Harry potter spoof play
- •
Astral Codex Ten
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
I.
I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting.
John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.
Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Hous
- •
The Ideology Is Not The Movement
I.
Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide?
I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there’s no more caliphate. You’d think maybe they’d let the matter rest.
Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they’re supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over.
And so we return again to Robbers’ Cave:
The experimental subjects — excuse me, “campers” — were 22 boys between 5th and 6th grade, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each other as the researchers could manage.
•
Wayward
October 3, 2022Chuck Wendig's Wanderers became the book of 2020 thanks to its prescience and incredibly timely, relevant plot. Released in 2019, Wendig forecast an apocalyptic global pandemic set during the 2020 election year, in which a bigoted, racist businessman, Ed Creel, an obvious Trump surrogate, was running for election and drumming up the support of every racist dipshit in the US and using his most ardent white supremacist group-affiliated brownshirts to wreak violence on his behalf. The pandemic was predicted by an artificial intelligence called Black Swan (it turned out that, in real-life, an artificial intelligence named Blue Dot predicted COVID-19, further cementing Wanderers coincidental, and eyebrow-arching prognostications), which utilized nanobots to infect hand-picked Americans -- it's Flock -- to make a journey to the isolated mountain town of Ouray, CO.
Although Wanderers spent much of its page count in pre-apocalypse and apocalypses in-progress, its sequel, Wayward is very must a post-apocalyptic narrative. Set five years after the bulk of
Copyright ©fatunfo.pages.dev 2025