I’ve only skimmed this, but I’m posting it as a reminder to myself that everything I said about Disney yesterday also applies to Apple, and that I need to find ways of extracting myself from their ecosystem, as hard as it may be.

What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it.

When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post:

This summer, I attended a Community of Christ “Reunion” camp for the third time. All three times have been at a campground in Southern Indiana owned by my local “mission center” (a regional grouping of congregations, not dissimilar to an LDS stake or a Catholic dioceses). I’ve wanted to write this post since getting back from Reunion in mid-June, and it probably would have been a better post if I had written it right away. That said, we’ve been doing a lot of family travel since then, and I’ve been trying to process exactly what I want to write about Reunion, so it’s only happening now.

For the past few years, my family has been getting into the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which is a lot of fun. In the three years that we’ve watched it, at least one of us has always been cheering for Switzerland. This is perhaps because of my own personal bias toward Switzerland, having spent some time there, but it’s also that the songs stand out to (at least one of) us. I was bummed in 2021 when Tout l’univers narrowly lost out (though Måneskin’s winning song has grown on me), and my kid was a big fan of 2023’s Swiss entry, Watergun, even if the rest of us (including the Eurovision judges and audience) weren’t huge fans.

Finally read up on this, and it’s worrying.

Over a year ago, I listened to Little Brother, with the intent of revisiting this whole series. Homeland is my least favorite of the three, though, and so I stalled out pretty quickly and put it off until now.

The book is better than I remembered it being, with some good themes and interesting plot developments. It does a good job of exploring WikiLeaks-style activism as something complex and not easily resolved, but it still comes down on the side of protest, activism, and pushback in a way that I find inspiring.

This is a goofy but fun book about demon hunters from a 1990s evangelical church. It came highly recommended by Cory Doctorow, which is why I checked it out from my local library even though I wasn’t sure it would be my thing.

I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it was my thing after all. I followed enough of the 1990s gags and enjoyed enough of the story to have a good time. I also appreciate the more nuanced take it had on religion and demon hunting (the final battle is very ecumenical, including a Wiccan coven). This isn’t a genre that I love, though, and for all the good bits of the story, nothing stood out as amazing.

I… did not realize that there were BYU connections to Project 2025.

This is also a darker novella, and reading a post-apocalyptic story that touches on death and disease stresses me out. More than the last time I read it, though, I get what Doctorow is going for with this story. It’s a critique of survivalist go-it-on-your-own mentalities with optimism that even in the worst of times, humans can come together and help each other out—if they’re willing to try. I don’t like reading the story, but I appreciate the message.

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of providing the sermon for the Toronto Community of Christ congregation’s Beyond the Walls online ministry. Like when I preached last summer, the congregation is working its way through the parables associated with a particular gospel (Luke last year, Matthew this year), and I preached on the parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

The parable’s reference to visiting prisoners—combined with having recently read Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle—made me think about a decade(ish)-old memory that I hadn’t thought of for a long time. I also got to think about a Gérard Siegwalt book I recently reread and a recent experience at a spiritual retreat I attended a few years ago. I enjoyed thinking about this text and putting the sermon together and wanted to link to it here. I also really enjoyed the contributions from Estaban (who, it turns out, has some professional overlap with what I do!), Ron, Leandro, Mike, and John, which all tied together into a service that did a lot for my Sunday.

This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me.

It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.

This is one of the most interesting riffs on Superman and Batman I’ve ever read (though, of course, their serial numbers are carefully filed off). It’s a fascinating exploration of race, prejudice, technology, and police excess. I can’t remember if I’ve read this any time except the first, but it’s one I need to read again and again.

This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews.

This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups.

Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best. I love this story, and I assign an excerpt from it to my students in one class every time I teach it.

Two books that I’ve recently (re)read have been helpful in making sense of some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for the past few weeks. Let’s begin with my rereading of Gérard Siegwalt’s La réinvention du nom de Dieu (“Reinventing God’s Name”). At a few points in his book, Siegwalt makes some points about “rationalism” having replaced God in the modern world and the need to keep rationalism but put it in its place as we develop a new conception of God that this world needs better.

