Samuel Chapman's Blog

5 Times the Book “How Migration Really Works” Blew My Mind

Don’t be alarmed by the title! I know that these days, when someone says they’ve “learned the truth about immigration,” they’re usually about to tell you that George Soros is hiring legions of Venezuelan hitmen to sauté our pure Aryan babies. I swear that’s not what happened to me.

What did happen was that I read a book called How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas, a Dutch academic who’s been studying migration for more than 30 years. Dr. de Haas’s work is dry, thorough, and openly contemptuous of politicians from America to Europe to Japan who weaponize immigration while misunderstanding it, misrepresenting it, or both (usually both). Although the book is mainly targeted at right-wing boogeymen, I — a person who considers himself very liberal on immigration — still learned that I’d gotten several things wrong.

The thing that makes How Migration Really Works feel like water in the desert is Dr. de Haas’s humanist approach to the topic. He treats migration as an inevitable part of the human experience, unstoppable in a species that has wandered since its earliest days. Drawing imaginary lines on the ground is never, ever going to prevent people from crossing them.

Given that most of the world’s rightward drift appears to be driven by a hatred of migrants, I wanted to use this post to point out five of the most interesting ways I learned we’re all getting migration wrong. If you have the time, though, I recommend reading the book yourself. It covers several pervasive myths I don’t have space to address here, such as the idea that migrants steal jobs, strain social services, and refuse to assimilate.

1. There is no massive spike in migration

Like most people, I took it for granted that rates of human migration are as high as they’ve ever been, with millions upon millions displaced around the world. We hear this everywhere, frequently tossed off on the way to making some other point — often something about the world being on fire and everything going to hell.

Lots of the people saying this have good intentions (we’ve even heard it from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees), but the general sentiment has an off-putting connotation of the immigrants as a “rising tide,” more like a natural disaster than human beings capable of independent thought. It has a whiff of The Camp of the Saints, a novel I would throw in the garbage even if I was reading it on my phone.

While it’s true that the raw number of immigrants on Earth is the highest it’s ever been, that’s only because the global population is still growing. Currently, about 3% of people live outside their country of origin, a figure that’s held steady since reliable data began in 1960. A further 13% or so (including myself) are internal migrants who live in a region of their origin country they weren’t born in. When “adjusted for inflation,” the rates of immigration haven’t varied much from their 20th-century baseline.

Where de Haas really rewired my brain in the first chapter, though, was when he examined whysomeone in America or Western Europe might think the rate of migration is higher than ever, even when it’s not. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the dominant trend in migration was colonizers moving to their occupied territories — Brits to South Africa and India, French to Algeria and Indochina, Portuguese to Brazil, and so on. After World War II, Europeans increasingly stayed home, while the people they’d colonized instead began coming to them.

Being Europeans, they predictably flipped out about this (see point 5). In other words, migration rates haven’t increased; the migrants just had the sheer gall to stop being white. This is a recurring trend. Scratch basically any complaint about migration and you’ll see racism underneath.

De Haas also tackles the myth that the world is facing an unprecedented refugee crisis. He starts by pointing out that the percentage of refugees in the global population, like the percentage of migrants overall, has held steady. Numbers fluctuate based on the current rates of violent conflict, but right now, only about 0.35% of humans are currently refugees.

Any amount of displaced people is too many, but at those rates, refugees do not pose a serious threat to infrastructure in countries far from where violence is occurring. For one thing, most people displaced by war prefer to stay close to home. If someone’s house in Syria is bombed into rubble, they’d probably rather go to Turkey or Jordan — where people are likely to speak their language and understand their culture — than to Germany or Sweden, where they’d be an outsider at best and a target for racism at worst.

This means the refugee crisis is far more of a problem for countries near the war zones than wealthy nations on the other side of the world. De Haas writes that “Some of the poorest countries in the world host large numbers of refugees,” simply because they’re closer to conflicts. In fact, if developed countries had the political will to host a lot more refugees (as they did after WWII), they could take a lot of the pressure off poorer nations, and there might not be a crisis at all.

2. The migrants are not who you think they are

So, as we’ve seen, migration rates are basically stable. Only 3% of people live in a country they weren’t born in. Of those, the vast majority are in their adopted homes legally. Of the few who aren’t, most arrived on a visa and stayed after it expired. By the time you get to the political right’s standard image of an immigrant — a shifty, certainly non-white person sneaking across the border in the dead of night, probably wearing a striped shirt and carrying a bag with a dollar sign on it — there’s hardly anyone left to fill the role.

And yet, while I’ve long known that the vast majority of migrants are honest folks trying to make their way in the world, I learned from this book that I’ve also made some mistakes. The stereotypes that blinded me came not from the deranged, feces-obsessed rantings of Jean Raspail, but from Emma Lazarus — who wrote “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which adorns the Statue of Liberty, is certainly an improvement over the view of immigrants as an invading tide of zombies, but after How Migration Really Works, I find it subtly dehumanizing in its own way. Lazarus originally wrote the sonnet to raise money to build Lady Liberty. While the statue gets to speak, the migrants themselves are silent in the most famous poetic evocation of their trials — reduced to huddled masses and wretched refuse.

A century later, while conservatives view them with fear and hatred, liberals tend to see them as charity cases, and everyone believes they can be pushed around with the right policies. Both views ignore reality. Migrants aren’t evil, and they aren’t helpless children.

