Pun Salad

I'm pretty old now, but back in the 1960s, as a teenager, I checked out Frank Meyer's book, In Defense of Freedom, from the Omaha Public Library. Even then, I was impressed by his argument. I would occasionally get creeped out by some of the other National Review writers. But it seemed to me back then that Meyer got it pretty much right. And that belief has (more or less) continued for sixty years or so.

Although Meyer didn't care much for the term, the political philosophy he argued for came to be known as "fusionism". What's being fused? The two ideals of liberty and virtue. Meyer argued for a compromise between those conservative factions, noting that neither was a credible standalone position: over-reliance on virtue could easily slide over into state tyranny, and libertarian absolutism could devolve into anarchistic squalor.

Against the virtucrats, Meyer argued that a virtue enforced by state coercion wasn't true virtue; it must be a freely-chosen position. And to the out-there libertarians, his position was remarkably similar to that promulgated by the American founders. (E.g., James Madison: "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." You could look it up.)

So I was gratified to hear about Stephanie Slade's book. Fusionism has long been an interest of hers. Here is her article in Reason's March 2021 issue, which asks: Is There a Future for Fusionism?) And more recently, in the July 2026 Reason: What is fusionism? America blends liberalism and religion.

I ordered the book pretty much as soon as I heard about it. It's an impressive combination of history, political philosophy, and shoe-leather journalism. Slade looks at the contentious history of conservatism and libertarianism, concentrating on Meyer's intellectual odyssey. (He started out as an actual Communist. But he got better.) But plenty of other folks are examined, with careful detail and sometimes surprising insights. (I thought I knew the intellectual history relatively well, but Slade kept digging out details of which I was unaware.)

Slade notes, accurately, that fusionism's greatest electoral success was in the 1980s, typified by the landslide victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. He wasn't perfect, but at his best he could be a passionate advocate of fusionist ideas. (Here's Slade again, in the July 2025 Reason: The fusionist politics of Ronald Reagan.)

Slade notes that since then, things have gotten worse (to put it mildly) on the GOP/right-wing side of things. Trump has shown little respect for fusionist ideals of limited government and free-market economics, preferring "pitchfork populism". Trump's heir apparent, J.D. Vance, is even worse. Most of the Republican Party seems to docilely follow along. And, out there on the fringes, there are some really scary folks: "theocons, natcons, and neoreactionaries", all calling for grabbing the reins of government power to impose their frightening visions.

In short, Slade has written an excellent book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in where we've been poltically, and where we might be going.

I have an embarrassing number of bought-but-never-read books on my shelves. This is yet another of those, purchased sometime in the 1970s. In case you haven't heard: it's about rabbits in England. In the book's universe, they can talk to each other, with occasional specialized vocabulary. (Fortunately, there's a "Lapine Glossary" in the back of the book for unfamiliar rabbit words.) The rabbits can also converse in a limited way with other species, but not people.

In the peaceful (but somewhat regimented) rabbit warren in Sandleford, there is trouble a'brewing. A small rabbit named Fiver, with soothsaying abilities, knows there's bad danger afoot. (And we readers know it too, as there's a sign announcing the imminent construction of "high class modern residences".) And that construction will involve the destruction of the rabbit habitat.

Fiver is convincing enough to get a small group of rabbits to abandon Sandleford and start looking for a new home. (Just in time, as it turns out.) Their travels are danger-filled. And there's another issue: they have no lady rabbits in their group, which (even rabbits know) doesn't auger well for their community's long-term survival. Their efforts to gain some females cause them to run afoul of an extremely militaristic warren. Our bunnies are no match for them in brawn; can they out-think them?

Spoiler: yes. But it's a close-run thing. If you're thinking about reading this to the kids: there's a lot of (rabbit) violence and even some PG elements of rabbit sex.

I'm not proud of this, but I'll admit it: I've been inordinately attracted now and then to the "celebrity memoir" genre. Written by musicians and actors I like, mostly. I tell myself that they'll provide me with some insight into the wellsprings of their creative talents. And I am invariably disappointed; these guys (yes, mostly guys) don't seem to have any eye-opening revelations on the matter. Hard work, good luck, singular focus… that's about it.

