The Destruction of Czestochowa by Shlomo Waga, edited and translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freund

    This one was not as good as Resistance and Death, but as a yizkor book, it is just a memoir of someone's time, so my criticism is not with what their memories were, it is just that Resistance and Death had several authors, whereas Destruction was just one person's memory. Some things that I thought were interesting were descriptions of ID cards for Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the five aktsias in September-October 1942, and the description of a Jew named Fajner initiating resistance in 1943 that led to the liquidation of the ghetto. Also, I am noting that certain individuals like Degenhardt, Linderman, and Kurland are mentioned by many people, and it might be interesting to compile a "who's who" list of notable people in the ghetto.

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

    I was shocked at how much I disliked The Odyssey after reading The Iliad. As a kid, I loved Odysseus and the children's version of The Odyssey with pictures. I never had that much exposure to The Iliad besides the movie, Troy. But reading both of them now, I liked The Iliad way more. I think that the most interesting parts of The Odyssey, the tricking of the cyclops, the passing between Scylla and Charybdis, are actually just way shorter as parts of the book than I realized. A huge amount of the book takes place back in Ithaca before and after Odysseus' return. 

    The best part of the book was really Emily Wilson's introduction, which artfully explains the history of the composition of The Odyssey, the Greek Epic Cycle, the importance of these works to the Greeks themselves and the Western canon, and how she translated it. Her introduction to The Iliad was equally good. I came away liking Odysseus less than I did when I enjoyed the children's book version of The Odyssey. He's not quite as heroic in the modern sense. End of the day, it's still a good story, and an interesting view into the world of the Ancient Greeks.

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson

    Crucible of War is a hell of a book about Britain's attempt to build its empire in North America through war with the French and Indians as well as in Europe. The Seven Years' war is a confusing name since the war lasted nine years. The French and Indian War isn't much better since there was a lot of fighting with the Prussians and Austrians. This is an amazing book because it does what all amazing works of history must do: it connects huge geopolitical movements, which are beyond the decision-making authority of any one person, and connects them to the individuals on the ground, who sometimes played a part in causing, say, the war between England and France, or felt the effect, say, of the Iroquois selling out the Delaware.

    Of critical importance to the start of the Seven Years' War was the diminution of Iroquois power in the borderlands between the French and English. This covered the Ohio Territory (west of the Appalachians) and the Pays d'en haut, surrounding the Great Lakes in modern day Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc. While the Iroquois maintained independence of action, they could balance the two empires against one another. But by the mid 18th century, the English had grown far more powerful than either the Iroquois or the French and were beginning to exert pressure on their borders. The Iroquois had come to power by the mid-seventeenth century, and their access to Dutch firearms made them a force to be reckoned with. The Five Nations, originally the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca (with the Tuscarora added in the 18th century), formed at some point before European contact in order to end the Mourning Wars, which referred to the constant wars to gain captives as compensation for those lost in raids. So war begot war, and it was useful to come together to agree not to raid one another. That said, they still raided non-joiners, and those outside the Confederacy, like the Eries and the Hurons, suffered for it. Iroquois power peaked in the 1660s, when the Dutch, their main supplier of weapons, were forced out of New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York, and the Iroquois exhausted themselves out of constant war.

    

    The Iroquois supported "half-kings," sort of viceroys or smaller leaders who could govern allied tribes. One half-king of Mingoes (Iroquois allies living in the Ohio Valley) was known as Tanaghrisson. His crossing of paths with a twenty-one-year-old George Washington and French Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville would change history. In short, Washington led two expeditions on behalf of the Governor of Virginia into the Ohio Territory. In the first, he led his freezing men to a French fort in December 1753 in order to deliver a letter ordering the French to vacate a fort they had built in modern-day Pennsylvania. In May of the following year, Washington returned to the Ohio Country with Tanaghrisson, and fought a battle with the French at Jumonville Glen, modern-day southwestern Pennsylvania, which resulted in a slaughter of Ensign de Jumonville and many of his men who had surrendered. But how? Anderson does a good analysis. First, he points out that a massacre certainly happened, despite those who claim that the French casualties were actually the result of battle. While shots fired in battle at that time "almost invariably" result in 2-4 times as many wounds as deaths (and indeed there is a three-to-one wounded to dead ratio among the Virginia men), the French suffered thirteen dead and only one wounded. I didn't take good enough notes on this, but my recollection of what happened is that England wanted the colonials to take a harder line on French fort-building west of the Appalachians, but not necessarily to start a war. Dinwiddie, the Virginia governor sent Washington to deliver that message to the French, but to strike at them if they were taking offensive measures. The French actually planned on having a diplomatic meeting with the Virginians they knew were coming their way. But Tanaghrisson, sick of the French for his own reasons, manipulated events to cause a battle, and after Tanaghrisson and Washington had won by surprising the French, he scalped and killed those who surrendered to cause embarrassment to the French.

