Peanut Butter Boppers

A final update on 2025.

I post quarterly updates for subscribers at Holodoxa to highlight interesting things I’ve happened across in the last three months. I also recap my “content diet” and provide recommendations to those who aspire to be more selective. Prior 2025 updates follow: first quarter, second quarter, and third quarter.

---

The outside is like crunchy and tough but then you bite down on it, it gives way to a gooey, creamy core.

~Steve “The Hair” Harrington in Stranger Things Season 5

In the final season of Stranger Things, there is a moment where the show’s pet-redemption-arc character, Steve Harrington,¹ is childishly delighted to obtain a niche 1980s snack, the Peanut Butter Bopper, while trapped in Hawkins, Indiana under military quarantine. The moment is a nostalgia play and product placement that later doubles as a jocular metaphor that explains a small bit of plot action. As as fan of peanut-butter-based treats myself, I’ve latched on this and plan to appropriate the metaphor for my own 2025 content diet. Perhaps all the reading, listening, watching, and thinking that follows looks crunchy and tough on the outside but once you bite in, it’s all creamy goodness.

Steve and his boppers.

Reading Recap & Recommendations

I would like to remind my Substack readers that I have over 550 book reviews that can be perused on Goodreads. The length of these reviews varies substantially, but if it is a major title in the natural or social sciences or politics or a splashy “discourse” read from the past few years or a famous work of literature, there is a reasonable chance I have commentary on it there.

Although what follows are books I completed in the past quarter, I’m actively working my way through other books, including We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi, The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time by William Safire, Enemy Feminism by Sophie Lewis. On deck for January 2026 and in the form of advanced reader copies, I have Gerontocracy in America by Samuel Moyn, Colossus by Ross Barkan, and Medium Rare by a. natasha joukovsky.

Here are the totals for what I read or listened to in last three months:

• 17 total books across all formats (3 fiction titles, 14 nonfiction titles)

  • 2 print books (including The Secret Garden to my eldest daughter)

  • 2 ebooks

  • 13 audiobooks

And here are the totals for what I read or listened in 2025:

• 82 total books across all formats (20 fiction titles though this is mostly children’s literature read aloud to my kids, 62 nonfiction titles)

  • 17 print books

  • 11 ebooks

  • 54 audiobooks

As an aside, it is worth noting that many are concerned that book reading has become outdated, even impossible for young people who have been irrevocably stunted by ubiquitous screens and AI chatbots. I don’t harbor dour projections about the fate of literacy as I think the intellectual life has always been for the few, but it is hard not to notice things are in a sorry state. Anyone who reads a full book a month is firmly ensconced in the top quintile of readers in America.² Anyone working at five-times that one-book-a-month rate is certainly in the top centile of readers. This is before we even consider the quality of that reading material or the comprehension of the readers. If we’re being honest with ourselves, it is evident that most of the reading that does happen includes either throwaway airport titles (e.g. self-help, celebrity memoirs, or the softest pop-sci) or pulpy fiction (e.g. Romantasy, YA titles, bodice rippers, etc). To rephrase, the bar for being literate in a sustained way with worthwhile material is several layers under bedrock. Substack is fortunately a community that helps promote reading and thinking seriously about ideas so please join and support us, if you haven’t already!

Stetson’s Review of Books Read from Q4

1. American Educational Excellence: The Foundation of Our Values, Democracy, and Market Capitalism by Kenan E. Sahin → Review at Goodreads

2. After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears

   & Michael Geruso → Review at Goodreads

3. The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey & Steven Teles → Review at Goodreads

4. Rules for Reactionaries by Lee Bebout → Review at Goodreads

5. The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan → Review at Goodreads

6. Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster by Helen Andrews → Review at Goodreads & Substack Piece

7. What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party by Michael Kazin → Review at Goodreads

8. Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon → Review at Goodreads

9. The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa Kearney → Review at Goodreads

10. Shadow Ticket by Thomas S. Pynchon → Review at Goodreads

11. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett → Review at Goodreads (read to my eldest daughter)

12. The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds by Mark Humphries → Review at Goodreads

13. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field → Review at Goodreads

14. American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi→ Review at Goodreads

15. Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America

    by Colin Woodard → Review at Goodreads

16. The Rest in History by Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook → Review at Goodreads

17. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think by Bryan Caplan → Review at Goodreads

Stetson’s Book Recommendations

I was somewhat dissatisfied with the reading selections I made to close out the year, especially when it comes to being able to provide quasi-generic recommendations. I had significant criticisms of almost every title, and I wish I enjoyed reading them more. I can say that if you have a young child, it is definitely worth reading The Secret Garden to them. It is fun to introduce children to naturalistic dialogue, especially something a funny sounding as early 20th century broad Yorkshire. Sadly, the yield on this recommendation is quite low given that The Secret Garden is already a children's classic.

