galva, journey with her, and foil her quest at the orders of her guild. It's a standard long journey across dangerous lands, with a prize at the end.

But two things elevate this book. The first is Kinch's first-person narration, which is funny, opinionated, perceptive and partially blind. He's a bad person but a good friend. The second is the world-building as revealed over the course of the book. There are many human nations, but all of them have been devastated by the Goblin Wars, a series of conflicts on the scale of a demographic collapse that saw humans drafting women and a plague which rendered horses extinct. The grasping ambitions of the Taker's Guild and the weird workings of the various mages Kinch encounters on his journey shin like poison gems against this falling world.

Read this, you won't be disappointed.

The thing about diet and exercise and weight loss is that they mostly don't work. Humans are immensely resistant to ongoing changes in body composition. Brewer, a psychiatrist, neurologist, and mindfulness coach, offers his summary of what might be a more successful program. The basic premise is that you have to break the habits of disordered eating and learn to listen to your body again. Modern snack foods are addictive, at the perfect triple point of sweet, salty, and fatty. Due to past experiences, we eat to deal with moods like depression, anxiety, and boredom. Obviously, you can't eat your way out of a bad mood.


Processed food was literally designed for you to eat. Organic is just some crap they found on the ground.

There's a lot of neurojargon, like references to the orbitofrontal cortex, dopamine, and various memory systems, but the basic technique is mindfulness based. No one has enough discipline to simply override the urge the eat, especially not over the long term. What is possible is to recognize the patterns and moods that trigger compulsive eating and develop new habits. Techniques like mindful eating, using attention to savor food rather than shoveling it down, and RAIN (recognize, accept, investigate, nurture) on junk food cravings can help us relearn 'proper' experiences around eating an entire carne asada super burrito, or a pound of jellybeans. As we learn to take pleasure in healthier foods and remember that junk food comes with a price, better eating habits come naturally.

This book recommends a 21 day course of exercises. There's also an Eat Right Now app, which I found expensive ($100 a year), and a little intrusive with notifications. I can do mindfulness for free, ya know. I'll also say as a natural born hater, I am not doing a loving-kindness meditation. Finally, I just have some stress and boredom eating, which is likely amenable to this kind of intervention. If you have a diagnosed eating disorder, I'm not sure mindfulness is the right approach.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory is a novel length expansion of Barsukov's previous novella Tower of Mud and Straw, adding a fourth and fifth act onto the foundation of the novella. Shea Ashcroft, a minister disgraced for choosing not to use violence against the mob, is sent to investigate the construction of an immense defensive tower that has been slipping behind schedule. The paranoid and insular group around the local Duke has mirrors in his own past.

This book feels like a political thriller, a plot of ambitions and intrigues, but that is a surface of stucco and paint rather than stone. The writing is dreamlike and lyrical, gorgeous word-paintings that capture those moments of memory that hold like snapshots, against which everything else seems false. Shea and the other narrators of the book, Lena and Brielle, tread water in a vast and stormy sea of memory and illusion, where air is foam and what purchase their feet can find is rotting driftwood. I'm reminded of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, though a labyrinth and a tower have complete different vibes.

(disclosure: I received an ARC from the author and no other compensation)

I appear to like Provenance a lot more than most readers, and it's mostly in the tension between Ingray's self-conception and how others see her. Ingray is a potential heir to political power, in vicious competition for her mother's favor back home over her brother. Her ambition has brought her to the station of Tyr, where anything is for sale, to bargain everything she owns on the exiled and imprisoned child of her mother's main political rival, who she believes knows a dark secret that could give her family immense political ambition.

Ingray sees herself as dancing along the edge of chaos, a social and emotional wreck desperately improvising to keep from falling into the abyss. The book spends a lot of time in her head, so glimpses of the outer Ingray, a possessed young woman who is scarily good at spotting weakness and jumping at it, is a delight.

The plot has a lot of moving pieces, which ultimately come to a kind of sleight of hand trick, but in a series that tends slow-to-glacial, alien ambassadors, murder mysteries, surprising romances, and a hostage situation on a space station as prelude to invasion, all offer a lot of interesting bits to chew on as the sociological design of Ingray's Hwae culture, focused on veneration of artifacts linked to famous events and people, unfolds.

