Choosing to Have Kids During the End Times


My best friend believes that humanity has a 60% probability of becoming extinct in the next 15 years. He’s one of the smartest people I know and is an extremely well-adjusted and high-functioning person. He scoffs at conspiracy theories, doesn’t wear tin foil hats, and has an abiding love of statistics. His belief is terrifying because it derives not from fevered information bubble YouTube binges, but from years of methodical research and predictions.

But I don’t need his bleak predictions to feel like the world is ending. I’m apocalyptic enough on my own for that. And now that I have 3 young children, I’m more worried for them than I am for myself. What kind of world did I bring them into?

Is it wrong to have kids when you are aware of all the risks? Am I to blame if my children suffer through a world-ending event?

It’s Not Just In Your Head

Last summer at a family gathering, I asked my parents about my feelings of dread.

“Mom and Dad, is it just me or is the world ending? Are my concerns just what it’s like to be the father of 3 young kids?”

My parents are some of the most rational and loving humans I’ve ever met. I’ve always been their paranoid, obsessive son. The kind of son you have to constantly tell to relax and not to worry. Take a deep breath, things aren’t that bad, George.

“The world is a lot scarier now than it was when you were little.” I almost couldn’t believe they said it. Maybe they had misunderstood my question?

Later that weekend, I asked my 93-year-old grandmother. She looked at me with pain in her eyes and said, “I’m worried about what your generation will have to face.”

These Are the Ways the World Ends

And those are just the risks that have a decent shot at ending our species. If you’re more conservative and only care about you and your family living, you’ve got lots of other risks to worry about: political instability, war, and the normal plagues.

Most people probably fall into this camp, and the sad fact is that it’s historically mundane for entire families, cities, and nations to be extinguished unceremoniously.

Let’s stop here for a moment and return to the main point of this post: the kids.

As a parent of young children, the thought of even these mundane calamities befalling my children is heart-breaking. No. Those words don’t quite do the emotion justice.

If I think of my children dying, a lump forms in my throat. I lose the ability to function. My brain freezes and I teeter on the brink of tears. The idea of this happening to every person’s kids is unfathomable. It’s pointless to multiply infinite suffering by anything.

So perhaps it is rational to just not have children?

Are We Just Species-Level Hypochondriacs?

People have been predicting the end of the world since there were words to record the sentiment. I’m fond of this Wikipedia article: list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. And lest you think that all of these predictions are just about a religious end of the world, don’t overlook the predictions about floods, comets, and earthquakes.

It’s tempting to conclude that humans are just species-level hypochondriacs. Even before nuclear weapons, prophets were envisioning the end of the world in a hundred different ways. 

We now know that apart from the mundane firestorms, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves, there are more exotic and deadly natural phenomenon: 

While all of the major asteroid impact events and mass extinction events predate our species by hundreds of millions of years, far smaller events happen regularly. For a sobering read, check out the Tunguska event.

So yeah, nature is out to kill us, and that’s stressful. But that’s sort of our species’ baseline. Me, my parents, and my grandmother all seem to be cluing into something more modern and ominous. 

Many Existential Risks Really Are New

Our species has probably existed on earth for ~190,000 years. Four out of five potential ways to end ourselves were created in the last 100 years. That means that the bulk of our species’ known existential risk has been created in the last .05% of our collective existence. Two of those risks (AI and pandemics) have really only become existentially threatening in the last 20 years. That’s .01% of our species’ existence.

Against the backdrop of massively increased risk, we’ve also created instantaneous worldwide communication and algorithmic information bubbles. That seems like the perfect storm for anxious people. 

Whenever I start down this path, I reflexively think “well, we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet, so maybe I’m just worrying too much.” But we’ve come alarmingly close more than you’d think: 

  • There have been at least 20 nuclear close calls since the creation of nuclear weapons. Some incidents got so close it makes me nauseous to read the accounts.

  • Covid-19 killed ~27M people and was probably created through non-nefarious gain-of-function research plus an innocuous containment leak. Oopsie.

  • Climate change is thought to have already killed ~2M people.