The most entertaining of the bunch was probably Helen Andrews’ Boomers, though I agree with her polemical analysis less than I anticipated, and, to the extent I do agree, I think her criticisms would be as much or more applicable to the generations that have followed the boomers.

I found Melissa Kearney’s book on the beneficial economic and social consequences of raising children in two parent households compelling, though she wasn’t able to convincingly and entirely demonstrate that the benefits married parents confer on children aren’t mostly selection effects and/or endogenous to the children. Of course, I’m normatively for two-parent households for raising children, but I worry the effort and political capital required to raise marriage rates may not result in meaningful improvement in the long-run outcomes for children from these unions and may have secondary consequences (backlash). The cultural levers to increase marriage may also no longer exist. At the very least, we should probably do some serious thinking about how such mechanisms could be rebuilt in ways that would be acceptable to most Americans.

I thought Mark Humphries’ The Spike was an excellent work of popular science writing that both refreshed my knowledge of neuroscience and taught me several new things. The Spike impressively bridges experimental and theoretical neuroscience using a systems approach to the electrical physiology of neurons. However, this is unlikely to ever be anyone's preferred topic for pleasure reading and following chats of stark action potential traces or abstract representations of neural circuits is going to feel a bit arcane to most readers. So even though I found it valuable as someone who has taken a graduate-level course in neuroscience based on Kandel’s Principles of Neural Science (a very ephys forward text), I can’t, in good conscience, strongly recommend in a nonspecific way.

Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids was amusing and a good reminder that parents should avoid overly taxing or painful investments in parenting, especially if it comes at the cost of family size. The book is largely a review of the findings of behavioral genetics (mostly twin studies). It was published in 2011 and we’ve learned a lot about the limitations of such research since then because of the advances of the genome era, but Caplan was already taking a somewhat softer line on these studies despite being confident in their nominal findings. The main takeaway here is that it is difficult for any parent to exert substantial influence on any long-run outcome for their child. Nevertheless, parents should be loving, attentive, and dutiful parents with high expectations; they just shouldn’t feel compelled to go overboard or be perpetually racked with guilt.

Laura K. Field's Furious Minds is generating a lot of attention and garnering a great deal of praise among political writers of the left and anti-Trump center-right. There are useful and interesting portions of the work. It is a good introduction to Straussianism and typology of “New Right” intellectuals, but it elides the most interesting and pressing questions about why “New Right,” especially illiberal, ideas have proliferated and found such fertile footing. This question seems all the more pressing given that Field prudently avoids smugly deriding these thinkers as troglodytes and toadies.

Stetson’s Reading Recommendations from Substack for Q4

As I shouldn’t need to say, my recommendation isn’t a comprehensive endorsement. I’m purposefully highlighting recent written work on Substack that I found plain ‘ole interesting for one reason or another. I could include many many more, but I did my best to keep the list limited in size. These pieces are not listed in any particular order.

• The Lost Generation by Jacob Savage

• English has become easier to read by Henry Oliver in Works in Progress

• America has already differentiated into castes by Performative Bafflement

• Completed Family Size Will Soon Plummet to Unprecedented Depths by Lyman Stone

• Hating Stranger Things During the Death Rattle of Criticism by Freddie deBoer

• Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2025 by John Hawks

• What is Heather Cox Richardsonism? by Nate Silver

• What’s Missing from the New Cross-Disorder Genetics Paper? by Kathryn Paige Harden

• Elite Colleges Should Try Harder to Stay Elite by Josh Barro

• To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials by Ruxandra Teslo

• Of course motherhood drives the gender wage gap by Ruxandra Teslo

• Why I teach Conservative Social Thought by Dan Silver

• Why I Write About the Jews by Yassine Meskhout

• Does inequality undermine democracy? The evidence is weak by Tibor Rutar

• Review: Shadi Hamid’s The Case for American Power by David Polansky

• Ezra Klein’s Blindspot by Jesse Arm

• The Neoliberal Era Was Not Pro-Market Enough by Richard Hanania

• In Defense of Men by Will Storr

• Stop Trying to Pretend that Feminism Isn’t a Class War by DeepLeftAnalysis🔸

• ‘Why Is The Incel Narrative So Popular Then?’ by The Nuance Pill³

• The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered by Sasha Gusev

• Monogamy is good, actually by Darby Saxbe

• It’s Hard to Be God by Andrew Cutler

• When grades stop meaning anything by Kelsey Piper in The Argument

• Writing For The AIs in Astral Codex Ten

• Announcing the world’s most powerful genetic predictor of cognitive ability by Herasight

• Speak So They Can Hear You by Eurydice

• Being a Writer in the Age of the Influencer by Rob Henderson

• Acting Is Not That Hard by Drunk Wisconsin

• Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond by Jane Psmith

Stetson’s Podcast Episode Recommendations

Save caveats as my article recs. Some of my recs here stray from the Substack platform itself:

• Alex Young: IQ, disease and statistical genomics at Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

• The Eugenics Debate - Diana Fleischman vs Lyman Stone at Maiden Mother Matriarch