In chapter seven, de Haas attacks the myth that all migrants are unskilled or low-skilled workers, pointing out that a worker with more skills is actually more likely to have to travel to find work. This makes sense once you think about it. If your only skill set is manual, you’ll almost always have a job close to home. People in every town in the world need floors cleaned, crops picked, or heavy objects lifted. By contrast, college professors are constantly relocating for work — that’s how my own family got spread out across the U.S. De Haas also cites engineers, surgeons, and plenty of others we would hardly consider unskilled laborers. Today’s migrant populations do include construction workers, food packagers, and cleaners, but they also contain nurses, chefs, and skilled tradespeople.

It’s also illuminating to look at where most migrants come from. In the Lazarus model, the most desperate people on Earth risk everything to seek a “golden door” to a better life. According to de Haas, economists tend to view migration as an evening out of inequalities. But if that’s true, why does the world’s richest country, Luxembourg, not host a huge population of expats from its poorest country, South Sudan? There is a Burundian diaspora in the United States, but shouldn’t it be much larger than it is?

The answer, per Dr. de Haas, is that migrating costs money. You need to pay for international travel, which is never cheap. You need cash to establish yourself in the new country. You may need savings to support family back home while you look for work. These costs explain why the biggest emigrant countries are those in the middle of the development scale, like Mexico, the Philippines, and India. Truly impoverished people usually can’t afford to leave.

De Haas uses this data to demolish the idea that we can stop the flow of immigration by funding development in origin countries. History suggests that as a country’s economy grows, the number of people wanting to emigrate tends to increase — it only decreases again once the country reaches the highest levels of development and establishes a social safety net.

I’m not writing this to suggest that asylum seekers don’t exist, or that America should evict immigrants because they don’t “need” to be here. Quite the opposite: migration is a universal human right, and people should be able to exercise it without needing to prove they’ll literally die if they don’t. This leads directly into the third point, which sits at the heart of the book.

3. Migration is driven by pull factors, not push factors

If de Haas wants the reader to take one thing away from How Migration Really Works, it’s this: the main cause of migration is not instability or inequality, but demand. When a country’s native population can’t fill its job openings, or doesn’t want to, immigrants step in to make up the difference. Destination countries allow this, and often actively encourage it, even while their leaders score points by promising to crack down on “illegals.”

Starting in the 1940s, the United States allowed thousands of workers to migrate from Mexico and fill labor shortages created by WWII. The bracero program had its flaws, but it did at least acknowledge the U.S. economy’s structural dependence on Mexican labor. However, while the bracero program was still active in the early 50s, the Eisenhower administration — afraid that the Mexicans coming to work in the American southwest constituted a secret invasion — launched Operation Wetback. This vicious and racist suppression campaign sent the Border Patrol to round up anyone who looked Mexican, in shows of force that strikingly resembled the ICE raids of today.

In other words, the U.S. was welcoming Mexicans with one hand while shoving them away with the other. This example neatly illustrates the unsolvable problem at the heart of the immigration debate: we’re frightened of migrants, but we can’t run our economy without them.

Recognizing that it makes them look like hypocrites, anti-immigration governments (which seems to be all of them lately) have stopped openly recruiting migrant labor. Some in Europe have even gone so far as to launch wildly condescending ad campaigns in origin countries, telling potential migrants that Europe sucks and they’ll just be exploited there. Africans mock these as mercilessly as millenials used to make fun of those “You Wouldn’t Download A Car” ads, rightly asking why, if Europe is to terrible, you still need a visa to get in.

Meanwhile, the private sector has picked up the slack of advertising labor demand. De Haas describes how recruitment agencies work under the radar to bring migrant labor to destination countries, often using more acceptable euphemisms like “guest worker,” “trainee,” or “au pair.”

And that’s a good thing. One largely true bit of received wisdom is that immigrants do jobs the locals don’t want to do but which need to get done. You can’t run an economy if you let racism decide who gets to work. People intuitively get this. Donald Trump’s 2024 voters thought he was going to deport all the “criminal illegals,” not the ones who power most of the agricultural, construction, and hospitality industries — when he started raiding work sites and dragging off laborers with no criminal records, his approval rating on immigration plunged.

Once I understood how much migration is driven by demand, I got, if possible, even more enraged by the total vacuousness of our current immigration debate. The Republicans nakedly persecute an outgroup and peddle Great Replacement garbage, the Democrats go along with it because they think it’s what the people want, and both of them ignore that policy can’t stop migration as long as the economy depends on it. And the economy will depend on it as long as humans are humans.

On second thought, that’s not quite true. There is one policy that could stop migration: tanking the economy so hard that the labor market craters and nobody wants to come here. Good gods, maybe Trump is playing 5D chess after all!

4. Tightening borders increases a country’s immigrant population

When anti-immigrant politicians need a red-meat policy, they inevitably come back to the stupidest option on the menu: making it harder to cross the border itself. Conservative geniuses, stumped by the fact that people keep getting past their imaginary line, decide to make the line even bigger and pointier. Surely it will work this time!

And yet, despite half a century of barbed wire, ocean patrols, and arcane entry requirements, people are still migrating to North America and Europe. In fact, de Haas’s research shows that the harder a country controls access, the larger its immigrant population grows.