But I was enticed into reading Peter Wolf's memoir by this review in the WSJ.

Wolf is no exception on the creativity score. But—holy cow!—he really makes up for it on another score: this book is full of stories about the people he's encountered over the course of his career, most famous, many surprising. And those stories are great: some hilarious, some poignant, some even tragic. But all of them well told. (If you're looking for hilarity, for example, skip ahead to his story about making this classic music video.)

In the unlikely event that a celebrity is reading this: If you're thinking about writing a memoir, read Peter Wolf first. Go and do thou likewise.

He starts out with a biggie: In 1956, his parents take ten-year-old Peter to a movie, an artsy-fartsy French flick. In comes another couple: an older guy and a mink-coated, sunglassed blonde. And the blonde sits next to Peter. Eventually (since it's an artsy-fartsy French flick) the blonde nods off, with her head falling on Pete's shoulder.

Punchline: the guy is Arthur Miller, and the blonde is Marilyn Monroe.

I wasn't a huge fan of the J. Geils Band, although I really liked their 1974 single, "Must of Got Lost" well enough to buy the album it was on ("Nightmares...and Other Tales from the Vinyl Jungle"). But our musical tastes diverged as time went on. I don't think that was Wolf's fault, though.

On the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" score: the drug of choice is alcohol, and prodigous amounts of it. I think Pete could drink you. me, and the entire defensive line of the New England Patriots under the table. And the sex is never prurient. Although (you might not know) he was married to Faye Dunaway, and he was a little miffed about her extramarital dalliances.

I put this in my get-at-library list back in 2023, thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's best mysteries list for that year. As a bonus, it's set in New Hampshire! (A heavily fictionalized New Hampshire, but what are you gonna do?)

The first-person narrator is Bodie Kane In a stylistic twist, Bodie's narration is addressed to another character—the "you" in the title—as if Bodie's writing/speaking to them. That choice comes into focus as the book proceeds.

Bodie is returning to the boarding school whence she graduated a couple decades back. She's been invited to teach a couple of mini-courses in an interim few weeks between semesters. Bodie's time at the school was unhappy, and marred by the murder of her onetime roommate, Thalia. Omar, an African-American athletic manager, was arrested and convicted for the crime (after confessing, then quickly recanting). But…

One of Bodie's courses is about podcast production, and one of her students wants to craft her podcast to revisit the crime. The student believes a miscarriage of justice occurred, and someone else did Thalia in. Bodie gets drawn into the student's investigation, and down the rabbit hole they go. Eventually, troubling facts emerge.

It's billed as a "literary" mystery, which (as near as I can tell) means a lot of discursive, flowery language. And anything that could be described as "action" is minimal. Bodie's narration involves plenty of navel-gazing, deep reflections on her life. She's estranged from her husband, who, in a sideshow to the main plot, is being fingered for a sexual harassment incident. She has a sorta-lover down in Boston, but he seems strangely unenthusiastic about coming up to see her while she's in the area. And there are a lot of other characters introduced, a bunch in the present, and a bunch from the past, and everyone seems dysfunctional in their own special ways. And there's occasional commentary in the "believe all women" vein, which probably seemed less quaint back then.

And (caveat lector) you may find the ending unsatisfying. I thought it was OK, but…

I had to "nudge" the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library (PPL) to get this book; fortunately, they are amazingly good at taking even my wackiest suggestions. (Although this one wasn't particularly wacky; they have a number of other books by the author, Michael Shermer, on the shelves.)

It's an interesting title, though. When I picked it up, I wisecracked to the PPL librarian at the desk: "Once I read this book, I won't need to read any of the others here," handwaving at the non-fiction stacks. She laughed. But maybe librarians are trained to laugh at customers' dumb attempts at wit.