    

    As the war progressed, it required greater English investment in the colonies and greater interference with the English colonists, who were unable to successfully coordinate the war effort amongst themselves. The confrontations that resulted from this are especially interesting for how they foreshadowed issues in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, especially with regards to military justice and contracts. Whereas English officers, coming from a world of immense class differences, were used to instant obedience by their enlisted soldiers, Americans were more contractually minded. Americans weren't desperate to fight the war. They signed contracts to do so, and if not landowners in their own right, they had greater social mobility than was available in England at the time. When the contracts they signed weren't respected, English soldiers tended to acquiesce, while American soldiers would eventually mutiny or desert. Similarly, the English were confronted, in the summer of 1756, with colonial governments that refused to provide adequate housing for their troops. To the English, it was hard to understand why Americans would not house the soldiers sent to protect them, but to the Americans, who had lived under "salutary neglect" for so long, the idea of supporting soldiers at their personal expense was shocking, and after all, it wasn't like the individual housing the soldiers would see the benefits of victories in Canada and Ohio. The French and English were ultimately both dealing with similar issues: convincing their colonists and the nearby Indians to fight for them. Initially, the French were more successful, but the Marquis de Montcalm alienated Indian allies later on, and the English would eventually overwhelm the French not only with Indian allies but way larger armies made of colonials (the English colonial population was far larger than the French).

    

    Different states had different reasons for not supporting the war effort. Maryland did not support the effort at all due to a small western border that gave them little reason to support. Virginia supported more due to a theoretical state western boundary all the way on the Pacific Ocean. Pennsylvania is an interesting case. Pennsylvanian politics had been deadlocked since 1740 over how to tax "proprietary" lands, that is, lands owned by the Penn family. Pennsylvania's governors had long refused requests from the legislature to raise funds by taxing Penn family lands, which provided most of the incomes for the Penn family, and in response, the legislature would not levy any tax on the population without also taxing the Penns. Meanwhile, the Quakers in the assembly, being pacifists, refused to appropriate any funds for war. There was no breakthrough until German settlers who had been attacked by Mingoes came through the streets of Philadelphia carrying the mangled corpses of their relatives and Scots-Irish settlers threatened to take up arms against the assembly itself. This actually caused the end of Quaker participation in politics in protest of the war funding, and the few Quakers who remained were excommunicated.

    I had planned to write a lot more about the actual specifics of the war itself--battles, tactics, etc.--but looking at that now is a lot of work. In short, the war was basically a war of attrition in the end. The decisive English victory began with several losses, since the French used maneuver warfare and irregular warfare with Indian allies to exact significant losses on British columns and fortresses. However, because the English had far more colonists in the area by an order of magnitude, and because the English were able to recruit Indian allies (or at least keep them from fighting for the French), the English won. As an illustration, the campaigns of 1758 featured 50,000 Anglo-American troops, which was a number that would be two-thirds of the entire population of Canada. The French had 6,800 regular troops, and 16,000 total if you count the untrained militia. A difficulty for the French was how to use their Indian allies. They were most useful to the French at the beginning of the war. But they were unreliable allies since (1) they didn't care about French territorial gains, and (2) were more interested in war prizes, so they would leave a campaign after just one battle when they took a captive, or a scalp, or some treasure. I definitely can't blame them. The whole war was just to decide which colonial power would dominate them, so it didn't make sense for them to tie themselves to any one power. The knockout blow of the war, according to Anderson, was not the Battle of Quebec, when the English took the French capital, but the Battle of Quiberon Bay, when the English gained the naval supremacy in the Atlantic and cut off any French resupply.