His argument, which is borne out by the data, is that immigration across lightly restricted borders tends to be cyclical. People prefer to be home, so migrants would rather work seasonally and spend the rest of the year with their families. But when a seasonal worker hears that the government is about to crack down on the border, they begin to fear that if they leave, they’ll never get back in. So they stay put and call their families to come join them. In a stroke, anti-immigration policy has added several more immigrants to the permanent population.

Meanwhile, in the origin country, people who haven’t migrated yet decide they have to seize their last chance. If the usual channels are closed, they’ll take more dangerous routes, since the potential reward is worth the risk. If they make it in, they don’t want to leave and have to face the difficult journey all over again.

You can see this pattern every time a nation clamps down on its borders, including in the U.K. after Brexit, a racist reaction against immigrants that ended up calling more of them in. By contrast, when countries open their borders — such as when the EU established the Schengen Area — permanent immigration visibly goes down.

Some of the personal experiences described in these chapters of How Migration Really Works are heartbreaking. De Haas relates the stories of Moroccans who used to travel freely to Spain, doing important seasonal jobs and making money for their hometowns. When Spain beefed up visa requirements during Europe’s panic over North African immigrants, these Moroccans lost a major source of meaning and livelihood.

People deserve to move. You’re going to see this again.

5. Europe somehow managed to racistly liberate its colonies

Speaking of Europeans panicking about immigration, let’s talk about the most European thing that’s ever happened. Toward the end of the book, de Haas relates the case study of French Guiana and Suriname, two colonial possessions in South America. French Guiana is still a French state today. Since French Guianese can travel freely to and from France, not many of them have settled there — why buy the vache when you can get the lait for free?

The opposite happened in Suriname, a former Dutch colony. In 1975, Suriname gained independence, which meant its people now needed visas to enter the Netherlands. Before those requirements went into effect, citizens of Suriname who had contemplated moving to the Netherlands rushed to dive through the closing door. As a result, the Surinamese population of Holland is much higher than the Guianese population of France.

This is the same apparent paradox we covered in point #4, in which restricting immigration leads to more immigrants. But what really struck me was almost an afterthought in the book. I had been taught that the mass liberation of European colonies after WWII was the result of a sudden upsurge of humanism among the colonizers, who graciously decided to stop oppressing the people they’d exploited for centuries.

Yet if de Haas can be believed, the real reason for the end of colonialism was that Europe wanted to slap visa requirements on colonized people trying to move in. It’s sickening. Europe declared itself the apex of civilization, then when everyone else on Earth quite rationally said “OK, let’s go there if it’s so great,” they slammed the doors shut. As if we needed any more proof that all of this is about white supremacy.

Conclusion: Open all the borders now

Among left-leaning politicians in the United States, it’s fashionable to say some variation of the line “Of course we don’t want open borders.” Much like their capitulation on trans kids playing sports, this is an attempt to reassure swing voters that the latest Fox News charges against Democrats are not true. You see, we hate the outgroup too, but in a more civilized way!

I would like to use my incredibly small platform to bellow out a resounding FUCK THAT ENTIRE SHIT. I want open borders. I dream of a world where crossing an international boundary means you write your name on a list, get checked for communicable diseases, and are thereafter ignored. I want moving to another country to be as easy as moving to another state. Enough with these years-long gauntlets that culminate in being forced to listen to Lee Greenwood. Migrating should take no longer than visiting the DMV.

While I can concede that international borders are useful for organizing political power, that’s where they should end: a system for deciding which government makes decisions about which pieces of ground. If there is a reason to keep certain people out that isn’t racist, I don’t know what it is. Racism is the source of all the apparent contradictions between policy, rhetoric, and reality in the immigration debate. Why recruit foreign workers in private while demonizing them in public? Why claim you just want people to immigrate legally, while making it nearly impossible to actually do that? Why refuse to make the jobs currently done by immigrants more attractive to locals?

For the same reason Republicans are against both abortion and sex education. They don’t want to reduce the number of abortions; it’s just a useful tool to win elections and control women. By the same token, they don’t actually want to “protect American jobs” — they’re afraid of brown people and know their voters are too.

Since we first climbed down from the trees in Africa, humans have been a migratory species. We filled Eurasia. We built boats and sailed across the Pacific. We walked all the way to the Americas. We delight in planting ourselves in places where our biology shouldn’t work, and finding ways to thrive there. We are all migrants. Forcing half the planet to suppress that instinct — to stay behind hallucinated lines they happened to be born on the wrong side of — is a denial of basic humanity. Doing it because of the utterly fake construct of race is a rank injustice. And so I say again: policymakers, open the damn borders right now, or my foot is about to apply for a 14-day tourist visa to the far end of your ass.

Every Book I Read In 2024, Reviewed (Part III)

The grand finale, posted several months before the end of the year after the year I’m writing about! Deadline crushed.

51. One Piece, Volume 1: Romance Dawn — Eiichiro Oda

“…My treasure? Why, it’s right where I left it…”

I am so glad I live in a world that has One Piece. Not only is it the only pirate media with real popularity right now, but its unabashed bonkersness is proof of a writer and artist imagining on the very rawest level. This omnibus, which includes the first three volumes of Monkey D. Luffy’s quest to find the world’s greatest treasure and become king of the pirates, is one of three books I brought to read on my trip to Japan last September (the next two follow).

