Currently Reading

I am a great practitioner of the art of tsundoku, both in the classical sense with physical books, as well as in the digital sense with the list of saved articles that I’m going to “read later”. As far as vices go, I could be much worse off, so I’m not going to complain about it too much.

Having said that, I do usually get around to reading most of the articles I save (eventually!), and sometimes even jot down some thoughts about them; for example, here's what I had to say about The Third Force:

There’s a lot to unpack in this essay, and almost all of it would be worth pulling out as quotes to note, but possibly nothing more than this passage:

“Stupid” doesn’t mean unintelligent or even uninformed. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin was closer to the mark when he defined stupidity as a “loss of reality.” It’s possible to take Voegelin’s definition a step further and say that stupidity is a denial of reality to the degree that one’s own survival, to say nothing of the survival of others, is imperiled. […] Stupidity is oblivious to negative consequences; it falls into a pit. Gross stupidity invites negative consequences; it looks for a pit. There’s an element of willfulness to it: let the oceans rise, let the virus rage, you can’t scare me.

I’ve also fallen into the “I simply can’t understand how anyone can think like that” trap many, many times over the last few years… it’s not that I don’t want to understand views different to my own, but has my refusal to understand become an inability to understand? Has this become my own form of being stupid? Do I even want to be able to understand something that I find abhorrent?

Cam Pegg
More of my hot takes

On My Nightstand

As well as the digital reads, I regularly have a couple (or three, or four) books on the go at once… I’ve been like that since I was a kid. On the positive side, it keeps a certain variety in my reading, on the negative, it often means that it takes me forever to finish some books.

More of my reading list