I read some great books this year

I made it a point to read more this year. Books, that is. I always read a ton of news, my self-defeating impulse of attempting to understand the slow societal collapse happening all around us every day. As if learning more about the who/what/why will somehow protect me and my family as it crumbles around us. I know it doesn’t make sense.

So many problems I’ve been reading smart people write/warn about for years seemed to break through this year. The network state, social media, corporate greed, algorithms, technocracy, plutocracy, capitalism, fascism, etc. I’m glad these issues are entering the public consciousness more now, but it’s also like yeah hi welcome to the party. It’s like when a band gets nominated for Best New Artist on their third record. Fascism has been rising for a long time, Karen, this isn’t “new.”

Facebook and X are brain-poisoning dopamine drips with perverse incentives that fracture public consciousness more every day. Two of the richest men in the world have tight control over the information that you see, and their thumbs pressed all the way to the right on the scale. Two of the books on this list are about them. Break free. Save yourself. Don’t look back.

*puts on a newsie cap* Read all about it!

NEWS

• I Want You to Understand Chicago

• I Toured America With My Band. It Changed How I Understand the Energy Transition.

• ICE is Arresting American Citizens — and Lying About It

• Immigration Agents Have Often Grabbed and Mistreated Citizens

• What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’

• Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz

• How Elon Musk’s Changes to X Made Our Discourse Far Stupider

• Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors

• Elon Musk’s Grok is Doxxing Home Addresses of Everyday People

• King Gizzard Pulled Their Music From Spotify in Protest, and Now Spotify is Hosting AI Knockoffs of Their Songs

• Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls

• Politicizing Transgender Athletes Is Dangerous. Lia Smith Deserved Better.

• Inside ICE’s media machine

• My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America

• “Sex trafficking on Meta platforms was both difficult to report and widely tolerated, according to a court filing unsealed Friday… the company had a 17x strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the ‘trafficking of humans for sex.’” (TIME.com)

• Anti-trans Alaskan medical board doctor dies in house fire after CSAM arrest

• NJ GOP congressman’s former staffer charged in staged MAGA attack

PODCAST OF THE YEAR

Pablo Torre Finds Out had a hell of a year. I really enjoyed a ton of his episodes, like hearing him dig deep into salary cap circumvention in the NBA, collusion in the MLB, sportswashing, Bill Belichick’s whole weird deal between Jordon and UNC, and a lot more. But maybe his best episode is all about Riley Gaines.

He does a great job revealing the insidiously quick jump from “it’s just about fairness in women’s sports!” to “these people are criminals and sexual deviants, we are all victims!” and how there’s no daylight between the two. He draws a straight line from her original reaction to the caricature she became, a line that goes directly through the fact that keeps this hornet nest buzzing: it is extremely lucrative to play the anti-trans victimhood card. That’s all this is. Bad people making lots of money by jumping onto a vicious wave of lies and hatred. Lies that only further endanger an already marginalized group.

Riley has made a career out of this. She made almost half a million dollars last year from one non-profit, all for being a whiny loser. She was a great swimmer. Finishing fifth in that meet was an achievement she should be proud of. Along the way, she changed for meets in a room with a trans woman, and said at the time she had no problem with it. Which is the normal response that a normal person would have, by the way.

But then her eyes bugged out and turned into dollar signs like in old cartoons. There was probably a cha-ching cash register noise in her head, and all of a sudden changing in that room near a trans woman was akin to sexual assault. She saw a pile of money available to her, and she took it.

The right wing billionaires waging this campaign of division and distraction truly don’t care about her or college sports more broadly, but it is part of their greater mission to eradicate trans people from existence, and this is one of the ways they feel they can win. To them, Riley is a pawn in a much larger battle. Riley will never admit that, but she is a useful idiot to them, and their cause is useful to her. She cashes the check, leans into this aggrieved, assaulted character she’s created for herself, and fame follows the money.

Her bank account grew. Her Twitter following grew. She gets paid speaking gigs. She gives Congressional testimony. She has a podcast. She has two book deals. She’s raking in cash. She’s doing just great, and all she had to do was be loud and mad, then stay loud and mad, because the rage machine runs on anger and its always hungry. Churn baby churn. Grist for the grievance mill.

Riley could move on any day, but it would all go away. If she wants to stay a Main Character, she has to keep going. There’s no place in the culture for a very good college swimmer. She doesn’t want to have to get a real job. Perverse incentives exist in the social media age, so she doesn’t have to; a stream of victimhood venom directed at the “right” people is a golden ticket to fame and fortune. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.