So, we’ve already nearly ended our civilization with nukes about two dozen times and millions of people have already been killed by two of the other major risk vectors. And unlike previous generations, we are cursed with the knowledge of the risks, the near-misses, and the accelerating rate of change. 

Given all of the above, I have to conclude that it’s fairly rational to be more worried about our civilization and our children than previous generations.

So, Why Have Kids?

If you’ve read this far, it may seem stupid to invest time and energy bringing children into such a risky world. Selfishly, kids take a lot of work and cost a lot. If you think our civilization will end in 5 years, why not remain child-free, retire early, and sip cocktails in the Caribbean? Even if cocktail-sipping in the tropics isn’t your thing, isn’t it philosophically cruel to bring kids into a world knowing that there is an increased risk of suffering and dying young?

I think that if you believe the world is going to end in less than 5 years and you don’t already have kids, then yeah, maybe don’t do that. But if you think we have more than 5 years and / or you already have kids, I think investing in them is essential and valuable. 

The Utilitarian Argument for Kids

I’ve read a bunch about the psychology of happiness. Daniel Kahneman proposes two ways of understanding the experience of happiness: the experiencing self and the reflecting self. The experiencing self is what everyone is most familiar with. It’s just how you feel while you live your life. It’s how you feel while you read these words. 

The reflecting self is different. How did you feel when you last went on vacation? What was something particularly fun that happened in the last month or so? Spend a couple seconds thinking about those experiences. Remember all the little details: the events, the people, colors, smells, and sensations. This is your reflecting self.

Kahneman and others have shown that we think very differently about our lives in these two modes. And most importantly, he has shown that we spend the vast, vast majority of our lives experiencing rather than reflecting.

This makes intuitive sense: most people spend orders of magnitude more time just living life than thinking about living life.

I think this simple fact makes for a pretty strong argument to have kids. I’m not a strict philosophical utilitarian, but follow me down the utilitarian path for just a minute here. 

Let’s say that you have a kid and every hour of that child’s life they get to experience a range of emotions that net out slightly positive. Sure, there are tantrums, pain, and displeasure, but there’s also lots of joy, excitement, and love. Over 5 years, that child gets to experience 25,550 hours of waking, positive life.

If the world gets nuked out of existence, they might have a couple of weeks of terror and pain followed by death. Even if that terror and pain last for 3 months and every single waking second is miserable, that’s still only 5% of their life. More likely, they can find joy even in the most grim circumstances. If this point seems hard to believe, read Man’s Search for Meaning.

Also, as a father of young children, I can attest that young kids seem from the outside to be very joyful most of the time. They aren’t plagued by the morose moods of adults. The movie Inside Out did a good job of visualizing this early-life psychological simplicity.

So, unless the end of the world is extremely drawn out and painful and your kid is already prone to suffer an unusual amount of physical or mental pain, I think having kids creates net-positive human experience … if you think the child can live beyond early childhood. 

Why the caveat about age? Because among most parents I know, raising kids from 0-5 is a very net-negative experience. Some people love babies and toddlers, but I haven’t met anyone yet that loves them for 90+ hours a week. 

The Phenomenological Argument for Kids

If you’ve done your philosophical homework, you may have read Heidegger or Sartre. They represent a branch of philosophical thought called phenomenology. One of the tenets of that system of thought is that human experience is inherently valuable, regardless of the quality of that experience. 

I’m not fully convinced of this in the extreme cases. For instance, I think it’s wrong for someone dying of excruciatingly painful and terminal cancer to be denied euthanasia on the basis that their suffering is meaningful. But for more mundane examples, I agree that human experience is superior to none at all. I think most people fundamentally agree. It’s pretty obvious why: we’re all human and the vast majority of us inherently value other members of our species. 

This school of thought would argue that a child’s existence and consciousness are valuable, regardless of whether that child is happy or sad. I think it’s tough to quantify this value, but I agree in principle that our species is enriched by having another child exist vs not exist.

The Hedonic Treadmill Argument for Kids

Maybe you aren’t convinced by esoteric philosophical arguments. That’s fine, I think there’s still a very strong argument for having kids if you want to. It’s called the Hedonic Treadmill. Empirical studies find time and time again that most people revert to a happiness set point, regardless of what life throws at them. 

