Blog

Year in Content

The year in content: 2025

Here’s all the content I consumed in 2025. The music data comes from Apple Music, the books from Goodreads, and the movies from Letterboxd.

The year in content: 2024

Here’s all the content I consumed this year. The music data comes from Apple Music, the books from Goodreads, and the movies from Letterboxd.

The year in content: 2023

Here’s all the content I consumed in 2023. The music data comes from Apple Music, the books from Goodreads, and the movies from Letterboxd.

Posts

Places I’ve been

R

travel

Here’s a list of places I’ve traveled to that I’ll hopefully keep updating. I’m probably missing a bunch of trips to Colombia but haven’t kept close tally.

Multicollinearity is a reality problem

R

causality

In grad school I was introduced to the problem of “multicollinearity”. This is the idea that if your explanatory variables are “too” correlated this will create issues with…

The `juanr` package

Some datasets for teaching and poking around

R

data

teaching

I maintain an R package called juanr that I use for teaching. It’s a grab-bag of 30+ datasets that I’ve collected over the years from published research, government sources…

What do controls do?

R

causality

When I first learned about regression I found the use of controls mysterious. The “why” was clear: we have a situation where we want to estimate the effect of \(X\) on \(Y\)…

Working with PRIO-GRID data

Walkthrough of the PRIO-GRID data in R.

PRIO-GRID breaks up the Earth into a grid of little squares, or cells, each of which is 0.5 x 0.5 decimal degrees (roughly 50 x 50 km at the equator; you can read more about…

Book Reviews

Books: March 2026

books

economics

politics

violence

⭐⭐⭐ I first heard of this book because of the associated poster the author sells. It depicts 4,000 boxes, one for each week of the average lifespan. When you order it you…

Books: February 2026

books

biography

democracy

fiction

history

philosophy

politics

religion

russia

sci-fi

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Now this is why we get up in the morning. What a great book. Something noteworthy: in the introduction, Tooze writes that he will not lay out the book’s core…

Books: January 2026

books

africa

democracy

fiction

history

middle-east

politics

religion

russia

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ I heard about this book on the [[Fall of Ottoman Empire, empire pod]] podcast. I was inspired to read it after finishing [[My name is red]] but also from realizing how…

Books: December 2025

books

history

philosophy

politics

⭐⭐ I have been interested in Lacan since I first (tried to) read him in college. Around that time I heard about Zizek and read some of his easier stuff, watched the…

Books: November 2025

books

asia

democracy

history

memoir

music

politics

religion

russia

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ > Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming…

Books: October 2025

books

africa

asia

democracy

history

latin-america

politics

russia

violence

⭐⭐⭐ This book, about a series of drug-related murders in Fort Bragg (Fayetteville, NC), can be read at a couple of different levels. The lowest level is “true crime”, where…

Books: September 2025

books

africa

asia

biography

democracy

economics

history

memoir

middle-east

music

philosophy

politics

religion

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’m still not sure how we went from: a world where newspapers with large teams, high-quality editing, and expensive reporting would struggle to get people to sign up…

Books: August 2025

books

biography

history

latin-america

music

philosophy

violence

⭐⭐⭐ This book is part of a series by the child developmental psychologist Louise Bates Ames. Each short book covers a year in the life of the child: how the child is…

Books: July 2025

books

fiction

history

politics

violence

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ My Name Is Red is Orhan Pamuk’s best-known book, at least in the West. Pamuk is also Turkey’s best-known fiction writer, at least in the West. So this is Turkish…

Books: May 2025

books

violence

⭐⭐ Right-Wing Women got billed as an analysis of women on the right by the firebrand feminist Andrea Dworkin. But the book is much broader, also delving into Dworkin’s…

Books: April 2025

books

history

latin-america

politics

violence

⭐ The “end of the world” in the title refers to a remote town in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where a staggering 25,000 people, led by a messianic figure known as Antônio…

Books: March 2025

books

asia

democracy

economics

history

politics

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ How Asia Works argues that the reason some Asian economies succeeded (the “tiger” economies: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) and others failed (the Philippines, Myanmar)…

Books: February 2025

books

fiction

latin-america

politics

violence

⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Frontier Effect is a book about Urabá, a region in Colombia near the border with Panama. Urabá is a microcosm of the country’s violent conflicts – you can see every…

Books: January 2025

books

asia

fiction

history

latin-america

memoir

philosophy

politics

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ I took a moral philosophy class in college that has stuck with me, one reason being that the professor told us that semester he had been denied tenure and would be…

Books: December 2024

books

asia

history

politics

russia

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Collapse is a history of the final days of the Soviet Union, from Gorbachev’s ascent to the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin being replaced by the Russian flag.