52. Kokoro — Natsume Soseki

“…I really did mean to see you — even after the passing of autumn…”

I’ve heard Soseki described as Japan’s Dickens. To me, though, he’s more of a Mark Twain or an Oscar Wilde, a satirical genius whose biting wit derives from a core conviction that most of his own cultural values amount to smoke and vanity. Kokoro is the story of a young man who befriends an older gentleman he only refers to as “Sensei.” As their relationship deepens, and the Emperor Meiji falls ill, we learn that Sensei has thwarted his own chance at happiness in order to stay true to his ideals of honor — ideals which are becoming obsolete in a changing age. I couldn’t help comparing it to Remains of the Day as I read; much like Ishiguro’s Mr. Stevens, Sensei is in a situation that eludes easy catharsis.

53. How Do You Live? — Genzaburo Yoshino

“…The world is full of people who are not bad, but weak…”

The third of three books I read in Japan (mostly on the plane, really) is a young adult classic that recently inspired Miyazaki’s film The Boy and the Heron. Copper, a young schoolboy, grapples with the titular question during Japan’s slide into fascism in the 1930s. Aided by his wise uncle, Copper faces several tests, and ultimately settles on his own definition of bravery. There’s a poignancy to the book, as the timing means Copper was likely drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army soon after coming of age — but I can hope that what he learned as a child still guided him to do the right thing.

54. Blue Lily, Lily Blue — Maggie Stiefvater

“…Centuries of damage are being incurred in just a weekend…”

The third book in the Raven Cycle continues to add lovable new characters to the already rich surroundings of Henrietta, Virginia, including an insane and immortal Welsh witch, a guy who talks in ALL CAPS, and the best evil girlfriend since Esme Squalor. It’s hard to top the dragon-filled finale of Dream Thieves, but Blue Lily does its damnedest with an exhilerating scene of the leads riding wild beasts through an underground cave.

55. Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz — Garth Nix

“…the lemons began to fall from the trees in the orchard, playing the soft drumbeat of a funerary march…”

Garth Nix is the journeyman fantasy needs. I never remember him when listing out the greats, but everything he contributes to the genre is solid at worst and masterful at best. The stories in this collection run that gamut. Sir Hereward is a wandering knight tasked with slaying malfunctioning gods; Mister Fitz is his companion, an animated spellcasting puppet. Their adventures are homages to the classic age of sword-and-sorcery, recalling Conan, Fafhrd, and the always-beloved work of Lord Dunsany.

56. Going Postal — Terry Pratchett

“…Everything everyone did affected everyone, sooner or later…”

Pratchett tragically never got the chance to give Moist von Lipwig the same depth as Sam Vimes, Esme Weatherwax, or Death, but there’s every indication that he would have with time. Going Postal returns to one of his favorite themes: that of technology, for good or ill, as an intrusion that warps the world in unexpected ways. In this installment, we get a mail-sorting machine that rips holes in spacetime, and a worldwide telegraph system that can keep a dead man’s memory alive. Ultimately, Moist isn’t out to defeat the Clacks, but to prove that the world has room for both high-speed communication and snail mail.

57. Sacred Games — Vikram Chandra

“…We are led in leaning curves towards the battlefield…”

A magnificent four-hour Bollywood epic in novel form, Sacred Games follows two parallel plot threads. In the present, Mumbai detective Sartaj Singh receives a tip that leads him to the hideout of notorious gangster Ganesh Gaitonde — only for Gaitonde to shoot himself in the head before Sartaj can get inside. In the past, Gaitonde narrates his rise through the criminal underworld, and the mounting paranoia that led him toward his last stand. Other characters, including Sartaj’s mother and an intelligence agent, take the lead for their own flashbacks, adding depth until Sacred Games becomes the kind of book you can swim in. Thematically, it’s asking about the purpose of religion in the modern world, and it even has answers.

58. Raven King — Maggie Stiefvater

“…digital time was cutting into his diseased tree time…”

The finale of the Raven Cycle was a little disappointing compared to what came before. It leans much more into horror than the first three installments, which means there are a lot of scenes in which a character walks into a room, gets scared by something, and then the chapter ends. But it also introduces the series’ best device — the chapters beginning with “Depending on when you began this story, it was about…” that show events through the eyes of one of the many characters we’ve come to love over the last three books.

59. A Wild Sheep Chase — Haruki Murakami

“…to where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns…”

This was my first Murakami novel, and while I can’t say I’m fully bought into the hype, I do get it. The plot is almost impossible to summarize, so I’ll content myself with saying that Murakami treats the few sheep ever raised in Japan as a kind of eldritch invasion, preying on the alienation of a society already rendered terminally weird by modern history. But at the same time, the MacGuffin sheep also represents the will to act individually, and the obsession it produces is sorely needed as a counter to conformity. There are no easy answers, but I didn’t expect them in a book this weird.

60. Thud! — Terry Pratchett

“…once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses…”

After Sacred Games and Wild Sheep Chase, Thud! might seem simplistic — a detective story about how racism is stupid, actually, and it’s in our interest to get along. However, it’s also realistic about the difficulties of doing so. Through Vimes and his coppers, Pratchett asks: “If cooperation is the only way forward, why aren’t we cooperating?” On another level, this novel also functions as a grand finale for Vimes and the Watch, sending them off in much more satisfying style than Snuff a few years later.

61. A Dead Djinn in Cairo — P. Djeli Clark

“…I asked him for proof, and he showed me a feather…”

A short novella set in Clark’s alternate clockpunk Cairo, where the locals have harnessed the power of djinn to throw out their colonizers and build the world’s most advanced society. I love the concept of Clark’s universe, but for some reason, the plots and characters never grab me; I wish I could say why, but it’s just a matter of taste.