This was popularized in the highly influential and oft-quoted study about recent lottery winners and paraplegics. Researchers enlisted people who had recently won the state lottery and people who had recently become paraplegics or quadriplegics due to an accident. They asked those participants to rate their happiness while experiencing everyday events like watching TV and talking to friends. What they found was that in the long run, there wasn’t much difference between the two groups despite their substantially different life circumstances. 

Put more simply, we can adapt to basically anything life hurls at us, and for most of us, we’ll probably be about as happy before and after. This effect has been labeled the Hedonic Treadmill. Like walking on a treadmill, our brains quickly adapt to new life circumstances and we tend to return to a happiness “set point.” 

Why is this applicable to having children? Because it strongly suggests that over the long term, you’ll be about as happy with kids as without them.

I can hear some folks reading this now and saying “whoa, hold on a minute, one of your arguments for having kids is that they probably won’t make you more miserable?!”. But I actually think that is a very strong argument. Bear with me for a moment.

I think Jean Twenge made a pretty compelling argument in her book Generations that despite their rhetoric, most young adults that choose not to have children today do so for selfish reasons. But what the Hedonic Treadmill strongly suggests is that avoiding kids so that you can enjoy your life more won’t work for most people. 

You might think “without kids, I can have tons more fun, I can go hiking and go to parties and live in an expensive city and play video games all day!”. And those things are fun, but only for a while. After you finish playing your 30th video game of the year, you’ll probably want to do something else. After living in San Francisco for 5 years, you might want to try living somewhere else.

Personally, I think parents in the US really are less happy on average for the first 3-5 years. Childcare is criminally expensive. Most parents don’t get any leave from their work. Young children induce sleeplessness, sickness, and marital tension. And in reaction to all these changes, many parents do stressful things like move out of big cities, change jobs, and remodel homes. All of that pushes a lot of parents to be less happy moment-to-moment.

In the long term, though, parents are about as happy as non-parents.

If you think that the world is going to end next year, there’s a pretty strong argument not to have kids because you’ll struggle less in those 12 months. But if you think the world will last at least 5-10 years, there’s a pretty good chance that having kids won’t make much difference to your long-term happiness.

Also no, having a kid isn’t an environmentally immoral action.

The Life Regret Argument for Kids

People regret things they didn’t do more than the things they do. That’s true even if the things they do end badly. 

Even with advancements in reproductive technology and medical care, if you want to have kids, it’s still a very good idea to have them when you’re relatively young. So, unlike some other big decisions in life, it’s not feasible to wait and see indefinitely. 

I’m a firm believer that people who don’t strongly want children shouldn’t have them. The US cultural norm that you grow up, marry, and have kids has become less prevalent, but is still too strong. If you don’t want kids, you shouldn’t have them. It’s that simple. And anyone that pressures or shames you for that decision is wrong.

If you do feel strongly that you want kids, but are worried about the state of the world, however, things are more tricky. If you’re in your mid-30s and feel strongly that you want kids, but decide not to do so because of political strife, climate change, nuclear war, etc, you may come to regret the decision. And there are very few options to go back and change your mind.

Why I’m Raising Kids in the End Times

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life. I’m not proud of it, but there is a certain comfort in the thought of surrendering to nihilism. What’s the point in struggling to raise children when there’s a non-trivial chance Putin will end the world in 2026 with the flip of a button? When you’re in that mind-space, you’re numb to all the fears and concerns.

But for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, I still think having children is worthwhile. Is it always pleasant? No. Does being a parent heighten my concerns about existential threats? Yes. But to simply surrender to nihilism and depression would make the world a worse place. If for no other reason than to show my children how I want them to act, I’m not willing to do that.

Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023 and What They Taught Me

Here are the top 10 nonfiction books I read in 2023 and 3 things that each of them taught me.

★★★★★ An Immense World by Ed Yong

  1. An organism’s umwelt (pronounced “um-velt”) is a description of what they can perceive. Many organisms have such different umwelt that they are essentially existing in different universes without any perception of one another.