    The parts about military justice were especially interesting to me. The culture shock between the Englishmen in the English Army and New Englanders who had served in provincial militias and armies were huge. The New Englanders were used to serving as civilians in arms. Anderson writes of the New Englanders, "A soldier who insulted his captain could expect to bear the consequences, which--depending upon the officer--might range from being knocked down on the spot to being placed under arrest, being court-martialed, and receiving ten or twenty lashes with a cat-o'-nine-tails. But under regular military discipline, insolence to an officer was a crime that carried a penalty of five hundred lashes; the theft of a shirt could earn a man a thousand; and desertion (no uncommon act among New England troops) was punishable by hanging or a firing-squad execution." New Englanders also had a superiority complex about being sons of freeholders and descendants of religious dissenters, and they certainly didn't have the inferiority complex that was found among the lower classes that made up the English Army.

    Part of what made the English so dominant in this period was sort of an economy of scale that came from rolling up all of North America into one market. Since France, England, and Spain were only permitting their colonies to trade with the mother country's network, there was a snowballing effect from building a bigger network. The result was that, instead of being made poorer by being conquered, the people conquered by the English in the Seven Years' War all across the world would have seen more economic activity after the conquest than before. This secured cooperation from the conquered, instead of resistance. But while this was true for the conquered, the conquerors (the Americans) were then asked to pay the price of that conquest with The Sugar Act, The Stamp Act, and so on. These acts that imposed greater taxes on Americans are described in detail in the book, but I won't get into them here, since I think they will be covered in my other books on the Revolution. All in all, I think that distinction between the conquered and the conquerors sort of reversing roles is important in understanding why the Revolution would happen among those who felt like they should have reaped more rewards for defeating the French.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In 1756, it cost nearly sixpence a milt to move a two-hundred-weight barrel of beef from Albany to Lake George, but by the end of 1757, the same barrel only cost less than twopence a mile on the same route. This illustrates the massive development efforts on roads into the frontier during the war.
• I'm pretty sure "habanero" like the pepper also means it comes from Havana a.k.a. Habana.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

    Not many books are so hard to put down. I thought this was amazing, and it's the second book I've enjoyed by Patrick Radden Keefe, the other being Empire of Pain about the Sackler family dynasty. It deserves more of a post than I'm going to give it due to being busy and behind on these posts, but I'll just say that it was awesome. The book weaves together the lives of the people it covers so well, and they all come from different perspectives on The Troubles. Everyone is humanized, and I don't think that anyone is let off the hook. Radden Keefe makes you sympathize a lot with the Irish car bombers and assassins, but doesn't make them appear any less culpable for their crimes. It seems that way for a while in the book, but by the end, he's connected them to the murder of another "character" in the book, which should make the reader understand the human cost of the movement to unify Ireland.

    Part of the reason I don't feel that into writing a big blog post is because I've already talked to so many people about this book. It blew my mind and is going to be one of the best books I've read all year I bet.

The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

     I decided to read the Emily Wilson versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey because Emily Wilson's versions struck me as easier to read. I am not looking for a challenge. Iambic pentameter and short words sounded a lot better than flowery language. Maybe I'll graduate up to Lawrence or Fagles one day, but this was perfect. Wilson also starts the book with a great explanation of the book itself and the themes the reader will encounter, before an editor's note about how she did the translation. Both were really good prep for the book itself.

    I didn't just read The Iliad; while I was reading it, I did a bunch of reading about Homer and his works. The Iliad is not an oral story. It is the written distillation of an oral tradition that lasted for hundreds of years before being written in the eighth century BC, at which point it became a standard part of Greek education. For millennia afterwards, Homer remains the epitome of literature in the Greek world. Plato, Alexander, and every Greek with an education was brought up reading about the Trojan War, and was told stories of Greek mythology. Something I didn't realize is that The Iliad ends before Achilles is killed and before the Greeks take Troy with the Trojan Horse. The story is neatly framed around what can't be more than a few days or maybe weeks sometime towards the end of the war, when Achilles refuses to fight, Hector goes on a rampage and kills Patroclus, and Achilles decides to rejoin the fight to avenge him (in short).