Walker, R.N. is punchy first-round WW2 history, focusing on Captain Frederic John "Johnny" Walker, the most decorated and successful anti-submarine warfare commander of the Second World War. The book glides over his early life and pre-war career as a successful misfit in the Royal Navy, a natural leader who clashed with his superiors and who's career seemed to have stalled when war broke out.

The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the critical points of the war. Without convoys from the Americas, Britain would have starved, Russia would not have received important lend-lease aid, and the Normandy landings might never have occurred. This was a campaign without fronts or decisive moments, a grinding war of attrition between escorts and U-boats.

In this war, Walker made a name for himself as an aggressive and preternaturally gifted hunter. In command of the Second Support Group, consisting of a core of Black Swan-class sloops, Walker sought out U-boats wherever they were most active, either in the Bay of Biscay or attacking allied convoys. He pioneered several tactics, specializing in a directed quiet kill, where he would stand off maintaining Asdic (the British term for Sonar) contact, while directing another ship to creep in and nail the target with depth charges. The descriptions of combat are plenty exciting, if a little repetitive, while the rest of the book is standard hagiography.

Baldwin's lengthy personal essay on race in America was written on the 100th anniversary of the emancipation proclamation, in the midst of the unsettled struggle of the Civil Right Movement, and before the assassination of President Kennedy which indicated a dark turning point in American history.

The biographical sections are fantastic: quick ink sketches of life in Harlem and a meeting with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. The central theme is racism, the way that legal and social shackles weigh down Baldwin and his compatriots. Yet Baldwin is more sophisticated, more psychological. Racism is about the power of domination, it's a tie that binds slave and master, and diminishes them both. The Black Separatism of the Nation of Islam, based on a theology that white people are devils (specifically bred by Evil Scientist Yakub), is an inversion of American racism that offers a balm of power, but no solutions.

Baldwin has no easy solutions. Universal dignity, universal love, universal brotherhood are all hard. Power is seductive, and always will product an out-group. A Black man became President in 2008. A Black woman has a decent chance at the oval office in 2024. But the American dream is still very provisional for African-Americans, and injustice everywhere.

If this is not yet the fire, I shudder to think what next time will be.

This is a terrible, cynical, awful book. And much like Machiavelli's The Prince, it is basically 100% correct in its thesis. Hewlett came out of a Welsh coalmining village to go through Cambridge, an econ PhD, then American academia, and then a pivot to thought leadership in talent development. Her big picture look is at the kinds of people who rise to the top of the political-economic sociopath factory that is American business, and especially women and minorities who are not rising to the top.

As much as we'd like to believe that the world is meritocratic and that good work speaks for itself, as you get higher up success is more and more defined by networks, and in particular the presence of a sponsor, a more senior leader who finds you opportunities, covers your mistakes, and sells you to their networks. In return, as a protege you make them look good, you do anything they ask, and you go above and beyond to demonstrate executive presence, and you deliver.

There are a few decent tips in this book, on avoiding perpetual lieutenant syndrome, saying 'yes' and doing caveats after, and the 2+1 rule, which is that you should have a primary sponsor as a manager (or maybe skip-level), a sponsor in an adjacent unit, and a third outside the organization entirely, in case things implode. Also, being a protege means regular check-ins, and balancing the reciprocal relationship.

As someone with a PhD who totally screwed up the networking part of the academic path, I've long said the only good plan for grad school is to find the professor in your vicinity with the biggest hat and make yourself a clone of them. This book offers some more details on how to do that.


A bigger hat

You weren't all that attached to your principles, were you?

The Unaccountability Machine attempts a grand project of diagnosing and curing the malaise of the 21st century: namely, everything is getting worse and it seems like nobody can do nothing about it. Davies' theoretical approach is to explain and use Stafford Beer's cybernetic management theories against Milton Friedman's neoliberal doctrine that the primary duty of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. I'm not sure it quite works, but it's a brave attempt. The initiating idea is one of accountability sinks. Think about getting bumped from a flight due to a system outage and complaining to the desk agent. It's not like they can do anything to help. They're just a face there to insulate the airline from customers who can no longer make their connections. Information should be flowing, but it instead it's stopped.