  2. It makes no sense to make statements like “a dog’s nose is 10,000x as sensitive as a humans.” Dogs almost certainly perceive the world in radically different ways unrelated to the number of nerve endings in their olfactory bulbs.

  3. Humans only perceive a very narrow range of possible sensory signals. To take a single example, elephants can communicate with one another using subsonic frequencies that are imperceptible to us. In a very real sense, the world is fundamentally different depending on your species.

★★★★★ Chip War by Chris Miller

  1. Only 3 companies in the world are capable of physically manufacturing the most advanced computer chips that power everything from laptop computers to cell phones: TSMC (Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation), Samsung, and Intel.

  2. Only 1 company in the world is capable of creating the specialized ultra-UV lithography machines that these three chip fabs require: ASML. It’s lithography machines cost $300-400M each. It takes 13 containers and 250 crates to ship a single machine.

  3. Because chip fabrication facilities are so mind-bogglingly expensive to build and run, many companies known for their electronics design (Apple, Nvidia, et al) don’t physically manufacture their own chips. They design chips which are then fabricated by TSMC, Samsung, or Intel.

★★★★★ The School of Life: An Emotional Education

This book defies the pattern of science-y nonfiction. It’s not, in my opinion, especially useful to summarize in bullet form. You’ll have to just check it out and see if you agree with the points.

★★★★★ Generations by Jean M. Twenge

  1. I used to think that generations were a bit like astrology: make-believe concepts that people used to justify pre-existing biases. After reading this book, I realize that view is probably too extreme. There are real differences between differently-aged people. Whether you’re comfortable lumping them together using birth years or not doesn’t have anything to do with large and observable differences in the way those people think and act. So by all means go ahead and disagree with whether “millennials” start in 1979 or 1982, but people born around that time have significantly different life trajectories to people born in the late 1950s.

  2. Younger people’s (Gen Z) mental health started to decline dramatically starting in 2012. A broad consensus is forming that the cause of that decline is due to cell phone use and social networking in particular. The impact has most heavily impacted young women.

  3. The falling birth rate in developed nations is probably being driven by increasingly capable technology, wealth, and social acceptance of individualistic behaviors. The alarmist rhetoric about people not having babies because of climate change or overpopulation don’t hold up under research scrutiny. Most people that don’t have children do it for the obvious reason: children are insanely expensive and inconvenient. In the past, more communal societies distributed the cost of raising kids at the same time that it put pressure on individuals to have families to adhere to social norms. As societies have become more individualistic, the cost of raising kids has skyrocketed for parents at the same time as society has punished adults less and less for choosing not to have kids in the first place. Hence, fewer babies.

★★★★★ Seek and Hide by Amy Gajda

  1. The right to privacy has been a part of English common law in some form or other for hundreds of years. Americans imported it into the original 13 colonies, but enforcement has always been inconsistent.

  2. At the end of the day, the main battles in privacy law enforcement have centered around relatively powerful people attempting to obscure their deeds from the public. US society has gone through periods where it was deemed more and less acceptable to muckrake and expose those secrets. During the late 1790s, for instance, journalists and muckrakers had a largely free hand to malign politicians and businesspeople. During the early and mid-20th century, by contrast, the right of privacy was more strictly enforced and courts ruled more in favor of protecting individual’s private details.

  3. We are currently in what Gadja thinks is the end of a period of particularly lopsided privacy enforcement that protects journalists and internet platforms.

★★★★★ Immune by Philipp Dettmer

  1. The immune system is so dangerous to the body’s tissue that there are an almost mind-boggling number of steps, checks, and safeguards on it’s activation. So, if you ever see a medication that promises to “increase immune response” be skeptical: you don’t want an over-active immune system.

  2. The body keeps a chemical memory of every pathogen it has ever encountered. That “memory” can be activated days, months, or years after first encounter. It also means that if you think of our immune system as a library of sorts, it is one of the most impressive information storage systems.