Shermer has made a long career of "skeptically" examining factual claims, both orthodox and heterodox. (He's the Executive Director of the "Skeptic Society" and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine.) And he's written over a dozen books on various truth-related topics. My take on his 2022 book, Conspiracy, is here.

Back then, I wrote that Shermer's prose "seems to set my teeth on edge, and my brain to go into nit-picking mode." I'm happy to report that my teeth remained unedged for this one, and I have a lot fewer nits to pick.

As you might surmise from the title, this book is very wide ranging. The first few chapters engage the tools of the truth-seeker: humility, good faith, Bayesian reasoning, fallacy avoidance, and so on. He quotes liberally and admiringly from authors I admire too: Steven Pinker, Julia Galef, Richard Feynman, etc.

He then turns his skeptical eye to particular areas: religion/myth, holocaust denial, rational morality, aliens. His arguments are fairly made, and take some unexpected turns. (For example, he takes more than a few pages relating the stomach-turning behavior of Japan's invading troops in World War II (including the "Rape of Nanking"), and it's hard to deny that Japan successfully dodged the level of postwar condemnation aimed at Nazi Germany for its atrocities.

And then Shermer moves in to even more contestable territory (he admits he's dealing with "known unknowns"): consciousness, free will, the existence of God, and (yes) the thorny problems of "why is there something, rather than nothing" and "why does the universe seem to be fine-tuned to allow our very existence."

I was particularly interested in Shermer's take on free will. He summarizes (always fairly) the various camps: determinism, compatabilism, libertarianism, etc. He quotes the arguments of determinists Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris extensively. (My own takes on Sapolsky's and Harris's anti-free will books were less sympathetic: here and here.)

But in one of those surprising turns, Shermer turns out to disagree strongly with Sapolsky/Harris determinism. Instead he advocates "self-determinism", pointing to our capacity to make decisions that can be fairly called ours. And he claims this capacity is a "self-organized emergent property": although the components of our free will (neurons, hormones, etc.) are themselves totally governed by laws of physics and biochemistry, the resulting complex interactions give rise to the ability to make rational, conscious choices for our actions.

Shermer winds up dismissing Harris and Sapolsky as having "physics envy." (Interestingly, Sapolsky provided an approving blurb on the book's back cover. Making me wonder if he read the free will stuff.)

I've blogged my "further thoughts" on the opening paragraphs of Shermer's free will chapter here: Free Will is More Than Button-Pushing.

Otherwise, I have only a few nits to pick. Shermer misuses (in the usual way) "begs the question" on page 301. On page 305, he claims "physicists Barrow and John Walsh … have demonstrated how the speed of light, gravitation, and the mass of the electron have in fact been inconstant over time"; I am pretty sure this has not been "demonstrated", and it's far from established fact.

At least in the edition PPL got, there's a weird typo on page 309: "… one part in ₁₀10¹²³ at least." (If you're reading this at Goodreads: Goodreads doesn't understand <sub> and <sup> HTML tags, sorry. It looks OK on my blog.)

And on page 317, he analogizes the progress of scientific knowledge to an expanding sphere: as the sphere grows in volume, the boundary layer between the "known" and the "unknown" grows too. Since the sphere's volume increases as the cube of the sphere's radius, its surface area only goes up as the square of the radius. And so "the volume of the known increases by a ratio of 3:2 over the surface area of the unknown.

As Wolfgang Pauli said (albeit in German): "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong!"

Still, a lot of good stuff here. Might be an especially good book to give to a bright high school or college kid. Although maybe not if you want to keep him or her a church-goer; Shermer's pretty hard on the God stuff.

This is the second book in Adam Plantinga's (so far) three book series featuring protagonist Kurt Argento. It went on my get-at-library list thanks to its Best Novel Edgar Award nomination. (There are scattered references to the series' first book in this one, but I didn't find that I was missing any vital information by not having read it.)

After that first book, though, Argento is in Arizona, house-sitting for a friend. He's trying to adapt to his new life, without a job, and missing his dead wife, caring for his loyal dog, Hudson. That life is disrupted when Kristin, accompanied by her toddler son Ethan, tracks him down and begs him to investigate the disappearance of her missing husband, last seen in the town of Fenton.