62. Winter’s Orbit — Everina Maxwell

“…this tiny station spinning around a tiny jewelled planet like the fulcrum of the universe…”

This is perhaps the most AO3 novel I’ve ever read that was published as original fiction. Queer men? Check. Arranged marriage? Double check. Goofy charmer paired with reserved stoic? You know that’s a check. Sparks fly in a stressful and isolated situation? We’re gonna have to give that a check. To its credit, Winter’s Orbit isn’t all tropes — my favorite conceit is that the arranged marriage must succeed because the interplanetary empire is being audited by technological gods. But for a book aiming at epic space opera, it’s a little bit slight.

63. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino

“…What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?…”

This book is about 150 pages long on Libby, and yet it took me over a week to read. In a series of intricately nested chapters, few more than two pages long, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan stories about the bizarre and fantastical cities Polo has visited in his travels. There is a city comprised of nothing but water pipes, a city that perfectly mirrors the stars, a city that inadvertently creates a second city out of the trash it throws away, a city that can only be seen at a distance, and toward the end, a city with none of the things we expect a city to have, which forces us to ask what a city even is. This is novel as abstract art, but it’s driving toward a point: civilization is a social construct, which means we have the power to construct it differently.

64. Impossible Creatures — Katherine Rundell

“…greater than the world’s chaos are its miracles…”

I’m writing a magic-archipelago novel of my own right now, so of course I had to get a copy of this unexpected middle-grade sensation, set across an invisible cluster of islands in the North Atlantic ocean. Mal, a native of the islands who’s always been able to fly, teams up with Christopher, a normal English lad, to find out why the mythical creatures of the isles appear to be slowly dying. The story poses young readers a difficult question, but one everyone must face sooner or later: how do we live in a world that feels predisposed toward chaos, violence, and darkness? Unexpectedly heavy, sure, but I found the answers satisfying.

65. The Killer Angels — Michael Shaara

“…I never saw dirt I’d die for…”

As a teenager, I got bogged down in this book and never finished. I revisited it this year as part of a Civil War kick set off by starting Grant (see below), and while I found it flawed in many ways — largely because I disagree with any moral equivalency of the slave-holding Confederacy and the United States — I also understood what makes it such an important novel for so many people. Shaara presents the Battle of Gettysburg as a kind of eldritch abomination that descended on the nation and stretched out horrible tentacles of war, leaving the survivors psychically mutilated and unable to perceive God like they had before. There’s also a good discussion to be had about whether he intended the relationship between Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet to come off as romantic as it does.

66. All the Seas of the World — Guy Gavriel Kay

“…The rain misses the cloud as it falls into the sea…”

I hate to say it, because Kay remains among my very favorites, but this is where I began to think his Renaissance universe was becoming a creative crutch. It’s the third in a loose trilogy, the first two being Children of Earth and Sky and A Brightness Long Ago. While the first two have moments of brilliance — the scenes between Perro and the Caliph in Children, the horse race in Brightness — All the Seas just feels like Kay playing the hits. To be clear, Guy Gavriel Kay at his worst is still better than most, and this book does serve up beautiful scenery and lovable characters. But I can’t ignore that the closer his alternate Europe gets to approximating the modern day, the more the magic seems to fade.

67. Jhereg — Steven Brust

“…I fancy myself an artist at times like this…”

Jhereg is the first of Brust’s novels about Vlad Taltos, a sorcerous assassin bonded to the titular dragon-like familiar. Vlad has his work cut out for him in a world where society’s upper crust — i.e. the people most likely to hire him to kill each other — are functional immortals living in floating castles. This is a tightly controlled puzzle box of a story, reminiscent of the best Dresden books, in which Vlad must figure out how to finish off a target who has taken shelter under a powerful lord’s promise to protect his guests.

68. The Valley of Fear — Arthur Conan Doyle

“…A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the extinction of one man…”

The last of the four Sherlock Holmes novels is something of a do-over of A Study In Scarlet. It borrows that book’s formula, wherein the first half is a fairly standard Holmes and Watson adventure and the second half skips over to America so Conan Doyle can try his hand at a Western. This time, the backstory section works much better than Scarlet‘s Mormon nonsense, featuring an intrepid detective infiltrating a band of thuggish Freemasons who have taken over a California mining town. There’s also a chilling cameo from Professor Moriarty, a villain Conan Doyle was wise enough to use very sparingly.

69. Heir of Sea and Fire — Patricia A. McKillip

“…a scattering of stars, a moon-white chambered shell, shape weaving into shape…”

I loved The Riddle-Master of Hed, but the second installment took my passion for this trilogy to a new level. Heir of Sea and Fire follows Raederle, the princess who was Morgon’s unseen love interest in the first novel, as she sets out on a quest to find out what happened to Morgon after that volume’s cliffhanger ending. Along the way, she picks up Morgon’s sister Tristan and the forest ranger Lyra, and the three women journey far beyond the fields we know. While the leads are searching for a man, one they each love in a different way, Heir of Sea and Fire is a defiantly woman-led tale that deepens and complicates McKillip’s mythically resonant world.

70. Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders

“…we named them, and loved them, and in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them…”

I listened to Lincoln in the Bardo‘s audiobook, which features an all-star cast led by Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Megan Mullally, Ben Stiller, and dozens of other famous names including Saunders himself. For the first few chapters, I thought it was pretentious nonsense, at one point even shouting aloud “We get it, it’s the Masque of the Red Death!” while doing the dishes. But as the motley band of ghosts begins to drive the story, I became invested, and then emotionally devastated. It’s a very simple genre-fiction setup — ghosts in a cemetery searching for the courage to move on to the afterlife — but Saunders does brilliant work with it, centering grief in the human experience in a way that feels much more uplifting than depressing.

71. The Mysterious Affair at Styles — Agatha Christie

“…At present we are all thinking so much, and saying so little…”

Styles is both Christie’s first novel and the first appearance of Hercule Poirot; it’s also the only one that gives an in-story reason for him being a weird Belgian dude who’s just always kind of there. It’s partly a classic manor-house mystery, with a controversial matriarch dying from poisoning in a locked room, but being set during the Great War adds interesting complications. The real testament to Christie’s talent is that I have a pretty good formula for predicting the killer — it’s always the first person who seems to have an airtight alibi — but I never remember that while I’m actually reading her.

72. Emma — Jane Austen

“…The extent of your admiration may take you by surprise one day…”

I still name Persuasion as my favorite Austen novel, but Emma stands out from the rest in fascinating ways. For once, the heroine doesn’t have any financial worries (the typical protagonist plot is given to a supporting character), which lets Austen explore her often-vicious social milieu from a different angle. Emma Woodhouse can indeed be hard to like, but early in the story, it becomes clear that she has grown up with almost no-one she can trust to tell her the truth. From then on, the question is no longer “Why is she like this?” and becomes “Does she have any hope of escaping what she is?”

73. The Lathe of Heaven — Ursula K. Le Guin

“…what if there never is an end? All we have is means…”

The greatest sci-fi novel ever set in Portland imagines a universe where God is all-powerful but not all-knowing or all-good. He is, in fact, megalomaniacal psychiatrist William Haber, who manipulates the dreams of the actual creative force, an unremarkable draftsman named George Orr. Haber uses his power over George to try and fix a broken world, but due to his lack of imagination — he can’t conceive of a problem being solved without mass sacrifice — only succeeds in breaking the world in new ways. Things get complicated when a third force, social justice attorney Heather Lelache, begins influencing George in her own way. The Lathe of Heaven has more creativity on the average page than legions of sci-fi imitators it skewers, and ends with a moving meditation on the uncertain virtues of letting things be.

74. Grant — Ron Chernow

“…a onetime warrior ambushed by a sudden outbreak of peace…”

If you’re like me, you went most of your life knowing two things about Ulysses S. Grant: he won the Civil War, then whiffed his presidency by letting his cronies run the country while he descended into a drunken stupor. Given how prevalent that narrative is, it’s not surprising that Chernow’s book comes off as a hagiography — Grant is in desparate need of rehabilitation. Much of the page count is taken up with thorough investigations into each accusation of alcoholism, revealing Grant as a man who knew he had a problem and only went on drinking binges when removed from the moderating influences of his wife and close friends. He wanted so badly to believe in human goodness that he repeatedly let himself be taken advantage of by swindlers. Chernow also makes the excellent point that Grant did not, as is commonly claimed by Lost Causers, only win the war because of his advantage in materials and manpower. Six commanders before Grant had the same assets and failed to beat Robert E. Lee. Lee was good. Grant was just better.

75. It’s All Relative — A.J. Jacobs

“…If there is a heaven, I want to have something to say to the people up there…”

A slight book to end a year in which I read a lot of much heavier stuff, but you don’t want to think too hard over the holidays. Jacobs, famous for experimenting on himself, turns his focus outward as he takes on a mission to host the world’s largest family reunion. His quest to unite all his ninth cousins under one roof is informative, entertaining, and moving in turn.

And that’s it! Unfortunately, 2025 hasn’t been as good a reading year for me due to several false starts, but I’m looking forward to another 75 in 2026. To wrap up, here’s my top 10 books of the year, though I recommend almost everything I read.

10. The Letter for the King — Tonke Dragt

9. The Dream Thieves — Maggie Stiefvater

8. Kokoro — Natsume Soseki

7. Heir of Sea and Fire — Patricia A. McKillip

6. The Lathe of Heaven — Ursula K. Le Guin

5. Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders

4. Thistlefoot — GennaRose Nethercott

3. Sacred Games — Vikram Chandra

2. The Years of Rice and Salt — Kim Stanley Robinson

1. Angle of Repose — Wallace Stegner

Every Book I Read in 2024, Reviewed (Part II)

Before continuing the great 2024 book review (see part I here), some exciting news: I’ve sold another story to Beneath Ceaseless Skies! It’s a tale of a reluctant con artist who character-develops her way into inventing professional wrestling in a fantasy world. No word yet on when it will appear, but it rarely takes too long after signing the contract. I’ll make sure to update the published works page when we have a date.

I’ll also be present at WorldCon in Seattle in August (though my attendance should not be taken as an endorsement of their AI bullshit). If you’re an actual living reader of this blog or my stories, and you’d like to say hi, just reach out directly!

With that out of the way, let’s get back to the books. Remember, these are in the order I’ve read them, not ranked by subjective quality or anything else.