  3. When your tissue is infected, it becomes warm to the touch. This is a localized version of having a high temperature during a bout with the flu. Scientists currently hypothesize that the added heat does help a bit to kill off pathogenic invaders, but mostly, it’s to facilitate easier and faster protein synthesis for the immune system. Basically, we get warmer when we’re fighting off a bacterium or virus because the immune system can more efficiently create warrior cells at slightly higher temperatures.

★★★★★ The Fall of Robespierre by Colin Jones

  1. Robespierre’s contemporary oratory and rhetoric sounds unnervingly similar to modern populist leaders.

  2. As with most tyrants, Robespierre held onto power through the use of violence and scare tactics. But this was also his undoing. The primary reason he was removed from power wasn’t due to a widespread popular backlash against his methods, it was because other powerful members of the revolutionary government were concerned that he might kill them.

  3. There were many unlikely events that led to Robespierre’s removal and execution. If any one of them had ended differently, there’s a pretty good chance he would have survived and continued running the revolutionary government. In one particularly comedic situation, overwhelming military strength was arrayed against Robespierre’s enemies and it looked like the entire rebellion was over. But the leader of the that military detachment misunderstood how many guards there were in a government building. Fearing a clash with a non-existent enemy and fearing for his own title and office, he chose instead to retreat.

★★★★★ Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

  1. International trade benefits developing nations far more than it benefits the US. The authors estimate that if all international US trade were halted tomorrow, it would only cost American consumers about 2.5% more per year to source all goods and services domestically. This isn’t a good argument to cease international trade, though. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have better lives due to trade with the US. It is, however, an important fact to keep in mind when creating policy.

  2. One of the primary hypotheses the authors put forward to explain rising income and wealth inequality in the US is a lack of a social safety net. While it seems like an obviously good idea on the surface for recently-laid-off workers in Cleveland to move to San Francisco to take advantage of more plentiful and highly-paid work, most can’t afford to do that. That’s not to say that they are modern day Okies fleeing the dustbowl with no money for gasoline. But expensive housing, a lack of subsidized childcare, and inaccessible health benefits make most disenfranchised workers rationally conclude that it’s better to remain in a place where they have social ties, even if there is no gainful employment. This perpetuates economic inequality. The laid off workers get poorer in small rural towns while coastal knowledge workers get richer in big cities.

  3. In response to growing automation and AI-fueled job destruction, we could significantly increase social stability by offering displaced workers government-subsidized jobs doing work that robots can’t do such as in-person teaching, caring for children, or producing certain kinds of art. The way to identify these heavily-impacted people, however, will be difficult and contentious.

★★★★☆ Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

  1. Most fungi are not visible to us humans. Mushrooms are only the fruiting part of most fungi plants, and not every fungi species distributes it’s reproductive material via the air. The overwhelming mass of fungi on earth are contained in rocks and topsoil.

  2. The whole premise of the video game and TV show The Last of Us is way less far-fetched at a scientific level than I had expected. Seriously, it’s a bit terrifying how advanced and pervasive fungi are and how little we can do to control them.

  3. The root systems of most plants offload the production of necessary chemical symbiotic fungi species. That means that most trees and plant species would be incapable of existing on the planet without fungi.

★★★★☆ When Crack was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

  1. Crack babies don’t exist. Or rather, the impact of crack on pregnancy outcomes was massively over-stated during the late 1980s and early 1990s to fit with a racist narrative of inner city black women and their lifestyle choices.

  2. There is actually fairly solid evidence that the US federal government colluded with large, known cocaine traffickers during the 1980s as part of the Iran-Contra affair. While there isn’t a direct link between entities like the CIA and cocaine distribution in inner-city neighborhoods, the conspiracy theory about the US government using cocaine to control black communities isn’t as misplaced as I had assumed.

  3. The end of the crack epidemic appears to have largely been driven by young people witnessing the ravages of the drug on their communities and abstaining. Ramsey even suggests that influential hip hop artists like Dr. Dre may have intentionally glorified the use of less destructive drugs like marijuana to discourage kids from using cocaine, crack, and heroine.

