complich8′s journal

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about justice in a broad sense, especially criminal justice, law and law enforcement. So my last batch of Audible books included one called American Furies by Sasha Abramsky. Abramsky’s journey through the American prison system covers some of its history and theory, from the inception of penitentiaries to the [...]

I recently gave Chris Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” and Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith” some listening time, and thought I’d share some impressions. My biggest impression is that these books are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Hitchens has, as his basic thesis, that the whole idea of religion poisons everything in [...]

I recently finished the relatively small morsel that is Atul Gawabe’s The Checklist Manifesto. Audiobooks are fun! The Checklist Manifesto is a doctor’s exploration of unexpected ways we can cope with complexity in an increasingly complex world. Gawabe leads in by talking about the challenges that keeping track of a large set of relatively mundane [...]

More on audiobooks. Recently tore through Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (all via Audible. Might as well do some reviewing… So Stephen Pinker’s got a really, really academic, very thorough style that really comes across in The Blank Slate. The whole book [...]