When September Ends

A Q3 update for subscribers

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 and second quarter.

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For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

— 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James Version)

[F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill… as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

― George Eliot, Middlemarch

There’s a part of me that vainly yearns to be a witness to all of time. It’s an insatiable curiosity about what was, what’s happening now that I know nothing of, and what will come in the future when I’m gone. I have another tendency, to systematize. This desire and this tendency conspire. They induce me to author a story in my head about the events of the present— the story of now. I know I’m not alone in this. We need stories to make sense of the world and to work together with others.

The story I can tell about my small corner of the world is one I can tell vivdly. I’ve plotted it all out. Even when the unforeseen emerges, I can edit and revise with confidence. However, I have limited authority or ambition to author a story for the larger world, and though my own private assessment does include a growing sense of uncertainty, volatility, and suspense, I’m worried others are telling themselves similar stories but in an agitated register. Meanwhile, there’s an ever growing contingent of those who live as heroes (or even anti-heroes) in fantastical narratives erected upon clouds rather than upon earth, who insist we must also be part of their story. And whether because the stories of others may interfere with my own or because I can’t help myself, I gather these fragmentary threads so that I can weave an expanded tapestry of the many stories I contain.

And now to the quarterly update!

Reading Recap & Content Recommendations

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

• 16 total books across all formats (1 fiction titles, 15 nonfiction titles)

  • 4 ebooks

  • 12 audiobooks

  • Reading of primary research publications and other forms of commentary and journals as well as to children have been left untracked for this quarter.

Stetson’s Review of Books Read from Q3

I was able, as I aspire to, produce brief reviews for all of the books I read or listened to this past quarter:

1. Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction by Lionel Shriver → Review at Goodreads

2. Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

   by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb → Review at Goodreads

3. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò → Review at Goodreads

4. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life by Steven Pinker → Review at Goodreads & Substack Piece

5. 1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport → Review at Goodreads

6. Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane → Review at Goodreads

7. The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman → Review at Goodreads & Substack Piece

8. Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane → Review at Goodreads

9. Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World by Nick Lane → Review at Goodreads

10. The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity by Steven H. Strogatz → Review at Goodreads

11. The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S. Rogoff → Review at Goodreads

12. The Case for American Power by Shadi Hamid → Review at Goodreads

13. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang → Review at Goodreads

14. Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics) by Ben Shapiro → Review at Goodreads

15. The Prime Minister (Palliser #5) by Anthony Trollope → Review at Goodreads

16. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes → Review at Goodreads

Stetson’s Book Recommendations

Although there were many amazing reads from this quarter, including a close look at the corpus of popular science writing from the biochemist Nick Lane, the book of the moment is definitely Dan Wang’s Breakneck. The great power rivalry between America and China is on the minds of many power players, public intellectuals, and armchair experts. We’re all a part of this story. Many are attempting to light a fire under America’s metaphorical bum so that it isn’t overwhelmed (in the Pacific) by China’s engineering and manufacturing capacity. I have many of my own thoughts, but they are held in reserve for now (or can to some extent be gleaned from my review of Wang’s book).

I also strongly recommend Steven Pinker’s latest book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... to readers who want to take a detailed and somewhat technical look at how common knowledge can facilitate or preclude social coordination. There really are very few, if any, other titles this one out there. In addition, Pinker is one of our more talented public intellectuals.

I fell behind on fiction reading this quarter, only tackling a fairly lengthy Anthony Trollope novel in an audio format. It was I only picked up because of the illustrious recommendations it has picked up from figures like Robert Caro. Hopefully, I can introduce a bit more fiction this coming quarter.

Stetson’s Reading Recommendations from Substack for Q3

All the usual caveats once again apply! My recommendation isn’t a comprehensive endorsement. I’m purposefully highlighting recent written work on Substack that I found valuable or provocative or just plain ‘ole interesting. 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.

• PhDs are easy by Adam Rochussen

• Building Better Scores For Embryo Screening by Herasight

• The Remnant by Justin Smith-Ruiu in Romanticon

• Beneath the surface of the sum by Sasha Gusev

• Psychiatric Genetics Beyond Heritability: Q&A with Michel Nivard & Awais Aftab

• Litigation Nation, Engineering Empire by Jonathon P Sine

• Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk by T. Greer

• An aesthete of controversy. Who was William F. Buckley? by Henry Oliver

• How the West was wrought by Razib Khan

• The four fathers of Four Mothers by Darby Saxbe

• Conservative closet cases by Kitten

• Illiteracy is a policy choice by Kelsey Piper

• Education Doesn’t Work 3.0 by Freddie deBoer

• Did Romans Have Blue Eyes? by Lyman Stone

• What We Find in the Sewers by Calum Drysdale

• Geography of Housing Costs by Peter Banks and The Boyd Institute

• The Bluesky-ization of the American left by Noah Smith

• If Self-Awareness Is a Phase Change, There Was an Eve by Andrew Cutler

• Unbundle the University by Yascha Mounk

• Agustín Fuentes’ Book ‘Sex is a Spectrum’ Fails to Refute the Binary by Tomas Bogardus