Other Books I Read in Q4

★★★★☆ Platonic, by Marisa G. Franco

★★★★☆ Stalin by Oleg V. Khlevniuk

★★★★☆ When Crack was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

★★★☆☆ Growing Up Human by Brenna Hassett

★★★☆☆ A Storm of Witchcraft by Emerson W. Baker

★★★☆☆ How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy

★★★☆☆ Gangsters vs. Nazis by Michael Benson

★★★☆☆ What the Ermine Saw by Eden Collinsworth

★★★☆☆ Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin

★★★☆☆ Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait

★★★☆☆ Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse by William Neuman

★★★☆☆ The Dive by Stephen McGinty

★★☆☆☆ The Declassification Engine by Matthew Connelly

★☆☆☆☆ Fortune’s Bazaar by Vaudine England

★☆☆☆☆ I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter










2023 Reading Update

So far in 2023, I’ve read 24 books and gave up on 7. I would have written about all these awesome books earlier, but writing on my new personal finance blog has taken up more of my time than previously.

If you’ve read any good nonfiction books, please pass the recommendations my way. I’m always looking for new material!

★★★★★ Chip War

If you read one book this year, I would recommend this one. The creation of microprocessor chips isn’t just important to techies and nerds anymore. The country that can produce more and better chips will prevail over all other countries. Miller not only describes the incredibly fascinating way in which chips are made, but makes a compelling argument about the hot topic of chip dominance between China and the US. I couldn’t put this one down and now really want to take a tour of a chip fab if I ever get the chance.

★★★★★ The School of Life

The School of Life doesn’t get everything correct, but there’s enough really good wisdom in here to make it a must read. This was initially hard for me to get into because it’s so thoroughly unscientific. At no point does this devolve into the popular science trope of citing social science research. You’re never asked to believe in the outcomes of a study conducted at such and such university that proves that love is real. But I think that’s the key part of the charm: it’s direct and even when it misses, it’s still thought-provoking.

★★★★★ Immune

I remember taking biology 120 in college: it was a big, long, and somewhat boring lecture series. This book is the opposite of that. Philipp Dettmer does an incredible job of making the specific mechanics of our immune systems accessible and fascinating. There’s so much detail in here that I almost immediately forgot most of it, but I came away with a deep, abiding understanding of the absolutely absurd level of complexity built into how our bodies keep us healthy.

★★★★★ The Fall of Robespierre

In my opinion, this is history writing at it’s finest. Rather than describing the events of the French revolution at a high level (booooorrriinnng), he zooms in and tells the deeply human, messy, and interconnected history of how a seminal historical event actually unfolded. What is often described in history textbooks in a couple of sentences and comes across as dry and predetermined here comes alive with ambiguity, reversals of fortune, random strokes of good luck, and human tension. I wish that I was taught this sort of history during my time in school.

★★★★☆ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

This would have gotten 5/5 stars, but good lord does Rhodes take a long time focusing on the history of physics. Easily the first half of the book is just focused on the extremely detailed history of the physicists and experiments that led up to what the title promises: the creation of the atomic bomb. And I get it, the title is about the making of the bomb, but I would have appreciated a longer epitaph about what some of the key figures did after the Manhattan Project. I was especially curious to learn what many thought about their contributions decades later.

★★★★☆ Chaos Monkeys

This one won’t change the way you see the world in a fundamental way, but good lord is it entertaining and accurate. Martinez was a couple of years ahead of me going through YCombinator and working at Facebook. But our experiences overlapped so closely that I feel like I am in a unique position to judge the accuracy of this book. And it is 100% accurate. If you ever wanted to know what it’s actually like to be funded by YC, work at Meta, or just be a techie in Silicon Valley, look no further.

★★★★☆ Barbarians at the Gate

This one deserves it’s reputation as a classic among business books. It’s well-researched, readable, and interesting at a human level. Personally, I think the people most likely to benefit from reading this book are younger people who don’t have a lot of working experience yet. It does a really good job of explaining how business at big corporations is really conducted. Obviously, the cast of characters here were chosen because they are almost caricatures of themselves, but if you’ve worked in corporate America long enough, you’ve met every single person described in these pages.