The first thing is explaining Stafford Beer and cybernetic management. Beer was one of those mid-century British prodigies, going from philosophy to the Army in WW2 to psychology to operations research to management consultant to public intellectual. His enduring contributions were two books, Brain Of The Firm and The Heart of the Enterprise, the acronym POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does), and a consulting hand in Chile's Project Cybersyn, a centrally planned economic operations center that was overtaken by Pinochet's coup.


Project Cybersyn

The key parts of management cybernetics, according to Davies, is that any system managing another system must have sufficient variety to handle the kinds of information coming from the managed system. Secondly, according to Beer's Viable System Model all systems have five interacting components: operations, coordination, regulation, intelligence, and identity. I'll confess that even as someone with a sympathy towards cybernetics, I'm not full convinced. The phrase "sufficient variety" conceals the complexities of what organizations are paying attention to, and applying the viable system model is to a real enterprise is far from easy. With cybernetics, I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' observation about astrology or tarot, in that it doesn't really matter what the rules are (even pure nonsense can work), as long as there are sufficiently many of them in enough fineness to reveal the shape of whatever lies beneath.

But taking cybernetic seriously, the problem is one of economic management, namely how to match inputs and outputs across the billions of human preferences that make up the economy. Davies is an economist, but a critical one, who regards the '-ist' as exemplifying an ideology rather than academic rigor. Economic modeling is powerful, but makes dangerous simplifying assumptions. To whit, individual preferences are atomic, and the effects of complexity in systems can be ignored. While economics is extremely powerful in a policy role, it is also shockingly bad at dealing with things like real accounting practices as done by businesses, time, and debt.

Economic as a discipline fostered a series of moves which represented the triumph of the capitalist class (those who own things) over the managerial class (those who make decisions), with the working class already placed on the ash-heap of history. These moves are most strongly identified with Milton Friendman, and the doctrine that a company's primary and indeed sole duty is to maximize shareholder returns. All sources of information get crushed down into a single number, the stock price, which floats on the whims of speculators. Further, the practice of the leveraged buyout means that companies are forced to ignore everything that isn't generating cashflow to service increasingly high debt obligations. And the neoliberal wisdom of the market means that there's no one to appeal to: this is just how the world works now.

I'm not sure that Davies' advice to adjust the information and incentives is sufficient. Power speaks, and it's no accident that capitalism won and forced the working classes to absorb all shocks to the system. But he offers an insightful and novel prescription, like some new drug extracted from a rare and ancient flower deep in the rainforest.

Everybody needs comfort food reading once in a while, and this was sitting on my shelf. I'm not sure that this is a great mystery novel, or even a great book, since I'm not a fan of the genre, but the characters are fun, the plot flows and twists, and everybody gets together at the end for the reveal of the killer.

The grocery store is the high temple of Late Capitalism, an unending cornucopia of everything that you want. And like any good high temple, it has its shadowy underbelly, a galaxy of corruption and lies that makes the magic work. Food is one of the key universals, but how we eat is highly specific. Lorr follows Upton Sinclair's classic muckraking in The Jungle, mixing cultural theory with extended anecdotes based on his reporting to show all sides of store. As I write this, the high price of groceries is one of the key issues of the 2024 election. Yet historically, Americans spend about 10% of their income on groceries today, compared to 30% in 1950 and 50% in 1900. The system is efficient and bountiful, even as parts of it are rotten.


Premier Gorbachev marveling at the produce at Randall's Supermarket in 1989. Tear down these savings!

The first thing to note is that the modern supermarket is a relatively new phenomenon, only arriving in the early 20th century and coming into its own in the immediate postwar boom. The ideology of the supermarket is abundance, choice, and cost. To get there, there is an intensive process that takes raw living organisms, crops and animals, and processes them into industrial commodities. Then, these commodities are transformed into products, everything from a single banana ("It's one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?") to a frozen meal with dozens of ingredients. Finally, we place in our cart and take it home, where only then does it become food.