26. The Darkest Road — Guy Gavriel Kay

“…no man is an exile anymore…”

In the final volume of Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, sacrifices pay off, epic feats are performed, and Rakoth Maugrim is destroyed in a way that might come off as rules-lawyering but still elicited a cheer from me. It’s hard to be too disappointed with a book that involves a dragon being taken out by a kamikaze unicorn attack, two dwarves holding a lethal political debate to impress a different dragon, and the great Arthurian love triangle finally resolving in a stable throuple (a feat not even Marion Zimmer Bradley pulled off). If you’re interested, I recommend the audio books narrated by the GOAT Simon Vance.

27. The Burning Maze — Rick Riordan

“…I had no time to dwell on the terrible past when I had such a terrible present to deal with…”

In the third installment of the Trials of Apollo series, Lester and Meg travel to southern California, where lethally dry weather may not be the work of climate change alone. This episode raises the stakes significantly, even killing off a main character for the first time in the saga.

28. The Riddle-Master of Hed — Patricia A. McKillip

“…unweathered, originless, the door yielded no answer to his waiting…”

McKillip’s Riddle-Master trilogy, which I shamefully haven’t finished, is about as pure as fantasy gets. Poetic, tragically beautiful, and completely underivative, it feels like a fever dream you’d have if you fell asleep while listening to the Mabinogion in one ear and Geoffrey of Monmouth playing a harp in the other. Only Earthsea manages to feel as timeless, and if you know me, you know how much of a compliment that is. This first installment finds Prince Morgon, of the backwater isle of Hed, refusing the call so hard he’s literally lost the MacGuffin under his bed. He’s inspired to pick it up when he learns it could be the ticket to marrying his childhood love Raederle, a decision that sets Morgon on a collision course with a terrible destiny.

29. Untethered Sky — Fonda Lee

“…I once thought there was no reason for me to be alive, no logic to survival, no meaning to be found past endurance of loss…”

Fonda Lee’s Green Bone saga is some of the greatest fantasy written this century; I didn’t like Untethered Sky quite as much, but not every meal has to be Michelin-starred. Sometimes you just want a chicken sandwich, and this novella delivers. A tale of giant raptors and the chariot-riding falconers who train them, it explores what you can learn from loving something that doesn’t love you back.

30. In the Garden of Beasts — Erik Larson

“…and when death touched him his flag was flying still…”

Erik Larson practically invented the modern nonfiction novel, and he’s still at the top of his game here. In the Garden of Beasts tells the story of William Dodd, a history professor who became the American ambassador to Germany in 1933. The mild-mannered Dodd is utterly unprepared to deal with the rise of Hitler, and spends most of his time fighting with his own staff, who disapprove of his frugal approach to diplomacy. The Americans are so intent on ensuring Germany pays its reparations from the last war that they refuse to let Dodd do anything that might upset the Germans, even when brownshirts start beating American tourists in the street. Meanwhile, Dodd’s daughter Martha hooks up with a staggering parade of Nazis. In the end, while he never evolves into most people’s image of a hero, Dodd becomes his own sort of champion by speaking the truth about Nazi injustices — long before that was cool.

31. The Tyrant’s Tomb — Rick Riordan

“…Nostalgia is one ailment immortality can’t cure…”

As a history dweeb, I can’t tell you how excited I was that Riordan dredged up Tarquinius Superbus to serve as a villain for the fourth book of the Trials of Apollo. As though Lester hasn’t been through enough already, this installment finds him slowly dying from a zombie curse, preparing for an assault on the last bastion of freedom, mourning a lost friend, and getting laughed at by a girl he likes.

32. The Storm of Echoes — Christelle Dabos

“…A little more than that, even…”

I dearly love the Mirror Visitor Quartet as a whole, but unfortunately, this last installment lost me. It’s packed to the gills with one too many twists and countertwists, with the big reveals mostly distracting from the developing love between Ophelia and Thorn. I still can’t say I understand the backstory of this setting, but I am, at least, pleased with how the central relationship turns out — those who have read it know how much the above quote means.

33. The Tower of Nero — Rick Riordan

“…it seems likely that I died somewhere along the way…”

The suitably epic conclusion to the Trials of Apollo. Rick Riordan knows how to tell a story — I finished this one on my back deck, the night fully dark around me without any thought of going inside. At this point, the whole Percy Jackson universe occupies a weird space between YA and middle grade, but it’s so well-crafted that its target audience is irrelevant.

34. Koh-i-Noor — Anita Anand and William Dalrymple

“…he who has possessed it, has obtained it by overpowering his enemies…”

This book by the hosts of the Empire podcast — an engrossing history of the East India Company — chronicles the bloody history of the legendary diamond known as the Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light. Anand and Dalrymple are thorough historians, which makes the story unfortunately a bit dry, but I still learned a lot. Plus, it inspired my latest RPG campaign.

35. The Rule of Four — Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

“…the roof of reality is a tesselation of love affairs…”

I listened to this book soon after it came out years ago, but only recently learned I’d actually heard an abridged version. That brutal cutting was likely designed to appeal to fans of renowned author Dan Brown, but it did The Rule of Four a disservice, since it’s a much more interesting work than any of Brown’s symbolological scribblings. Caldwell and Thomason met at Princeton, and will not let you forget that, but I found their obsession with their alma mater much more endearing than annoying. However, the real appeal of the book is its protagonists’ dedication to understanding an obscure Renaissance work in so much detail that it validates the very idea of the liberal arts. Under the thinnest veneer of a thriller, this is actually a story about the dangerous joys of seeking knowledge.