★★★★☆ Preparing for War

Onishi might be wrong about his primary thesis, but it is at least consistent and may answer a question that’s been on my mind for the last 8 years: why is conservative political ideology so nonsensical? His theory is that most conservative rhetoric is an intentional misdirection from the real truth that the only consistent Republican system of belief is white supremacy. That’s almost certainly an oversimplification for any one conservative person’s system of beliefs, but the shoe does seem to fit the party’s direction at the national level. At the very least, I’d encourage you to read it and make your own assessment of his hypothesis.

★★★★☆ Entangled Life

I had actually been avoiding this one despite the insanely positive reviews. I mean, c’mon, how much is there to know about mushrooms? But I was wrong and the reviews were right: this one really is insanely interesting. If, like me, you thought that fungi were only just mushrooms then you should do yourself a favor and read this book. It was so good that I found myself spontaneously gushing about it to coworkers.

★★★★☆ The Secret Life of Groceries

This book could have easily devolved into another Supersize Me, editorialized expose about grocery stores, but it rises above that. I learned a lot about why Trader Joes is so likable, why it’s nearly impossible for good food to be sold at large box stores, and why the food we eat is neither so terrible as journalists would have you believe or as good as food marketers claim it is.

★★★★☆ John Adams

I love the musical Hamilton. The show briefly covers the Adams administration, but I realized recently that I didn’t really know much about him nor his work. And of course, David McCullough is a nonfiction legend. I’ve read most of his books, and they’re all great.

This might have scored higher with me if I hadn’t accidentally downloaded the abridged version of the audio book. So, don’t do that if you actually want to learn about Adams. Otherwise, I really enjoyed refreshing my knowledge on the founders. I came away thinking that Hamilton was probably the lesser of the two men, but the musical is still great.

★★★☆☆ Dead in the Water

I have a fascination with large boats. I have no idea why. But if you’re like me and maritime shipping and boats are at all interesting to you, this one will definitely keep your turning the pages. It’s about what is probably the largest known maritime insurance fraud that occurred about 15 years ago. It’s got everything you want in a story: a bad guy, a good guy, murder, fraud, extortion, and … big boats.

★★★☆☆ The World in a Grain

I was worried that this book would fall into the category of pop-sci books that became a fad in the mid 2010s. They all follow the same pattern and pitch: Simple Noun: How Simple Noun is Important to Every Person That Has Ever Lived and May Have Killed Your Parents. I’ve read a couple books in this genre and they can be pretty cloying in their fascination with their subject. But this one is significantly better than the rest of it’s ilk. For one, I think Beiser’s point about the importance of sand to the modern world is actually accurate. From concrete to glass to silicon chips, we really do depend on sand quite a bit. And I knew next to nothing about it prior to reading this fun book.

★★★☆☆ Trust the Plan

Given how unhinged the political right has become in the US and the visibility of this particular conspiracy theory to adherents of that ideology, I felt I needed to better understand what QAnon really is about. It turns out it’s even more insane and vapid than I had assumed. I had thought that perhaps, due to the relatively high profile this particular conspiracy theory had attained, there would be more to it than random posts on 4Chan, but …. nope. Having read it, I feel equal parts dismayed and educated.

★★★☆☆ Uneasy Street

I love reading about how people think about and understand money. And this book does a good job of accurately representing how wealthy people understand and cope with their own wealth. This one didn’t cause me to fundamentally reevaluate my life or anything, but it was a fun read and I think Sherman did a good job avoiding the popular “eat the rich” narrative.

★★★☆☆ The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe

I want my kids to read this when they get a bit older. Novella’s commitment to skeptical thought is a breath of fresh air. It’s deeply entertaining to read. It’s like a written version of MythBusters but with a lot less filer. My only gripe is one inconsistency in his approach. He really dives into and tears apart most folk beliefs, but seems to make an exception for theories that surround the AI singularity. I think that AI doomerism casts a spell on many hyper-intelligent rationalists and I wish he’d taken off the proverbial gloves and asked harder questions on this topic.