So the next time you hear about “fairness in women’s sports” remember that’s not at all what’s going on. Remember we’re talking about less than a dozen kids. Remember that while Riley and many others are throwing the term sexual assault around, there is real, actual sexual assault going on (including by Riley’s former coach!) but they have nothing to say about that. Remember that standing up for real victims doesn’t put money in their bank accounts, so they’ll stick to pretending to be the victim themselves. Remember that this is ragebaiting. That’s all they have because their views are extremely unpopular and they’re desperate to latch on to the zeitgeist. Remember that it’s working. The infrastructure exists. They just need someone to be irrationally angry and ready to yell. Samantha Fulnecky in Oklahoma is just the latest cog in the well-oiled anti-trans machine. Her paper was horribly written. It was at best inappropriate but much more so offensive. She knows this. It’s a playbook, and it works. She’s already hit the award circuit somehow. Maybe it didn’t deserve a 0, maybe it deserved a 25 or 50, but that’s not the point so don’t let anyone distract you with that. She did what she intended to do.

Remember this is what billionaires can do and why they shouldn’t exist.

I never said there wouldn’t be math. Don’t leave! It’s quick!

In 2024 NCAA President Charlie Baker said he knows of fewer than 10 transgender college student-athletes. Fewer than 10! Out of 510,000 athletes total! This is not a widespread issue. If these kids all got together they could barely form a kickball team, and yet right wing media wants you to believe this is a top issue in every town in the country with big stakes for everyone. They have to continue to act like a handful of college kids are an imposing army, an invading force, who are coming to take everything from you. The whole thing is bullshit.

Let’s call it 10. 10 out of 510,000 = 1 out of 51,000. That’s 0.002%.

This is Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Go Pirates. The capacity: 51,000. Now think about one single person sitting somewhere here watching a football game. That’s one of fifty-one thousand. That’s it.

Leave trans people alone, you weirdos. Stop thinking about other people’s genitals. Get a hobby. Go for a walk. Do literally anything else with your pathetic lives.

Shoutout to everyone who doesn’t have a podcast though. The real heroes. Myself included, of course.

BOOKS: FICTION

The Memory Police 
by Yōko Ogawa

Characters live on an island where they are forced to forget things or concepts. Hats. Roses. Birds. Thrown away and forgotten. The author brings a gently pervasive melancholy to a quiet human drama about grief, state surveillance, the danger of forgetting and who benefits from it, the slow crawl of totalitarianism, the power of the written word, objective truths passed down through storytelling. Any dystopian future one can imagine happens daily, piece by piece, and never announces itself. 

Reading this in 2025 adds an extra layer of fright. At a time when there is so much going on, and it’s almost all very scary, how can we continue to function during such an assault on our memories, our time, our senses, our shared humanity, our common decency, our freedom, and our democracy? 

More interested in asking questions rather than answering them, which may turn off some readers, but thought-provoking and engaging nonetheless. Multiple times I stopped to reread a passage, stunned. There is something haunting, floating, ghost-like in the characters and the prose. 

Selected quotes:

“It’s subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“When I was a child, the whole place seemed…how can I put this?…a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn’t worry.”

“But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man’s death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.”

“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”

Water Moon 
by Samantha Sotto Yambao

Ostensibly a story of a family-run pawn shop with a succession plan, but nothing is as it seems in this magical tale. For example, unless you are lost, you’ll never even find this pawn shop.

You know those days when you randomly remember your dream from the previous night, and it’s a series of scenes that seem to flip from one to the next without any real transition? This story is sometimes just like that. It reads like a lush, layered dream where anything can and will happen, where you can never predict what the next twist or turn will be. Everything is a bit fuzzy the whole time, and it feels like your feet are always just off the ground. Poetic prose, ethereal imagery, an enchanting journey. Jumping through a puddle. Listening to candles. Floating on paper cranes. A night market in the clouds. This is a waking dream you want to spend more time inside of.

Neuromancer, Count Zero, Burning Chrome 
by William Gibson

Putting these altogether. I’d never read Gibson before and wanted to change that. I loved Neuromancer and reached for Count Zero immediately after. The world-building is dense and interesting. The prose is sometimes difficult but always worth it. (And as the world’s #1 Straylight Run fan, I should have read this a long time ago.) Burning Chrome is a collection of short stories, my favorite of which was co-written by John Shirley. It immediately became one of my favorite short pieces of fiction ever. It just blew me away so I read it again right away. Here’s a pdf link to it.

We Had it Coming
by Luke O’Neil

It’s funny, it’s sad, sometimes it kicks you in the nuts, sometimes it gives you a hug. It is extremely dark but it’s keeping the light on for all of us. There’s nothing else like it.

It Can’t Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis

Oh it sure can happen here. In the book, people actually cared when Congress lost all their power. How unrealistic!

The Running Man 
by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

I decided to read this when I heard Edgar Wright was remaking the film. The book was an enjoyable quick read, and the 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was campy and fun. I still haven’t seen the new film, but I plan on it.

BOOKS: NON-FICTION

Character Limit
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Elon Musk is a terrible person and it cannot be overstated what a net negative he has been for society. He overpaid to buy the town square and broke down walls that may never be replaced. He will go down in history as an all-time villain. The title is just perfect.

Careless People
by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Mark Zuckerberg is a terrible person and it cannot be overstated what a net negative he has been for society. Facebook was a bad idea. He will go down in history as an all-time villain.

