Documenting My Reading; Holiday Shopping; and Tr*mp

Posted on Thursday 18 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Infrastructure note: I’ve updated all the pages under the “Nonfiction Books” tab in the menu above. I set up those pages a year ago, in December 2024, and updated a few of them in May 2025, and now have updated all them this month. The link on the main tab in the menu takes you to those books recently blogged (not necessarily recently read). There are, of course, other books recently read that I haven’t yet blogged about and so are not captured in these pages.

My plan is to finish updating these pages in the next few weeks, extending alas into the new year (I thought I might finish by this month), and then turning my attention to the SF Reviews tab, and building it up similarly. Because that’s where I’m going: to consider SF novels and stories in light of the modern understanding of the world. And documenting them all, as a start.

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And I did my annual trip to the shopping centers and malls for Christmas. (Walnut Creek, Emeryville, 4th Street in Berkeley; not all today.) My conclusion: it’s easier to buy stuff online. Once in a while shopping in a physical store provides some inspiration, but that didn’t really happen today. And the things I was actively looking for, I could not find. I came home and ordered more stuff online.

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Another Trump performance with his TV speech last night, then the shock and bewilderment: how has America comes to this?

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 18 Dec 2025: Trump’s primetime speech was a master class in gaslighting, subtitled “The president’s false claims about economic conditions are the latest indication that he’s in serious trouble”

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Do People Actually Believe the Things That They Say?

Posted on Wednesday 17 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Timothy Snyder on Elon Musk, responsibility, and displacement;
  • Adam Lee how on how, despite abortion bans, rates of abortion have gone up;
  • Short items on racism, dual citizenship, dismantling climate research, promoting violence, and snitching and scapegoating.
– – –

Stepping out a bit to a larger issue of human psychology.

Timothy Snyder on Substack, 16 Dec 2025: Enemy Aliens and (Freudian) Displacement, subtitled “One way to think about billionaires and borders”
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Steven Pinker: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, post 2

Posted on Wednesday 17 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

The first three chapters of this book are crisp summaries of themes shared with two or three dozen other books I’ve read and posted about here; this book is at the center of a Venn diagram of all of them. Basic ideas of reason and science, of humanism and morality; how the human mind’s ancient legacy is ill-suited for the modern world; the expansion of the circle of empathy for others; the later ideas of evolution, entropy, and information; how life and evolution are possible in zones of order despite long-term entropy; the intuitive and simplistic thinking that derives from our ancient biases, including motivated reasoning; how people would rather think they are right than know what is true; how rules and norms emerged to allow true beliefs to emerge. And then why challenges to Enlightenment values emerged, from the Romantic movement with Rousseau, to religious faith and nationalism, to notions that civilization is in decline or is merely boring compared to the glories of the past.

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Defending the Indefensible; and Reading

Posted on Tuesday 16 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump about Rob Reiner and the few who defend him and the many more who do not;
  • How many people don’t finish most books, and how high school students barely read any.
– – –

Once again, we’re dealing with a despicable, demented lunatic in the White House. And the fact that so many still support him reveals a deep, disturbing aspect of human nature that I suspect the species will never overcome.

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 15 Dec 2025: Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder, subtitled “This morning’s Truth Social post was nauseating even by the president’s standards.” (gift link)

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Narcissists and Simpletons

Posted on Monday 15 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s vile comments about the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, and wondering what kind of people still support him;
  • How the MAGA right succumbs to the bias of believing in an ideal past;
  • Short takes on Ron Johnson; the world giving up on America; “slop” and “rage bait”; misunderstanding Denmark’s health-care system; the motive for teaching “intelligent design”; and Tom Nichols on Trump.
– – –

First, we can’t look away from the despicable comments made by President Trump this morning about the deaths of film director Rob Reiner and his wife yesterday. Any more than we can look away from a train-wreck.

NY Times, 15 Dec 2025: Trump Seizes on Rob Reiner’s Death to Attack the Hollywood Director, subtitled “The president attributed the killing of Rob Reiner and his wife to “Trump derangement syndrome.” There was no indication that the couple’s political beliefs were linked to their deaths.”