• High fertility on the Faroe Islands by Boom

• Building in the world of flesh needs regulatory transparency by Ruxandra Teslo

• A shorter, sharper Out-of-Africa story is emerging by John Hawks

• Is hereditarianism wrong yet? by East Hunter

• Getting closer to understanding mechanisms behind GWAS signals by Marios Georgakis

• Your Parents Aren’t Being Rude, They Just Don’t Remember Parenting by Drunk Wisconsin

• The Two Mearsheimers by Seva Gunitsky

• Dating Men In The Bay Area hosted by Astral Codex Ten

Stetson’s Podcast Episode Recommendations

Same disclaimers as above but this time for podcasts. Also, my podcast recommendations stray a bit beyond the confines of the Substack ecosystem, though I still try to highlight Substack natives or those with an ethos consistent with the platform. I also have tried to keep this list shorter so as to encourage more reading than listening. The latter can’t quite compete when the content has high information density or visual/mathematical content.

• Barbarians at the Gate | Interview: Allen C. Guelzo at The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

• John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed-up at Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

• Coffee, Cherry Pie, and the Nostalgia Trap with Richard Hanania & Tyler Tone

• Left Behind at Eminent Americans with Daniel Oppenheimer, Sam Kahn, and David Sessions

• Non-Zionism Returns with משכיל בינה & DeepLeftAnalysis🔸

• Paying the Toll of the Infinite Scroll with Jeremiah Johnson & Alex Kaschuta

• The Argument hosts Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Derek Thompson: what happened to Liberalism and who shot first?

• Maiden Mother Matriarch hosts Should We Encourage Our Daughters To Be Feminists? - Bryan Caplan vs Holly Lawford-Smith

• 100 years of insulin in 15 minutes with Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen

• Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history with Dwarkesh Patel

Film & Television Recap

I wasn’t particularly ambitious about what I watched this past quarter. Nearing the end of her pregnancy, my wife was particularly averse to anything with intensely dark themes. So we stopped halfway through season two of “Yellowjackets” (Eww, cannibalism) and switched to “Desperate Housewives” (Yay, gossiping about neighbors).

We made it through two seasons and maybe halfway through the third season (somewhere in Orson Hodge’s Hitchcockian arc) and then our interest petered out a bit. By the time, the show had turned more than once to a character-in-a-coma plotline, we figured it may be time to bow out even discounting the plot histrionics that come with the soap opera package. I also watched the latest Steven Soderbergh film Black Bag.

Arguably, both “Desperate Housewives” and Black Bag are very interested in the psychological and logistical demands of marriage albeit the latter’s dynamic, a childless marriage between British spies, is obviously less immediately relatable. So I guess there’s an accidental theme to my watching. I can’t say I didn’t learn anything or didn’t find occasion to reflect upon the content.

Movie Poster for Black Bag

I can also say that the DH creator Marc Cherry at least put together a somewhat sympathetic, though still too Freudian, portrayal of a Republican WASP, Bree Van de Kamp. Bree is evidently inspired by Cherry’s own mother as Andrew, Bree’s early primary antagonist, is evidently stand-in for himself and a manifestation of his own id.

Bree Van de Kamp exercising her second amendment rights.

Stetson’s Writing Recap

Given limitations on my time, and the ever growing population of Substackers producing writing worth reading, I’ve slowed my output. Nonetheless, I’ve aimed to make my contributions more substantial. Here’s a recap:

• Phonemes and Genes - I ask explores research that treats phonemes, the basic sound units of language, like genes and what this can and can’t teach us.

• Homo Largiloquus - I review the thesis of a recent pop-sci entry in the storied debate about the evolution of language.

• Solving the Problem of Uncertain Significance - I provide an accessible summary of one of the most important challenges facing medical genetics and how it may be resolved.

• Reading the Mind of the Mind Reader - I review the major claims presented by Steven Pinker concerning common knowledge in his latest book.

A New Addition to the Family!

This past week, my wife and I were blessed with our third child. He’s our first boy and is wonderful and healthy. His older sister are enchanted too.

Baby Caspian