I should start by acknowledging that this is a hard book for me to review honestly and thoroughly. First, it’s long and dense! I’m not sure I would have made it through if it hadn’t been via audiobook, and even then, I was sometimes listening at 3x speed to make it through before my loan expired. I know I missed some details along the way. Second, these authors are clearly making a big argument that takes on much of the received wisdom in fields like anthropology and archaeology. I have zero training in either of these fields, so even if I had followed every detail, I wouldn’t be able to evaluate the argument against other findings and arguments in the literature.

Once you read enough Cory Doctorow, you start to pick up on the story elements that he reuses and recycles, and that’s pretty obvious here. Not only is this a graphic novel adaptation of a short story, but it’s very close to the premise of For the Win, too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though!

In fact, I really like this comic. The plot is interesting, and the art is AMAZING. The story doesn’t bog you down and treats the reader as though they’re smart enough to keep up. My only complaint is that there are a couple of plot elements (in the main comic and the bonus one) that would benefit from a bit more explanation. Other than that, though, I think this is great, and I can’t wait for my kid to be old enough to read it.

This sucks so much—and encapsulates our world’s obsession with financial success over environmental health.

I don’t remember when I learned that Leo Tolstoy had written his own, Thomas Jefferson-style miracle-free New Testament mashup, but I do know I immediately wanted to read it. Then, I spotted a copy at my local indie bookstore while looking for things to spend a gift card on, and that’s how I picked up a copy.

Like The Kingdom of God is Within You, I like some of Tolstoy’s ideas, but getting through them can be a drag. Since a lot of this one is just remixing the four gospels, it felt even harder to get through. It took a few starts and stops to make progress, and I think it’s going to be more of a reference book for me than anything I reread.

There’s a certain flavor of bizarre that makes for great fiction, and this comic is that. It’s a story about gender transition and transphobia, a critique of tech bros and libertarian business types, and… a science fiction story featuring a Cthulhuesque cult? There’s a bit more gore than I normally tolerate in comics, and the art style isn’t what I’d identify as my go-to preference, but everything fits together in a surreal but profound way.

If AI is indeed going to help us reduce emissions, it seems to me that that will be the product of targeted, scientific and industrial use of AI, not shoving AI into a load of commercial products. Are these commercial companies using AI to figure out how to reduce emissions? If not (and maybe even if so), it seems disingenuous to express optimism that their increased energy use will be magically cancelled out by someone else.

Look, I’ve been trying to approach the SCOTUS decision with an open “I’m not a legal expert” mind, but I think this quickly demonstrates how dangerous the decision is. There’s no way this is an official act, and Trump’s insistence that it could be shows his confidence that he can get away with what he wants as president. This is not good for democracy.

If I understand correctly, this book was recommended in the curriculum for Community of Christ Reunion camps this year; at least, I listened to it because it was recommended for the Reunion that I attended last weekend. I actually finished it on Monday, but it’s been a busy week, and so it’s taken me a while to write this review.

While I am an aspirational environmentalist, I’m not very in tune with nature, so I wasn’t sure how I’d like the book. That said, I really appreciated the author’s respectful challenging of dominant scientific paradigms, something that is professionally important to me. Her critique of consumerist greed also stood out to me. I got a lot from this book, and I think I’ll be blogging more about it in the future.

I’m not necessarily opposed to teaching the Bible in public schools, but if you’re going to do it, you should do it right: Compare and contrast the creation accounts, discuss different authors’ conflicting takes on issues, and treat it as literature. That’s clearly not what Walters is advocating for, and his approach is indefensible.

I went to BCHS and was on speech and debate with Akilah. I was one of those naïve white kids who didn’t really register all of the problematic parts of our mascot, and I have regrets. I’ll be interested to listen to this podcast and do some more internal work.