Let’s stat with the introduction to Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub . It describes an elaborate future history, one in which the world — something like our world, we gather — has suffered a calamity: the papyralysis. The papyralysis has destroyed all paper on earth...

to be fair, i’m putting big Xs for the ones i’ve read through, and small xs for the ones i haven’t finished… BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Share with your fellow reader friends. 1 [X] Pride and Preju...

One concern about liberaltarianism is that libertarians will lose something important in the process. I’m not convinced that this is a very pressing concern. After all, liberaltarianism is a project that exists mostly in a few blog posts at the moment. It’s nothing like a voting strategy...

(Update: I just noticed that for some reason, the comments had been closed. They’re open now.) William James confesses his utopia as follows: I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. . . . And when whole nations are the armies,...

While Mr. Rowe continues to keep the assertions, arguments and blandishments of the Christian Nation crowd at bay, he and Mr. Babka and I got into a bit of a digression regarding whether the existence of God in some sense is necessary to the existence of natural rights and / or whether the latter is...

I abandoned my blog project on collectivism and science fiction after getting the impression (wrong, it seems) that I was the only one who really cared about it. With this post, I’m re-booting it, with links to the previous essays and pointers to the upcoming material. I really will try to fin...

Everytime I even think about putting my pen to paper and writing that “great Beatles’” that I know is inside of me I think of titles like this.  There are book about The Beatles’, and then there are things that are much greater.  Jonathan Gould’s awesome tome definite...

In an interesting article entitled “Google & the Future of Books,” Robert Darnton writes: Along the way [between the dawn of the Enlightenment and the age of the Internet], professional journals sprouted throughout the fields, subfields, and sub-subfields. The learned societies prod...

I accuse the literate public of accepting bad translations for far, far too long. Consider this excerpt from Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse!” — his condemnation of antisemitism and corruption in the French military during the Dreyfus Affair. It’s been called ̶...

Here is a book I strongly recommend: Fully Human Fully Divine: An Interactive Christology by Michael Casey. If you're from the Philippines, you can get it for PhP 250 at Jesuit Communications. As the title implies, this book is a reflection on the dual nature of Christ and what such duality means fo...