    It sounds like there was no such person as Homer. Homeric Greek, Wilson writes, is a mixture of Greek spoken at different places in times, such that it is clear to Classicists that it must have been a distillation of works created by different poets. It would be like a single speaker of English using Chaucerian, Californian, Australian, and Victorian voices in one work of literature. Instead, it was the result of an oral tradition, developed after the Greeks lost their system of writing developed in Mycenae, and then written down hundreds of years later, when they re-adopted writing from the Phoenicians, who had adapted an alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphics.

    The Iliad occupies an interesting point right in the twilight zone between history and mythology. Historically, Troy existed, and has been discovered, although something like eight or nine cities have existed on that spot over thousands of years. The Greek states referenced in the book existed, and much of what is described is real. The Greeks who read The Iliad in the fifth century BC must have understood it to be real and in their world. Yet it is set not as a creation story, but a story uniting various creations about two to five generations later. Many, many, characters are the sons or grandsons of gods, and, of course, all the best characters are loved by different gods and directly interact with them or are controlled by them. There's a son of Heracles here, a grandson of a river there, and at one point Aeneas informs Achilles of his own lineage (right before facing him in battle, which is pretty common to do for these guys), and explains that he is not only a cousin of Hector, but that he is a son of Aphrodite and a 5x-great-grandson of Zeus. Most characters are human, but they are often described as "godlike" or an "equal of the gods," although a clear lesson of the book is that no mortal is equal to a god.

    I think my favorite thing about the style of The Iliad is its pacing, clearly meant to be delivered orally. I actually tried to read it out loud, but gave up because it was just so much reading out loud and there are a lot of places where you look like a crazy person. I listened to some of it on audiobook to get the effect, however I preferred to read it in my head in Dan Carlin's voice. If you know, you know. But the pacing. The pacing is awesome because the book is filled with encounters between major, named characters, and minor, also named characters. We basically always know that our named characters won't have a bronze spear put through their eye socket, so the narrator build the tension by telling us all about the lives of the people they are killing, and the way they do it. So the book is filled with personal encounters between two individuals where we get a lot of details. Here's one from book four:

So spoke Athena, and her words persuaded
the mindless mind of Pandarus. At once
he took the cover off his polished bow,
made from a nimble wild goat's horn, which he
had hunted. He had lain in wait and watched
till from behind a rock the goat jumped out.
Pandarus hit his chest right through the heart.
The goat fell backward on the rock. This horn
was sixteen palms in length. A master
    craftsman
had smoothed it down and polished it all over
and set a golden hook upon the tip.

All of that is an aside to just say that this guy, who never appears again, took out his bow. And then the description continues to tell the reader how Pandarus whispered a prayer to Apollo as he strung the arrow and took aim at Menelaus, but that Menelaus was saved by Athena, who brushed the arrow away "as when a mother strokes away a fly to keep it from her baby, sweetly sleeping." In a more typical example, in which Homer tells us all about the life of one of the men killed, it is written:

Then Telamonian Ajax struck and wounded
young Simoesius, Anthemion's son,
A healthy boy who had been born beside
the streames of the Simoeis when his mother
had gone to see her parents' flocks of sheep
upon Mount Ida. On the way back down
she gave birth by the river. That was why
they named him Simoesius. That boy
would never pay his loving parents back
for taking care of him. His life was short,
because the spear of Ajax cut him down.
The young man stepped in front, and Ajax struck his
chest by his right nipple, and the bronze
pierced through and came out by his shoulder blade.

The text is really humanist in this way, where the glory that comes from fighting in war and killing does not override the value of each human life killed. Those individuals are remembered by The Poet. Not only that, but the glory that a man gets for killing is gotten because of who he has killed. The listeners and readers of The Iliad probably could not tell you how many people Telamonian Ajax killed, but they could tell you who he killed.

