What I Just Read

A difficult book, recommended only for readers curious about--and with some pre-emptive grounding in--philosophy, theology and the history of Western thought.  If you're still here: Tillich is not the 1950s-era Protestant theologian you'd expect: he's conversant in and draws heavily from many religious traditions. More surprising, he's a fan of Nietzsche, and he's even a fan of Existentialism--not in the modern sense of shitty French plays, but rather in the sense of the late 1800s/early 1900s Existentialist philosophers like Kirkegaard, Heidegger and Jaspers, who rejected the Enlightenment-era idea of reducing man and his world to pure scientific truths, and who were appalled at the dehumanization such an idea implies. And they were right, as we were to see from the brutality of the 20th century.  Although Tillich occasionally descends into punctuation-challenged academic gibberish, this book sings out with truly profound ideas. The author refuses to traffic in pla...

Entertaining, competently-written history of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, a time that, today, feels like a joyous, long-lost era of glitz. You'll also see in this book how it takes just a couple people to change the culture of a company: the Lakers had a total rebirth once Jerry Buss took over as the new owner, and once he brought in Magic Johnson to take over as the team's floor general. You could perhaps extend this example to the entire pro basketball industry as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson together drove much of the NBA's renaissance in the 1980s. Within a decade, the entire economics of professional basketball changed. Notes:  1) Coach Paul Westhead takes over from coach Jack McKinney after McKinney's near fatal biking accident, wins the championship in 1979-1980 using his McKinney's system... then, Westhead starts to believe in his own "genius" and installs a sclerotic offense totally unsuited to his players. A guy who's too academic and too l...

"The wise are wont to say, and not without reason or at random, that he who would forecast what is about to happen should look to what has been; since all human events, whether present or to come, have their exact counterpart in the past." It's both encouraging and depressing to see that all the incompetence and institutional decay of our era have direct parallels--over and over and over--across history. Wherever you look in history you'll see greed, corruption, and truly horrible leadership. It's the rule not the exception in every era, and it makes me (slightly) less ashamed of my country's leadership in mine.  The Discourses  often meanders in an enjoyable way (just like Montaigne's essays), but it also at times meanders in an annoying way (also just like Montaigne's essays). Still, it's fascinating to hear Machiavelli draw historical parallels from Rome to his own era (the 15th century Italian city-state period) which had its own range of prob...