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Moon Status; Dormant Bigotry

Posted on Monday 15 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Just two items today. First a think piece.

Slate, Joel Achenbach, 9 Dec 2025: Moondoggle, subtitled “Officially, America is supposed to land on the moon again in 2027—and Mars thereafter. Ask anyone inside NASA under Trump, and you will hear a far different story.”

(Achenbach is the writer of Captured By Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe in 1999, a book sitting down in my stacks.)

This piece is about the incoherence of NASA’s planning in the Trump administration.
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Nominalism, and Some Cool Maps

Posted on Saturday 13 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The idea of nominalism, from a 77-year-old book, that seems to have inspired MAGA’s arrested moral development;
  • Apocalyptic speculation in science fiction and in speculative maps;
  • Brief items about Trump’s whitewashing of American history, teaching students how to think, and the lunacy of asking tourists to turn over their social media history.
– – –

Today’s think piece is courtesy Steven Pinker’s gift link in a Facebook post, where the title of the article appeared as “The Closing of the MAGA Mind.”

NY Times, guest essay by Laura Field, 13 Dec 2025: The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right (gift link)

Pinker’s Facebook post comments:

Laura Field, a specialist in “illiberal studies,” explains one of the intellectual foundations of MAGA: that the root of all evil is the West’s rejecting a universal moral order based on religion. (She could have added to this excellent exposition that in fact many secularists are in fact “moral realists,” believing in a universal morality, but one that is based on reason & well-being rather than dogma and scripture.)

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Rituals and Routines, and Fonts

Posted on Friday 12 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Personal health updates;
  • Big Think on the need for everyday rituals;
  • Boing Boing on the origins of Calibri and Times New Roman, and stupidity;
  • Short takes on approval ratings, European leadership, earning more, and Trump’s image.
– – –

It’s been a busy week of medical appointments, for blood work, to see the cardiologist (four and half years!), to see a new PCP (Y’s new insurance doesn’t cover my old one). Two of these involved long drives, into the city across the Bay Bridge, and down to San Carlos across the 92 bridge. Everything is fine, medically speaking. Today I managed to stay home all day today, though we’re going out to dinner in a little while. Another drive tomorrow, to Walnut Creek, for Xmas shopping.

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Think piece of the day. This might have profound implications.

Big Think, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, 10 Dc 2025: Why your brain needs everyday rituals, subtitled “Rituals serve psychological functions that go far beyond mere habit or tradition.”
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Marriage, and Women

Posted on Thursday 11 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Adam Lee on whether marriage can survive the continued emancipation of women;
  • Thought of the day about who’s making progress and who are against it;
  • Short takes on a Republican loonie; on a Christian who advises calling gay men a slur; how Republicans reflexively opposite everything Democrats implement to help people, as being “woke”; and how Republicans favor business over public safely, every time.
– – –

Today’s think piece.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 10 Dec 2025: The end of marriage?, subtitled “If marriage goes extinct, it will be because it deserves to.”

Haven’t read it yet. Why would this be? Among some progressives there’s an idealistic notion that human nature can somehow be overcome. I’m less sanguine about that.

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Steven Pinker: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, post 1

Posted on Thursday 11 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

This is the last of the ‘big’ Steven Pinker books that I’ve read but not yet written up here. Though there was one book in between them (THE SENSE OF STYLE, 2014) and though the connection isn’t explicit, this book is a companion, perhaps even a spiritual sequel, to THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. (And RATIONALITY, 2021, is in a sense third in a trilogy.) I read this one when it came out, in early 2018. Upon reviewing it and my notes just now, this one strikes me as perhaps the single-most core volume in my library that summarizes my own worldview, one aligned with liberalism, aligned with science fiction, and describing how to approach the world objectively and not via the filters and biases of tradition or received religious ideology. And how that approach, unlike those of tradition and religion, has brought about great improvement in the world.

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