Monitoring the Situation

Reports from Q1 of 2026 where "nothing ever happens."

I post quarterly updates for subscribers at Holodoxa to highlight items of interest and recap what I’ve been reading, writing, watching, and thinking. I also attempt to provide narrower recommendations to those who have a less omnivorous approach than me. Last year’s updates → first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, and fourth quarter.

---

Obviously, there is a lot going on in the world—there always is—but whether or not you are living through an important moment in history, it is more likely than not that your fingers aren’t the ones turning the dial of destiny. You, like me, are a hobbit and, unlike Frodo, the Ring of Power has not come to us and likely never will.

Instead we have the privilege of sampling from a manifold of hyperrealities, where whatever we want to be happening is happening. Nevertheless, in this venture, we remain only spectators. Most of the time this is okay. We should tend to the details of our lives and those of our loved ones. These ideas remind me of a lovely, oft-quoted passage from the closing paragraphs of Middlemarch:

“..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

And so, here’s a snapshot of my hyperreality from the last three months while I otherwise tended my own garden:

Books

Counting the books one reads can feel like vulgar posturing for intellectual status or an embrace of insatiably solipsistic consumerism. There is a box-checking-self-improvement dimension to it that is designed to be seductive because it cranks certain dopaminergic dials up and down, especially those related to chest-thumping about being more urbane or informed than one’s peers. I like to tell myself that I count the books I read, write reviews about them, and share the stats publicly because it helps crystallize my reading takeaways. It’s up to you to judge from there.

Here’s my book reading for the first three months of 2026:

• 29 total books across all formats (8 fiction titles, 21 nonfiction titles)

  • 3 ebooks

  • 5 print books

• 21 audiobooks

Stetson’s Review of Books Read from Q1

1. Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis → Goodreads Review

2. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut → Goodreads Review

3. Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality by Angus Deaton → Goodreads Review

4. Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx → Goodreads Review

5. The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them by Euan Angus Ashley → Goodreads Review

6. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi → Goodreads Review

7. The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time: Wit and Wisdom from the Popular “On Language” Column in The New York Times Magazine by William Safire → Goodreads Review

8. The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea by Helen Lewis → Goodreads Review

9. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle → Goodreads Review

10. The BFG by Roald Dahl → Goodreads Review (read aloud to my eldest daughter)

11. The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America by Hyrum Lewis → Goodreads Review

12. Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff → Goodreads Review

13. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon → Goodreads Review

14. The Witches by Roald Dahl → Goodreads Review (read aloud to my eldest daughter)

15. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A.O. Scott → Goodreads Review

16. Colossus: A Novel by Ross Barkan → Goodreads Review

17. Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney → Goodreads Review

18. A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers by Yaron Weitzman → Goodreads Review

19. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl → Goodreads Review (read aloud to my eldest daughter)

20. American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now by Paul Starr → Goodreads Review

21. Medium Rare by a. natasha joukovsky → Substack Review & Goodreads Review

22. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx → Goodreads Review

23. Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden → Goodreads Review

24. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl → Goodreads Review (read aloud to my eldest daughter)

25. Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell → Goodreads Review

26. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl → Goodreads Review (read aloud to my eldest daughter)

27. The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations – Social Disintegration, Birth Rates, and the Path to Extinction by Nicholas Wade → Goodreads Review

28. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf → Goodreads Review

29. Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by Manvir Singh → Goodreads Review

Stetson’s Book Recommendations

The first quarter was replete with good reads, but reading to my children, namely my eldest daughter, of the Roald Dahl’s oeuvre has been immensely enjoyable. The favorite among these titles is The BFG. The ungrammatical, quirky patois of the titular character is accessible even to extremely young children. They immediately latch onto the silly vocabulary of “whizzpoppers,” “snozzcumbers,” and “frobscottle." I can’t recommend that enough for parents looking for books to read to young children that will encourage them to engage with language. Make sure to avoid the bowdlerized versions of Dahl books too.

I also finished several new, as in 2026, titles from authors/writers from Substack. These have either just been published or will arrive soon. I, of course, have reviews available on Goodreads but have also published a meatier review of a. natasha joukovsky’s Medium Rare here at Substack. I also recently interviewed Ross Barkan about his upcoming novel Colossus. For those involved in the neverending and always fiery debates about human nature, behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book, Original Sin, examines the genetics influences on human vice and violence in a personal register.

Television & Film

I tend to watch more television series than films because as a parent to younger children, it can be difficult to find an uninterrupted block of ninety-plus minutes for a film, and it’s harder to examine a film fairly and in the same mood if the watching is broken into chunks. I also have a preference for sitting with characters for longer periods of time. For instance, I’ve spent the whole first quarter with Mad Men’s Donald Draper and the rest of his family, colleagues, rivals, and paramours. At first, the show’s commentary on gender was over-the-top, but, as the show continues, the psychological portraits deepen and the Madison Avenue ad-man life feels more lived in than caricatured.

I’ve sprinkled in some other shows like the second season of Severance, which I finally got around to finishing, and the second season of The Pitt. The Pitt is a high octane emergency department drama (definitely entertaining) that ratchets up the level of freshmen medical student 101 exposition and progressive political pieties to a level that even Law & Order SVU couldn’t compete with. Both the second seasons of these shows have lost some of the shine of their breakout first seasons but remain entertaining.

Quick Hits

Remember my usual disclaimers about these recommendations, i.e. they’re not necessarily endorsements. Second, I tried to keep these links notably shorter than my prior updates.

Stetson’s Reading Recommendations from Substack for Q4

• Does genetic evidence really increase drug success by 2-3×? by Marios Georgakis

• On the Ivy Red Queen’s Race by Performative Bafflement

• The fascinating insights of Robert Trivers by Lionel Page

• Endlessly mocking “the manosphere” won’t solve the bigger problem by Rohan Ghostwind

• Attention is all we have by David Bessis

• Someone is deeply wrong about Iran right now by Peter Banks

• Did Levallois Tools Make Neanderthals Human? by John Hawks

Stetson’s Podcast Episode Recommendations

• Conversations with Tyler - Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

• Out-of-Africa is Not Dead but Hybridization Lives from Razib Khan

• Ancient DNA: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Razib Khan interviews Dan Tabin

• Machiavelli and Rational Control at The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

• When ‘Good Kids’ Go Radical at Breaking History

• Weapons Free at Very Bad Wizards

My Features

Beyond reviews I published a couple pieces to Substack, including a critique of Cormac McCarthy’s only nonfiction essay, The Kekuele Problem. I also wrote about the potential for assaying ear wax for cancer biomarkers, and commented on the clinical approach used to the philosophical question of lumping and splitting.

I also appeared on a couple podcasts in the last three months. Feel free to take a listen!

• Recombination Nation’s Shane peppered me with great questions about genetics, evolution, technology and culture: Spotify, Youtube, RSS

• I appeared on the Speaking of Women’s Health Podcast to discuss some of the new advances in testing circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in cancer patients for molecular/minimal residual disease (MRD): Spotify, Buzzsprout, Youtube, Apple

Selections from Substack Notes