    As someone who has read a lot and learned a lot about The Iliad before reading it, something that still surprised me was the manner of Hector's death. At least in this version, his death is basically an execution, rigged by Athena. She has Hephaestus make for Achilles a godly suit of armor. Fine. Achilles chases Hector around the city walls and is too fast for Hector to escape. Fine. But then, in the climactic moment, Hector, who has laid waste to the Greeks and just slaughtered and slaughtered them as far and away the best warrior in the battle, is just executed. Achilles throws a spear at Hector, and misses. Then Hector throws a spear, and Athena brushes it away. Then, Athena magically restores Achilles' spear to his possession while tricking Hector into thinking his buddy was there to hand him another. So it's not even a fight, let alone a fair fight. Athena just uses Achilles to clumsily kill Hector. That makes me think that it is Hector who is the greatest warrior in the Trojan War, not Achilles. Achilles, to me, feels like a villain throughout the whole book.

    This was an absolutely fantastic way to finish the last year and start the new year of reading. I don't know what took me so long. Next, I will be starting the Odyssey, which I was more familiar with growing up since I had a children's version of it. 

Miscellaneous:

• The Greek Iliad often uses "untying" or "unraveling" as a metaphor for death. People are stabbed by a sharp, bronze spear, and their limbs become undone.
• The Iliad was not always as popular as it is today. For a long time, Virgil's Aeneid (written in Latin) was the most popular work about the Trojan War. The Iliad was not translated into English until the 17th century.
• There's a random part in the book where a horse talks to Achilles. I just think its funny that at no point in this story does an animal ever talk until more than three-quarters of the way through, when a horse makes sure Achilles knows he is going to die.

2025 Year in Review

    In 2025, I read 36 books, one audiobook, and two essays, totaling a little over 14,000 pages. I am currently reading The Iliad, which I expect will be the first book I finish in 2026. This was the first year that I tried to hit some broad themes in an attempt to sort of simulate an undergraduate class in the subject. I started the year with Russia, and then Mexico, just focusing on non-fiction and literature about these two countries. But I don't think I really figured out a cohesive course of study. I had really just found a lot of books that could be "tagged" with Russia or Mexico, but I didn't really build a cohesive way to learn about the two countries. I did the same thing with attempts at a topic in science and then sort of tried a Cormac McCarthy unit. Science didn't work because it wasn't cohesive and I didn't like the books. Cormac McCarthy didn't work because I really only liked All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, like loved them, but then didn't get into his other works. But I did succeed on "media" as a theme, and that was an excellent and cohesive unit that felt like a real college course. In the next year, I plan to continue with history of the Holocaust as well as do a big unit on the American Revolution in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the revolution. I still have to think of whatever other units I will do.

    This year, I also tried to read more fiction and books by women. I'm not sure I succeeded, but I read books by 8 female authors and 4 female translators, and 10 works of fiction. Maybe not as high as I would like in either, but I would guess it's a big improvement. I also tried to read more books from a broader distribution of years, and I worked my way back into the 20th and 19th centuries to do that. I want to keep doing that next year, and reading The Iliad and The Odyssey will help with that. Here are my previous years-in-review, and then my favorite books of 2025:

2024 Year in Review

2023 Year in Review

2022 Year in Review

Fiction:

3. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    This is just a magical little book. The Little Prince as a character is just a really charming children's book character, and the book is just really neat. Reading about the author also made me like it extra since he was such an interesting person.

2. All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

    These books were incredible. I've never read anything like what Cormac McCarthy writes--he is totally unique. These books just hook me. They're dark, they have great dialogue, and really good descriptions of dialogue. I like the world that Cormac McCarthy's characters live in. It's a really disturbing, harsh world, full of evil people. But it's also a world full of good, simple, and kindhearted people. There are wise people, and the characters have so many interactions that are so deep with these strangers.

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

    What an epic. One of the first books I read this year and it was just incredible. I get the hype and I definitely plan to return to some Tolstoy because this book was so amazing. Tolstoy gets people on a deep level and what life is. He writes with this amazing confidence of someone who totally understands how people act and feel. And I love how the book develops into these abstract concepts less and less related to the story and more and more related to history and philosophy as it goes on. It felt to me like the perfect book.

