As humanity finally learns (or is forced) to confront the reality and imminent dangers of climate change, we’re going to need every bit of mental flexibility and creativity we can muster. There has probably never been a moment in history when it was more critical for us to explore and appreciate types of intelligence different from […]
I’ll be the first to admit that Peter Watts’s The Freeze-Frame Revolution might be a better book than I’m willing to give it credit for. It was nice to take another trip into the mind-bending ideas and dark humor for which Watts is rightly loved, but I found myself unable to sink into this novella in a […]
I expect any worthwhile novel to touch on a smattering of my intellectual interests, weaving them together in a fresh and entertaining fashion. It is rare, however, for a single story to engage with a manifold range of subjects about which I am deeply passionate, and rarer still for that synthesis to prove itself more […]
It’s been more than a decade since I walked into my first Philosophy 101 discussion group at the University of Oregon and noticed a diminutive, sparkly-eyed man at the front of the room. There’s no way I could have predicted how profoundly my life would change due to the influence of this man, who spent […]
Cixin’s Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past is a perfect and peerless narrative achievement. Not only is it the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read, but it would also be a strong contender for my favorite story of all time. I think that giving away any major plot points or world-building features would do a disservice […]
Antonio Damasio’s impact on my intellectual development would be difficult to overstate. I first encountered his work when I was assigned The Feeling of What Happens for a philosophy of mind course in college. That book fundamentally transformed how I understood myself as a thinking, feeling being, and when I read Self Comes to Mind a few years later, […]
Steven Pinker was one of the first writers to kindle my passion for scientific thinking. When I read The Blank Slate in 2011, it exposed me to a host of intellectual disciplines that my undergraduate training in philosophy had neglected––most notably evolutionary psychology, skepticism, and the empirical foundations of human nature. Nearly a decade later, I am […]
The title of Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions may appear to promise a set of inquiries with reachable termination points, but in fact the opposite is true. This collection of short essays explores a slew of multifaceted and often-insouble problems surrounding the nature of human society and experiential life that Nagel pondered during the 1970s. Nagel is nobly […]
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s Moral Psychology series represents the sole source of truly academic writing that I’ve managed to keep up with since college. When I was contemplating applying to graduate school back in 2012, the field of moral psychology was my target niche, so reading these books over the years has been a way of catching up with my […]
George Orwell’s 1984 is one of those books about which it is probably impossible to say anything new or interesting. Much like its protagonist’s tortured mind and body, Orwell’s masterpiece has been prodded, cut open, and drained of its juices by many minds that surpass my own. My intention for this review, then, is just to leave […]