Argento is very reluctant to get involved, but soon enough Kristin and Ethan also go missing. Which causes him to snoop around Fenton and discover some very shady and secretive dealings involving the local police force. Pulling the strings is a silver-haired genius, who is also (we quickly learn) a murderous sociopath. After harrowing and tragic events, Argento embarks on an audacious, high-risk scheme to take down Silver Hair's operation.

It's very violent. And we could quibble about the plausibility of the plot. But, for me, it was also a page-turner. I was reminded of Lee Child's Reacher series, turned up a few notches on the hard-boiled scale.

Another page-turner—oops, "screen-swiper"—from Michael Connelly. It's his second book in his "Catalina" series. (I reported on the first one here.) The hero is Stilwell, a detective on Catalina's skeletal branch of the LA county sheriff's office. Cop-wise, Catalina is (at least in these books) very much the analogue of Mick Herron's "Slough House": it's an assignment for police who have messed up, but not badly enough to be fired. Or, in Stilwell's case, ran afoul of a superior by his insistence on doing the right thing.

The book opens with a literal bang. Well, actually, two. Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Stilwell has hastily assembled a team to intercept a cartel's drug delivery via plane at a Catalina airstrip. Unfortunately, things go very wrong: one officer dead, another gravely wounded, all the bad guys escaped, and Stilwell's taken off the case.

But don't worry: he'll eventually piece things together.

There's other stuff going on too. A backpack in the island's lost and found turns out to have been owned by a hiker who vanished four years previous. An island winemaker has had a row of his precious grapevines hacked up. And a vandal has been defacing famed island landmarks with spray-paint graffiti.

One of these cases causes Stilwell to connect with another Connelly heroine, Renée Ballard, and she plays a major role here. (There's even a non-speaking cameo from Harry Bosch!)

No spoilers, but the ending is kind of a cliff-hanger, with Stilwell's future in law enforcement in peril. I will, of course, be checking Amazon for future developments.

I've had bad luck with self-help books lately. (I'm not sure why I keep checking them out! It's not like I need help!) But good news, readers: although Goodreads sticks a "self help" genre tag on this book, it's much more, and better. (Other Goodreads tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Science. All accurate.)

It's very good, well deserving the praise you can read on the book's Amazon page and elsewhere. I regularly blog my "top 10" nonfiction reads for the year. If I make it to 2027, I can guarantee this will be on that list.

The author, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writes superbly on this topic she clearly cares so much about. She does not talk down to her readers, she doesn't avoid fancy lingo, like "ontological". I think she assumes you're gonna catch up via Google.

(Example, page 86: "It was a trompe l'oeil at an ontological level, a trompe l'ontologie." Well, shoot. There's two things I have to look up.)

She is, however, not above a bit of wordplay. Page 64, the bit that made me smile is bolded:

There are exceptions to the constancy of self-attention. You might have sometimes experienced extraordinary intervals when your attention was drawn so fixedly toward something outside of you, perhaps as you concentrated on a task that so entirely absorbed your attention that you lost all sense of yourself—together, most tellingly, with the psychological sense of time's passage. That is how fundamental to us our self-attention is: Escape it temporarily, and you temporally escape temporality. These extraordinary episodes have come to be called flow and they are so psychologically distinct precisely because they are so anomalous.

The book is also full of I-didn't-know-that items. Example: back in the early 20th century, pretty and rare feathers were worth (ounce for ounce) four times more than gold. And so: "The costliest loss of valuables aboard the Titanic lay in the boxes of feathers that went down with the ship."

All this, and I haven't really talked about the book's subject: mattering. It's a near-universal human instinct, coming into play when you have won the basic struggle against entropy, and assured your self-preservation. Then you start wondering: what was the point of all that. Isn't there more? Shouldn't I (somehow) matter?

