I highly suggest the Umberto Eco book "How to Travel With a Salmon". It's a collection of short essays on a variety of topics.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Read this many years ago and enjoyed. Great recommendation in the spirit of this thread (for anyone who has not read it)
I enjoyed reading Ur-Fascism so it’d probably be nice to read something lighter from him.
Foucault’s Pendulum is amazing.
It's the book that kicked the Davinci Code to death and left it bleeding in a gutter.
It’s the book Dan Brown was “inspired” by.
That's actually a complicated story...
It goes back to a book called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" back in 1982.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Grail
Then you have Foucalt's Pendulum (1988) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum
The comic book series "Preacher" 66 monthly issues from 1995 to 2000. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)
Da Vinci Code (2003) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code
There is not a lot "light" about Umberto Eco, but How to Travel With a Salmon is one of them.
If you're in the mood for nonsensical madness:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Time_Cube
or
https://pdf-library.org/terrence-howard-math-theory.pdf (Yes, this is the actor that played Rhodes in the first Iron Man movie)
I suppose that OP didn’t state that the ideas presented must be worth any consideration
OP did not!
Upvote for time cube
You beat me to the cube. Wish the original blog was still around
My virus scanner says that last link redirects to a phishing site.
There's nothing of value there, feel free to look up "Terrance Howard math theory" elsewhere
Exiting the Vampire Castle, by Mark Fisher (2013): https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiting_the_Vampire_Castle):
"Exiting the Vampire Castle" is an essay written by the English theorist Mark Fisher for the online publication The North Star in 2013. It argues for increased leftist solidarity by departing from the phenomenon of online callout culture to instead orient activity around organization of efforts around the accountability of one's economic class, rather than around traits in identity and culture.
Fisher argues that a largely online style of identity-based leftist discourse grounded in "witch-hunting moralism" halts productive leftist discourse and undermines class politics.[1] In particular, the combination of a primary focus on identity and the policing of others' speech is deleterious.[2] Fisher saw the turn from class and materialism towards identity as a move from objective outward-facing goals to subjective inward goals that result in fragmentation of the left's efforts and community.[3]
Fisher defends Russel Brand in the essay, but remember that this was written in 2013, and Fisher died in 2017.
What is entropy : https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/
The life changing contrast of Japanese clutter : https://aeon.co/essays/the-life-changing-magic-of-japanese-clutter
Stanislav Lem wrote really good short stories next to his amazing books.
In my opinion he is the most philosophical, most intelligent and best in physics among all sciencefiction authors. I think his most famous book is Solaris but everything I read of him was actually really interesting - including the short stories.
Be aware that stories of his early career are more funny while later he got really pessimistic about humans in general.
I had one of his books of short stories when I was a teen (The Cyberiad) and loved it...meaning to read more of his work
Could the genetic diathesis in the stress-diathesis model of disease for both psychiatric and medical illness be staring us in the face?
How about HG Wells talking about mini wargaming in 1912? I think it's fascinating to see proto-nerds inventing the geek stuff that we take for granted a hundred years later.
Little Wars via Project Gutenberg
And a subtitle that he probably thought was egalitarian and progressive at the time.
Yeah, that's pretty bad.
I still think it's an interesting read.
All good. It's something I'd like to play sometime. I just think it's important to acknowledge this shit.
Yeah, I'd have left a misogyny warning if I'd remembered that part. Thanks for the note.
Have you ever wished that you were personal friends with a 16th century French petty nobleman and diplomat? His essays are more interesting and more accessible than that sounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne
I trusted my drug dealer's recommendation on that one and was not disappointed, so I'm passing it on.
Also, I will never not recommend Pliny the Younger's account of his uncle's death by volcanic eruption (Vesuvius) and his own story of surviving it. PDF versions are widely available.
If not for the edit, I was gonna suggest Time Cube.
I like this one about tick borne illness a lot. https://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/essays/jungle-wedding/
This one is from 2001 and is about how the pornography trade was getting increasingly violent, interesting to read in a post internet porn world. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1
On music and words - Friedrich Nietzsche (1871)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/51548/51548-h/51548-h.htm#ON_MUSIC_AND_WORDS
- The language is from a different era and takes a few pages to get into.
I stumbled across a theory that really early christian figure Paul of Tarsus was a Roman/Herodian plant trying to thwart Jewish uprisings. I've only seen videos so far and I don't know how credible it is really, but it was a really interesting idea, I'm sure you could find an essay if that's the sort of historical conspiracy theory you're interested in.
I love the bit where they just attack the idea of someone saying "Ugh, capitalism" and perform character assassinations (on people they seem to respect?) rather than actually discuss issues in the world. Like yeah, virtue signalling exists. See the companies that ask to work with LGBTQIA+ people specifically in the month of June and no other. We know it happens. You're doing the exact thing you're currently complaining about.
"Y'all can't quote the exact policies that are causing issues" - says the dude who complains about everyone in Brooklyn having 'Ugh capitalism' in their tinder bios. I thought we were talking real issues here? Hard hitting policy that needs to be changed, not horny men using a tactic.
Awful article really.
There’s never any real discussion of detailed fixes in this kind of complaint—because that might acknowledge we can fix the problem without overthrowing the system. There’s never any argument about how under socialism (or some other alternative economic model) public policy tradeoffs, political failures, or scarcity just wouldn’t exist.
There's tons of theory out there that addresses that point. Maybe read some.
Theory is useless.
I will acknowledge that is in there but he spends the entire article talking about how much of a loser you are for saying Ugh capitalism, then throws in those two sentences. That's not an actual discussion, it's the article equivalent of drawing the person you disagree with as the virgin loser and yourself as the chad.
He's right to point out that either no alternative is offered or the alternative is just more regulated capitalism with a stronger safety net.
Yep, and an intelligent discussion could have been had, if this had been the point of the article. Instead we got 4 paragraphs stating which people are saying this phrase and the rest discussing how much of a loser those people are.
It’s as if “Capitalism” wrote that article.