• The Meaning of Norman Podhoretz from Commentary Magazine

• The Secrets of Joan Didion at The Unspeakeasy with Meghan Daum

• Intellectuals of the New Right | Interview: Laura Field

• Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism from Conversations with Tyler

• Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War at Dwarkesh Patel

• A Spark of Literary Genius By Christopher J. Scalia + Frances Wilson

• Joseph Heath on the Psychology Behind Modern Populism from Frames of Space

• Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

What to Watch… or Not

While it feels like cinema is dying, I worked to get through some of the more critically celebrated films of this year, including Sinners (2025), The Materialists (2025), Eddington (2025), Weapons (2025). I thought all four were fairly entertaining, though none were particularly subtle and perhaps only Eddington was conceptually sophisticated and possibly culturally memorable.

I think critical appreciation for Sinners is way out-of-step with what that film is. In fact, I thought it was the weakest and least engaging of the four I watched in the last three months.

The dialogue in The Materialist was wildly stilted, non-naturalistic. In the pivotal scenes, the main characters adopt solemn visages and discourse in an unironic incel patois. In fact, I was surprised when terms like “gonial angle” or “looksmaxxing” didn’t find their way into the film. Although this is consistent with film’s central concept, justifiable—even interesting— as an artistic choice, and suited for Dakota Johnson’s wooden acting, it’s ultimately a thin way to make a provocative play for very online theater goers, especially on a perennial topic (the battle of the sexes). Celine Song, the writer-director, also has to pull a deus ex machina of sorts (SPOILER: discovery of a leg lengthening surgery) and shoehorn in a sexual assault side plot in order to make her point about the commodification of the sexual marketplace. There’s a big casting problem too. The low status ex-boyfriend can’t be Captain America (Chris Evans) even as an alternative to a looksmaxxed finance bro (Pedro Pascal), who was also ill-suited for that role. At least, Chris Evans does look like he’s had the super soldier serum sucked out of him in the film.

Dasha and Dakota in The Materialist

Ari Aster’s Eddington is a surrealistic and satirical neo-Western set in the COVID era. It hits every hot button issue from that miserable moment and predictably has been more warmly received by right-of-center film critics than left-of-center ones. In fact, Ross Douthat sought to explain this phenomenon by reversing the woke left’s favorite zinger, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." into “When you’re accustomed to caricature, evenhandedness feels like bias.” Despite the criticism of the cultural left, the actual politics of the film are not reactionary, but are quite cynical and fatalistic, perhaps a bit conspiracy minded itself. Regardless, I’m confident in asserting that Eddington was the most thought provoking of the films I watched.

Weapons is a horror film intended as an allegory about the social and psychological consequences of mass gun violence perpetrated against school children. It is a decently executed and entertaining film that makes some goofy choices. Considered together, it seems conceptually and tonally inconsistent. It bounces between differently flawed though sometimes sympathetic point-of-view characters while vacillating between a serious and sardonic view of events. In fact, the mixture of darkly satirical and irreverently absurdist humor often cuts against my expectations about where the creator’s sympathies lie with the exception of one or two characters. These choices make Weapons a banal, though visceral, commentary on the aftermath of trauma while being resolutely confused about exactly where the blame for that trauma should go.

In television, I watched two Netflix limited series, Black Rabbit and Death by Lightning. I enjoyed both. I also completed the first season of Mad Men, a show I have been woefully behind on watching. I have found the depiction of midcentury misogyny too on-the-nose and extreme which sometimes takes me out of the show. Finally, as the title of this piece suggests, I have been keeping up with the latest season of Stranger Things. It is a mess like many critics have pointed out, but I just try to enjoy the end of the ride. I strongly recommend the first two seasons of the show without reservations.

My Own Substack Recap

Here’s what I ended up publishing this quarter:

• A Gene For... You

• Ok, Boomer

• The Progressive Case for American Power

• Paradoxes of the Genome

This was certainly less than intended, though my pace is consistent with my prior quarter. It is difficult to assess what is worth pushing out as a newsletter post, though I do feel that I should at least write 1000 words, and I should try to do something more substantial than provide critique of something I’ve read or do basic science communication. I plan to push my production up in 2026 and, of course, have many ideas sitting around in draft form.

Selected Stetson’s Notes from Q4

I’m also quite active on Substack Notes so I encourage those who read Holodoxa to download the mobile app and follow me there. I’d like to reserve sending out email posts for longer form content (1000+ words at least, as mentioned above) so I have shifted to sharing commentary on science, literature, and politics there.

Here are some selections from my Notes this quarter:

Here's to looking forward to a great 2026! Heartily bite into it like a peanut butter bopper.

1. And doppelganger of DeepLeftAnalysis🔸. See Note.

2. The numbers are broadly similar in other developed countries.

3. I believe it is reasonable to say that this article was written in response to my commentary on The Nuance Pill’s “Black Pill Critique” series.