Empire of AI
by Karen Hao

Sam Altman is a terrible person and it cannot be overstated what a net negative he has been for society. He will go down in history as an all-time villain.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve

Some of the worst people in the world used to be constrained to obscure forums on the internet. They posted the most hateful, racist, gutter bullshit you can imagine. Well now those people work for and run the American government. These are JD Vance’s buddies. He follows them on social media. He speaks their language from government podiums. The worst of the worst has spilled out into positions of influence.

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
by Megan Greenwell

However much you hate private equity, it’s not enough.

A well-researched, prescient, rage-inducing read. Private equity allows the very wealthy to risk very little in order to get richer while leaving human misery in the wake of their destruction. They ruin lives and industries in the name of profit, because no amount of money will ever be enough for them. Like our president, these people are black holes of need and greed and there is no number high enough for them to be satisfied. Greenwell smartly tells the story through the eyes of four victims: a doctor, a journalist, an affordable housing advocate, and a retail (Toys R Us) employee.

Here are some passages I highlighted, but the first one really says it all.

“I’m desperate to convince everyone else how bad this is, but they don’t believe me because it’s not their problem.”

“When the only worth of a local grocery store, a newspaper, or a hospital is the short-term profits it can generate, the company becomes little more than a mine awaiting extraction.”

“As the New Yorker put it in 2012, ‘for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits.’”

“When KKR, Bain, and Vornado borrowed money to buy Toys R Us, they did it in Toys R Us’s name, not their own. Even though the firms owned the company, even though their executives took out the loans, they would not be legally responsible for paying that $5 billion back. … Toys R Us’s private equity owners had initially taken out $5.3 billion in loans to finance their purchase of the company. Twelve years later, their total debt had shrunk. Now they owed a mere $5.2 billion.”

“Private equity and other investment firms spent $42 million on congressional races in the 2020 election cycle, two-thirds of which went to Democrats. Just four senators and sixty-two representatives didn’t get any private equity donations, a mere 12 percent of all elected members. … A committed lobbying operation and generous donations to politicians of all political stripes have helped protect the industry’s ability to operate largely unchecked.”

“But to Roger’s mind, following Riverton’s example doesn’t require building a new community hospital in every rural county in the country. What it does require is people banding together to dream up solutions, and being unafraid of pursuing more radical options.”

Here’s to those willing to pursue more radical options, those willing to fight the behemoth that is private equity. It feels very unlikely, but a better world is possible.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource
by Chris Hayes

We only have the capacity for so much, and we’re stuck in a mirrored funhouse full of flashing red beacons and blaring sirens, screaming and beckoning for us with little haunted gremlin voices: payyyyyyy attentionnnnnn.

We’ve been calling it “the information age” but “the attention age” is more appropriate. There is so much information and we only have so much time, which makes our attention the most important and endangered resource there is. Capitalism comes for us all, and that includes our attention. Perhaps light on solutions, but I’m not sure there are any great options. But the more we can try to claw back our agency and time, the better off we’ll be. Fair warning, readers may become Marxist or at least Marxist sympathizers. This book is a like cousin of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves the Death.

Donald Trump is the poster child for this. He craves adoration and attention, but confuses the two. He’ll take as much of either as he can get, and no amount will ever be enough. Elon Musk is another attention starved beast. he overspent for Twitter in part because he knew it would make him the main character. Yes he wanted control of the information firehose too, but opportunities to buy attention like this are extremely rare.

“What gets attention is a very different category from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society.”

MOTION PICTURES

Eephus was the best film I saw this year. If you are in the middle of the Venn diagram of “loves baseball” and “loves films” this is a grand slam. Probably a double if you’re really into one of the two. If you don’t like either, I don’t know what to tell you. Fix your heart.

I didn’t see a ton of new films but I also enjoyed Stolen Kingdom, Mickey 17, and Frankenstein. The best non-new film I watched was The Zone of Interest (2023) and was stunned by it. I rewatched I Saw the TV Glow many times.

I plan to see Bugonia, One Battle After Another, Avatar 3, Eddington, Sinners, No Other Choice, and Wake Up Dead Man.

OTHER STUFF I LIKED

I got a Switch 2 and really enjoyed Mario Kart World, especially the free roam mode. PowerWash Simulator 2 was my favorite game though. There’s something so calming about it. My stupid brain just loves it.

It has done wonders for my mental health knowing that for years I will get to watch Roman Anthony play baseball all spring/summer/fall and watch Drake Maye play football all fall/winter. I went to Roman’s first game, and later in the season I saw him crush a homer off the best pitcher in baseball, Paul Skenes. 99 MPH fastball, 108.6 exit velocity, 408 feet. Beautiful.

I will definitely write about the songs/records of 2025 sometime in January.

In case I don’t end up writing a separate post about television, my favorite shows of the year were Andor, Pluribus, Severance, The Studio, Last Week Tonight, The Rehearsal, and Task. Still need to watch The Pitt, The Lowdown, A Man on the Inside, and probably like 29 other shows.