There are a number of tactics people use to scratch this itchy instinct. The author has composed a "mattering map" showing the four basic varieties (if you don't want to track down the book, it's reproduced in the WSJ review). Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but you will almost certainly recognize your neighborhood.

Finally, the author tells fascinating stories of the famous and not-so-famous, and how they worked out their mattering instincts. (That bit about the feathers above? It's about this cat burglar…)

In short: this book has my highest recommendation.

Recommended by Ronald Bailey at Reason! So I asked the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library to get a copy on that. And (sigh) I didn't like it as much as Ron did. But (hey) you might.

But it leaves you wondering right off the bat: how many babies did Dr. Benjamin Spock (indirectly) kill when diligent parents followed his "expert" advice to have their infants sleep on their tummies? That turned out to have a significant risk of SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Good news: My sister and I survived our 1950s infancy, even given the occasional misguidance promulgated by that era's authorities. And our kids made it through the 80s OK, too, even though that tummy-sleeping advice persisted after that. Whew!

But mostly Helen Pearson's book is about "evidence-based" practices. Their earliest adoption was in medicine, and its use of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to determine the efficacy of medicines, procedures, and general advice. If there are no RCTs, or the existing ones are problematic (low sample sizes, etc.), a backup technique is "systematic review", where the literature is scoured for relevant studies, which are combined via statistical magic to give a reliable result.

Pearson goes on to show how the "evidence-based" technique has been applied in other areas: "social policies", policing, conservation, education, and management. The results there are more of a mixed bag. And Pearson's descriptions can get a little tedious at some points. I found the section on management to be extremely boring, with my eyes often wandering off the page, checking out what the cat is doing, or maybe looking at my phone… (She did, however, seem to imply that managers get taken in by fads promoted by charismatic hucksters. That matches my experience!)

At times, Pearson lets her ideology fly.

In discussing social policy, she claims Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign, "told derogatory stories of the notional 'welfare queen,' referring to women who were supposedly claiming welfare fraudulently or even deliberating having children outside marriage in order to milk the system."

Reader, I researched this back in 2014. As far as anyone can tell, Reagan uttered the phrase once, in a 1976 radio address. And even then, he clearly attributed the phrase to someone else ("as she's now called"). He was referring to an actual (non-"notional") woman, known most commonly as "Linda Taylor". And his source was not the KKK, but Jet magazine.

Pearson also does a considerable amount of Trump-bashing, and a slightly less amount of RFKJr-bashing. This is to be expected, I suppose, from an editor of Nature, which dropped its usual neutrality to endorse Wheezy Joe in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. And (of course) she explicitly drops her "evidence-based" demands when it comes to climate change. The practice of "spewing greenhouse gases" simply "need[s] to stop". Period. Just shut up and do whatever the "experts" say.

I read a different book on RCTs back in 2012: Uncontrolled. I liked it better, and you might too.

Like his previous book in the series, Mick Herron ends this one with a … well, it's not exactly a cliffhanger, let's just call it "a stunning plot development that leaves you wondering about its resolution."

But (spoiler alert) the previous book's SPDTLYWAIR was Roddy Ho's discovery that Slough House's personnel records had been wiped from the Agency's internal database. Disturbing! As in previous books, we are dropped into the middle of an ongoing battle, and its dimensions are only clarified as Jackson Lamb and the rest of the group muddle through, hoping to survive. It develops that "First Desk" Diana Travener launched an assassination scheme aimed at a Russian agent misbehaving in England. Much worse, that scheme was bankrolled privately, by a corrupt media star in a corrupt relationship with a (previously) disgraced politician.

The upshot is that the Slow Horses may be in mortal danger as a result, (relatively) innocent victims of this rekindled cold war.

Other things of interest (may contain more spoilers): a character we haven't seen since the first book in the series gets resurrected here. On page 201, Jackson Lamb reveals that he's a believer in the Steele Dossier Russians-elected-Trump conspiracy theory. Lady Di actually seems to be more sympathetic here than in previous books; however, that may be only because her antagonists are truly slimy.