Currently reading
Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare
Reading List
The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
The reading crisis Ong and Postman both saw coming, argued from inside a culture that's already there.
The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It
History's most examined catastrophe, revisited for what it says about how ordinary institutions actually fail.
The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort
The central bank's real job isn't setting interest rates, it's backstopping the plumbing that everyone assumes just works.
The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
Capital doesn't just fund empires, it outlives and discards them — a long view of who's really been in charge.
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Conspicuous consumption named and dissected over a century before "flex culture" needed the word.
Read
Amusing Ourselves to Death
What happens to public argument once a culture's dominant medium is built for entertainment.
Novels
White Noise
The novel that gave media saturation a plot — supermarkets, tabloids and an airborne toxic event as the water nobody notices.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Wall Street ambition, tabloid media and the justice system collide, and nobody comes out looking clean.