Non-Fiction:

3. Collapse by Vladislav Zubok

    This book is so highly rated because it changed my entire understanding of the fall of the Soviet Union and answered a lot of questions that had been sitting around in my head. Zubok's version of the collapse centers around Gorbachev's attempts at reform bringing down a brittle system. He shows you granular details so that the reader can really understand how the leader of a country can completely dismantle it. He basically gave up all his own power in an attempt to democratize the country, and the result was just simply that the people didn't want to reform the USSR like he did. In the national republics, they wanted out of the Soviet Union, and in Russia, they also felt like they were being oppressed in the USSR. Somehow, everybody thought they were getting a raw deal. The book was also written really well 

2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

    This book is one of the best works ever created about the Holocaust in my opinion. It combines the personal story of Holocaust survival with the continuation of that story after the Holocaust, as well as the story of the writer getting the story from his father. It's a book you can't do on a Kindle or a phone. The physical copy of it, since it's a graphic novel, is a big part of reading it. The re-read was very worthwhile.

1. Polyglot by Kató Lomb, translated by Ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne

    My favorite book of the year is the book that most changed my life this year--thanks to this book, I really committed to learning French, and completed the entire French course on Mango. I have stalled a little and need to set some goals for the coming, but this book was super inspiring. Kató Lomb is such an interesting character who just loves to learn languages and her enthusiasm is infectious. As someone who didn't start learning any languages until she was an adult, she's super inspiring.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order):

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs by Theodore Draper

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

My Best-Written Blog Posts of the Year (in no particular order):

Collapse by Vladislav Zubok

Stalin (Volume II): Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs by Theodore Draper

Three Themes:

1. Russia
2. Mexico
3. Media

Books and Pages Read:

January: 2 books, 1,680 pages
February: 1 book, 576 pages
March: 1 book, 1,184 pages
April: 5 books, 1,847 pages
May: 4 books, 1,120 pages
June: 5 books, 1,759 pages
July: 4 books, 876 pages +1 audioboook
August: 3 books, 1 essay, 1,009 pages
September: 3 books, 1,295 pages
October: 2 books, 925 pages
November: 5 books, 1,107 pages
December: 2 books, 1 essay, 736 pages

2025: 14,114 pages over 36 books, averaging about 392 pages per book,

2024: 13,057 pages over 30 books, averaging about 435 pages per book.

2023: 15,629 pages over 42 books, averaging about 372 pages per book.

2022: 22,902 pages over 50 books, averaging about 458 pages per book.

2021: 14,144 pages over 27 books, averaging about 524 pages per book.

2020: 13,415 pages over 32 books, averaging about 419 pages per book.

2019: 55,502 pages over 116 books, averaging about 478 pages per book.

2018: 18,122 pages over 33 books, averaging about 549 pages per book.

Gender of Authors:
Female authors: 8
Male authors: 29
Female translators: 4
Male translators: 4
Male editors: 5
Non-binary authors: 1

Languages:
Spanish books: 3
French books: 2

Fiction: 10

Non-fiction: 26

Counting Nuclear War as non-fiction. Un verdor terrible as fiction.

Media in Review

    Before I landed on "media," I tried and failed in two other units of reading. They were science and Cormac McCarthy Books. For science, it's visible on the page that I made it through a few books, but I found the majority of the books on my list boring or too complex for me. I can't remember most of them at the moment, but I remember one was Energy and Civilization, by Vaclav Smil. Maybe just not the right time. Maybe I am just not that interested in reading about science. For Cormac McCarthy, I loved All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, but I could not get through Cities of the Plain or Blood Meridian. So I moved to the next category on my list, media, and I wanted to do it in chronological order to cover the last century of media studies as technology advanced. 