★★★☆☆ The Perfectionists

This was a fun read and I loved that Winchester organizes the book by measures of precision. I didn’t learn anything earth-shattering here, but it was entertaining and I learned lots of factoids along the way. I also came away with a better understanding of just how imprecise most human-made objects are.

★★★☆☆ Rise of the Robots

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that AI is going to steal your job and probably cause the collapse of our society. So, you know, not much to see here.

★★★☆☆ Rise and Kill First

Okay, the premise here is really fascinating. I knew nothing about Israel’s explicit policy of assassination as a tool of the state. From there, I assumed that Mossad and other associated defense agencies must be hyper-competent killing machines. And certainly they have killed a bunch of people, but I came away from the book reaffirmed in my belief that almost all spycraft and covert military stuff hews closer to the depiction of the CIA in Burn After Reading than any Tom Clancy novel.

★★★☆☆ The Wager

Who doesn’t love a good adventure/survival porn book from the age of discovery? That’s right, nobody. If Scorsese and DiCaprio ever actually release a movie based on this material, I’ll definitely watch it.

★★★☆☆ Endless Forms

I hate wasps. And I actually mean to use the word “hate” here. It probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve been stung repeatedly by them over my life and even sent to the hospital due to an allergic reaction. If they at least had the good manners to die when they sting, this penchant for stinging all the time could sort of be forgiven, but no, they aren’t even polite enough for that.

So I was interested to see if Sumner could convince me to abandon my well-deserved dislike of these murder flies. The short answer is no, they’re still beastly and awful. But they are at least more interesting than I had previously understood. Also, most of the wasps you actually see aren’t the aggressive, social species that would actually sting you. So there’s that I guess.

★★★☆☆ Who Gets In and Why

College admissions is pretty borked. This book is probably not worth reading unless you have a kid that’s college-bound, but it' is interesting to get a glimpse at just how subjective the process really is. Also, I’ll be curious to see how long we keep pretending that essays are a valid way to communicate anything of value in a post-ChatGPT world.

★★★☆☆ The Great Displacement

I had hoped that Jake Bittle would go beyond what I had already learned about how climate change would affect people’s lives here in the US. He did add a little color around the edges, but he didn’t try to do any advanced modeling or make any specific recommendations, which was a bit of a letdown. Basically the south and west are pretty much doomed due to desertification, drought, and increasing temperatures. So, nothing new here.

★★★☆☆ The Escape Artist

This was a good read on a topic that I already knew a lot about. I do hope that this book is incorporated into school curricula, though, because it tells a far more nuanced historical account of the Holocaust than is typically discussed.

Didn’t Finish

★★☆☆☆ The World

I wasn’t even able to make it through the introduction. Too long-winded! Get to the point.

★★☆☆☆ All That Moves Us

I thought this one would something akin to Complications, but this wasn’t as well-written and tended towards saccharine, feel-good stories.

★★☆☆☆ Cobalt Red

I’m a jaded, cynical bastard, but I find it completely unsurprising that big western hardware companies exploit other people in the world and that their suffering is exquisite and completely unnecessary. If you haven’t read about this sort of thing before, this is worth reading about, but I just found it sad to reflect on yet more senseless misery.

★★☆☆☆ The Last Days of the Dinosaurs

I was hoping for lots of science and disaster porn, but instead, got lots of poetic descriptions of late-Jurassic landscapes.

★★☆☆☆ Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

You know that corny 1920s radio announcer voice? Yeah, kinda what it’s like reading this book. I don’t mean that the narration of the audio book sounds like that, but the personalities here are so larger-than-life and so much of their time, it was too much.

★★☆☆☆ The Lessons of History

First, the audio book version of this was ruined by a poorly-recorded interview with Will Durant that’s borderline un-listenable. Second, if you read history or nonfiction books, you’ve probably already figured out most of the lessons they cover.

★★☆☆☆ There Are No Accidents

Felt like an overly-long Atlantic article. The world is unfair and people get hurt as a result of it.

★★☆☆☆ Infinite Powers

If you like math, you’ll probably really like this one. I hated Calculus and I still made it through about halfway, which is a huge vote of confidence. But, at the end of the day, this is a book about math and it’s never been my passion.