Books: October 2024

books

fiction

latin-america

memoir

politics

violence

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lituma en los Andes is a classic mystery novel following a cop stationed in a remote, highland mining town in Peru rumored to be at risk of capture by the Shining Path.

Books: September 2024

books

fiction

middle-east

politics

russia

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐ In Nonstate Warfare, Biddle wants to challenge the assumption that state and non-state armed groups fight in fundamentally different ways, with the former using…

Books: August 2024

books

economics

fiction

history

memoir

politics

sci-fi

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ This book threw me off my reading streak. For parts it felt like the best science fiction I’ve read. The focus on the relationships and politics of Mars colonization is…

Books: June 2024

books

africa

history

latin-america

politics

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ States and Power in Africa is probably one of the best social science books of the last twenty years. It’s about state capacity in Africa, why it’s so low, and the…

Books: May 2024

books

fiction

history

latin-america

politics

russia

violence

ww2

⭐ This is a book about Colombian history from about 1830 to 1958. It’s a strange book – some chapters are just one or two pages long, two chapters have the same name with…

Books: April 2024

books

fiction

history

philosophy

politics

sci-fi

ww2

⭐⭐⭐ Ubik at first seems to be about a future where people with extrasensory powers battle on behalf of private corporations. But this is mostly a red herring. The story…

Books: March 2024

books

violence

ww2

⭐⭐⭐ Time Shelter mostly uses a loose plot about a psychiatrist building hyper-real, decade-specific amusement parks to riff on memory: how some things can’t be forgotten…

Books: February 2024

books

economics

politics

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid was a surprising read. I was vaguely aware of him, knew he was an anarchist writing in the late 1800s, and expected dense, militant writing. But…

Books: January 2024

books

politics

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Super readable, impressive use of primary sources and poems. Interesting how much domestic political dynamics drive British decision to invade Afghanistan. One concern…

Books: November 2023

books

russia

⭐⭐ There are beautiful moments in this book. A memorable description of his family eating lentils and everyone seeing the bugs in the food. But writers and poets can be so…

Books: October 2023

books

memoir

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The best forever-war memoir. Clean, almost unsettlingly detached narration. Gives a unique feel for the place and the texture of war, plus absurdities that are almost…

Books: August 2023

books

fiction

history

latin-america

violence

⭐⭐⭐⭐ An unusual book by a historian in that there are no cited sources or any “show your work” language in the text, which I found frustrating, though there are works…

Books: July 2023

books

asia

⭐ No clue why the French feel they need to write like this. Couldn’t finish it.

Books: June 2023

books

history

latin-america

politics

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Well written, feels like it could be used in a writing course as a template for plot and character development. Stevens is a great character, verging on caricature at…

Books: May 2023

books

history

⭐⭐⭐⭐ This guy sounds like a crank and he says some odd stuff, but the first few chapters are very good and his excitement is fun.

Books: April 2023

books

history

philosophy

religion

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Coming off two other books on Buddhism and knowing little about psychoanalysis, I found this fascinating and convincing in the parallels between the two. Psychoanalysis…

Books: February 2023

books

latin-america

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Beautiful book, epic love letter to Mexico. The “main” plot bookending all of the little stories is genius. Read it in Spanish, which I haven’t done much of lately…

Books: December 2022

books

politics

russia

violence

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great book, lots of surprising anecdotes and stories from a “bottom-up” perspective in the 1930s. Contrasts the conventional wisdom of Stalin leading everyone by the…

Books: November 2022

books

russia

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Sets up an interesting puzzle: why the terror? The author makes a good case that Stalin’s terror stands apart from conventional autocrat “coup-proofing”. But in the end…

Books: October 2022

books

biography

philosophy

religion

⭐⭐⭐ Pretty moments and useful metaphors throughout. Writing is clear and simple. The stuff on ethics, though, is mostly disappointing and you could see these ideas being…

Books: September 2022

books

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Really enjoyed reading this but now I remember nothing of it. Maybe a reread?

Books: August 2022

books

religion

⭐⭐ A few interesting glimpses of life in Moscow in the 1920s. The Devil and Pontius Pilate sections are also interesting but don’t get much play. Beyond that there doesn’t…

Books: July 2022

books

biography

politics

religion

russia

ww2

⭐⭐⭐⭐ I think about this book a lot. The famous story of Saint Anthony in the cave, tormented by the devil, but the way he does it is very interesting: he shows Anthony all…

Books: July 2017

books

⭐⭐⭐⭐ This was a re-read for me. Perfect compromise of density and levity which is probably why this is the starter Pynchon. No one makes you feel you’re stoned like Pynchon.