    This is what I read (with failures crossed out):

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
• Published 1935, originally in German
• The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan
• Published in 1962
• Cue the Sun! by Emily Nussbaum
• Published in 2024 (I went out of order here)
• Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
• Published in 1964
• The Society of the Spectacle
• Published in 1967, originally in French
• Within the Context of No Context
• Published in 1980 in The New Yorker
• Simulacra and Simulacrum by Jean Baudrillard
• Published in 1981, originally in French
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Published in 1985
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• Published in 2024
• The Siren's Call by Chris Hayes
• Published in 2025
• Essays by Derek Thompson

In October, I also watched Ways of Seeing, a TV show hosted by John Berger, which aired in 1972 on BBC. I had actually read the book a couple years ago and had always been interesting in watching the show, since it talked about so much visual material. The show was excellent. I think it is a masterwork, using the history of European oil painting, 1500-1900, as a Trojan Horse to deliver an argument about capitalism and commercial society. He starts with painting, and end with advertising, and shows how the same techniques in painting have been applied to modern ads. But in the modern day, these works of art don't seek to enhance the prestige of the owner of the art, but to sell goods and services to the viewers of the art via publicity, creating feelings of envy and desire. Those feelings wouldn't exist to the same extent in a society without social mobility like Renaissance Europe, but are widespread today. Something I hadn't picked up on in the book was the other side of it--that oil paintings were a way to make art a moveable commodity in Europe, whereas much previous art was sculpture, architecture, mural, or mosaic, attached to a place. And in the case of religious art, which dominated Europe in the Middle Ages, it was meant to glorify God, not man. The Renaissance changed that.

    
    For this post, I think I will address a couple of the themes that came up in my readings and my thoughts on them.

Reproduction of Art and Letters

    This came up again and again. One of the most important innovations in the last six centuries is the ability to reproduce through "copying machines." The first of these machines was the printing press, invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century, initiating an era of copied letters. It was followed by photography four centuries later, used to copy images. Film allowed for the reproduction of actions in moving images as well. Television and the internet allowed for mass communication of copied letters and images.

    Walter Benjamin is the main thinker on the effects of reproduction on art, and McLuhan is the main thinker about the effect of reproduction on letters. John Berger does excellent synthesis of both their ideas in Ways of Seeing. Reproduction ended the long tradition of Western painting that emphasized realistic depictions of individuals, especially in portraits of the rich, as ways to immortalize them and display status. Once photography was possible, there wasn't much point in painting realistic portraits since photographers could do it much quicker and cheaper. Religious art and architecture retained their value since there was more to their value than their authenticity, which would be diminished in copies. For literature, once copyists were no longer necessary, the authorship of a work was emphasized much more, along with citations and references to earlier works. That also helped give rise to religious literalism. Whereas literalism doesn't make a lot of sense when you read a Bible that you copied with your own hands or was copied by someone else in your monastery whose mistakes were still visible, printed copies of the Bible inspire more belief in their infallibility as standardized texts.

The Effects of Changes in Media on Politics and Society

        Almost all the authors I read, but most of all McLuhan, were concerned about the effects of different media on politics and society. They all analyzed how manuscripts, print, painting, photography, television, radio, film, or social media have affected and are affecting our minds. I won't go into that more here since I've covered it so much in my posts except to say that it is clear that "the medium is the message." There is no denying that the medium by which an individual or a society received information or entertainment affects the way that they understand it. And conversely, the medium by which an artist or a reporter or a politician or a writer expresses themselves affects the output and message of what they express. It is hard to make a normative argument for any medium being "good" or "bad" since each medium promotes or diminishes certain values. 

Alienation

    The more modern authors are all very concerned with social alienation due to social media, and the first author that dealt with that seriously was Baudrillard. Media can connect people when it forms a connection where none existed, before but an unexpected result of media is to also replace and therefore degrade communications between people who were already connected. This effect is most pronounced today from social media replacing real-life interactions, causing tremendous social alienation across the world where people use social media. 

    Alienation is the reason I was interested in completing a unit on media, because I feel that the alienating effects of social media are some of the most important phenomena happening right now. After reading these books, I feel more grounded in understanding how media can connect or alienate us, but I don't feel that much closer to solutions in my own life. I feel like I need to re-engage with social media on terms that focus on connecting with people, rather than just turning it into TV. Wasting time on an endless scroll is not useful. I miss old Twitter, pre-Musk, which made my scrolling feel more productive since it was full of smart people posting their work. That Twitter has been dead for a while now. I think I need to just recognize when my endless scrolling is just a time filler and find better time filler. Even as time filler, scrolling isn't good because at least I can talk about TV I've watched with people. It's a lot harder to connect over a meme or a short video.