Managing the product stage is one key part of the grocery experience. Lorr conducted an extended interview with "Trader Joe" Coulombe, founder of the eponymous chain, who is usually and rightfully deemed a product visionary. Trader Joe's went in a unique direction in the 1960s, focusing on a Southern California customer base of the 'overeducated and underpaid', and achieving record profitability by focusing on employees, profit per square inch of shelf space, and unique products with an aura of sophistication.

Trader Joe's has a unique vision, but most grocery stores are Walmart/Safeway/ALDI. The thousands of products represent not so much a unique vision of the shopper as a random selection of brands engaged in brutal Darwinian competition. And it is truly Darwinian. Another major arc follows the tragically named Slawsa and its intensely driven owner Julie Busha (she was subsequently on Shark Tank) towards potential success on the shelves. Of new products, over 90% of them disappear within a year. Slawsa is made in a small (by food logistics standards, it's several thousand square feet of reconfigurable production space) industrial kitchen in North Carolina that makes hundreds of unique products on demand.

The story of Slawsa is one of those American dreams of an idea that might make it big. Its manufacturing is also hygienic, fair, and efficient. Getting on shelves and then into shopper's carts, is where the corruption lies in this story. Groceries are a notorious unprofitable business, with stores making perhaps 1.5% profit on what they sell. The money is in kickbacks from distributors. A fee for getting in the store, another for better shelf space, mandatory bonus cases in each shipment, requirements to purchase ads in those newspaper inserts that get thrown away unread, two-for-one deals at the distributor's expense. It's pay-to-win, and unless you come in with deep pockets, you simply won't.

A similar story of is in the various certifications on products: Organic, FairTrade, Sustainable Fisheries, etc and so on. Food safety auditing is overwhelming privatized, ethical labelling even more so. In one sense, this public-private partnership, backed up by class action lawsuits, has made American food much safer since the 1990s, as recalls have fallen immense. On the other hand, auditors are barely trained, report to the people who hire them, and have conflicting incentives to not see problems that don't make customers sick.

Ethical and supply-chain labels conceal horrific problems, as the back half of the book focuses on, with a segment with the NGO Labor Protection Network, its founders, and one of its exemplars, a former fisher named Tun-Lin. Tun-Lin was born in Burma, illegally immigrated to Thailand in search of work, wound up enslaved on a fishing boat for five years (where he witnessed his only friend beaten to death and tossed overboard), enslaved on land in a shrimping facility for more years, and then went back to another boat of his own free will before losing a hand. Slavery is endemic in shrimp, chocolate, and coffee, among other commodities. The pressure is to reduce prices in the store and look the other way, and Lorr is deeply skeptical about reforms doing anything than pushing the problem to another region.

While not technically slavery, the whole grocery system runs on trucking, and trucking is profoundly bad. Lorr rides with Lynne Ryles for a week, a veteran owner-operator who routinely works up to the legal limit of 14 hours a day, 70 hours a week, in the exhausting and alienating ordeal of driving a big rig, and who makes maybe $100 a week above expenses, if everything goes right. Ryles is slowly killing herself in pursuit of the open road, and she's good at this. Trucking as an industry has about a 120% annual turnover, and only functions by a constant influx of indebted trainees, who front the costs to learn how to drive, are coerced to sign owner-operator leases, and then have the money sucked out of them by literally everyone else in the system.

Against this, ordinary grocery retail is merely ordinary bullshit. Lorr worked six months at Whole Foods, just prior to the Amazon acquisition, and retail is long hours, crazy customers, and just-in-time staffing that prevents people from having a predictable income, or a schedule stable enough to work a second job or have a life. (As an aside, as someone who has only had good 9-5 jobs, I strongly believe this kind of mandatory just-in-time staffing should be illegal, and the officers of any company found practicing it should be required to serve jail time in 12 hour shifts at random until their sentence is completed.)

There are things to genuinely critique in this book. It's a series of anecdotes backed up by data, not a systematic analysis. Lorr is definitely an MFA style writer, and dances a fine line of over-egging his prose. The conclusion about how grocery stores reflect and represent us isn't wrong, but dissipates its impact in a cushion of theory. Yet those flaws are minor. This book cuts to the core of American life. You may not like what you see, but that's what's for sale.