36. The Years of Rice and Salt — Kim Stanley Robinson

“…we have many generations to go before history begins…”

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the most interesting authors currently working. He’s an autodidact seemingly obsessed with everything, a hard sci-fi writer in a soft age, and an optimist in a gloomy world, penning doorstopper tomes even as attention spans shrink. He defies comparison: maybe Neal Stephenson but with documentaries instead of blockbusters; maybe Andy Weir but much less concerned with the plot. The Years of Rice and Salt is an 800-year alternate history that imagines the world if the Black Death had killed everyone in Europe, instead of just one in three. With Christendom and “the West” reduced to irrelevance, it is left to Chinese Buddhist historians, Abbasid Islamic scientists, and the Haudenosaunee of Turtle Island to build the modern world. What results is a sprawling and magical work about the grand mission of humanity.

37. The Grace of Kings — Ken Liu

“…creation seems to favor making friends of those destined to be enemies…”

In a perfect world, Ken Liu and Fonda Lee would be dividing the adult fantasy world between them. The Grace of Kings is the first volume of Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty saga, a “silkpunk” take on the Chinese classic The Three Kingdoms (which I’m reading this year). Its tale of Kuni Garu and Mata Zyndu, two wildly different men who become fast friends and then fierce rivals as ideology tears them apart, is sometimes a little fast-paced and episodic, but in a way that befits its source material. So many moments from this novel are seared into my brain — the tragic end of Princess Kikomi, Kuni’s army crossing the ocean on the backs of whales, Mata mournfully destroying the letter that reveals his brother’s pre-emptive treachery. It’s a blueprint for the future of fantasy.

38. Predator’s Gold — Philip Reeve

“…when the going gets tough, the sensible conceal themselves under large items of furniture…”

Ignore the movie: Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books are extraordinary. The central concept of Municipal Darwinism — cities riding around the world as giant vehicles, with the larger ones eating the smaller — looks ridiculous onscreen, but on the page, it’s a powerful metaphor for the absurdity of endless growth on a finite world. It’s also just a cracking good story. In the second book, Predator’s Gold, young lovers Tom and Hester shelter on the ailing city of Anchorage, where they both face temptations that lure them off the path of peacefully sailing the skies together. Reeve deftly parallels their development with the world’s hope of rising beyond civilizations eating each other for sustenance.

39. Changes — Jim Butcher

“…I shall never understand why someone hasn’t killed you before now…”

The Dresden Files is the popcorn series I always return to when I want to read but don’t care what I’m reading. That sounds mean, but it’s meant as praise: it takes a lot of skill to write books that are purely enjoyable with very little getting in the way. As the title suggests, this is a major turning point in the saga, hinging on wizard detective Harry Dresden finding out he has a daughter with his vampire ex-girlfriend.

40. The Daughter of Time — Josephine Tey

“…The real history is written in forms not meant as history…”

Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant is laid up in bed for several weeks with a broken leg. Bored silly with crossword puzzles, he decides on another diversion: exonerating Richard III, the English king known as one of history’s most notorious villains. Grant has a gift for reading faces, you see, and he doesn’t see a killer in the surviving portraits of Richard. Despite having almost the lowest stakes possible, this unusual mystery managed to engross me all the way through.

41. The Raven Boys — Maggie Stiefvater

“…the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did…”

For the longest time, I avoided Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle out of a general distaste for YA paranormal stories, but I’m so glad I finally picked it up. The first book introduces Blue Sargent, who seems destined to kill the first boy she kisses, and Richard Gansey, a child of privilege on an obsessive quest for the preserved body of the legendary Welsh rebel Owain Glyndywr, who probably is that boy Blue’s going to kiss-murder. I admit it was the Welsh aspect that drew me in, but everything else — the huge cast of charming characters, the pitch-perfect rendering of a Virginia town teetering between D.C. luxury and southern poverty, the tarot cards for days — got me to stay.

42. The Grave Tattoo — Val McDermid

“…I fear that I will not make old bones…”

This thriller follows Jane, an antiquarian who returns to her native Lake District after getting a tip she can’t ignore: Fletcher Christian, the infamous mutineer of the Bounty, may have told his side of the story to William Wordsworth, who turned it into an epic poem that never saw the light of day. The Grave Tattoo made an interesting contrast with The Daughter of Time. Both are nominally about modern sleuths exonerating historical villains, but while The Daughter of Time couldn’t have had lower stakes, The Grave Tattoo throws a body on the pile every other page. Two very different approaches, both with good outcomes (though I will say I guessed the real villain of this one a hundred pages early).

43. The Mysteries — Bill Waterson & John Kascht

“…every day, things happened for which there were no explanations…”

Waterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, collaborated with John Kascht to create this short but haunting picture book about how human civilization is founded on the impossible desire to destroy all mysteries. I’m not entirely sure I read it right, but I’m still thinking about it.

44. The Amulet of Samarkand — Jonathan Stroud

“…There are always jugglers…”

I started the Bartimaeus trilogy as a child, but only recently decided to come back and finish it — and I’m extremely glad I did. Samarkand alternates between third-person chapters about the hapless young wizard Nathaniel and first-person chapters narrated by Bartimaeus, a perpetually sarcastic djinni bound to serve Nathaniel (but not required to respect him). Bartimaeus is an unreliable narrator for the ages, righteously furious about his lot in life but unable to resist embellishing his own profile.

45. A Time of Gifts — Patrick Leigh Fermor

“…I lay deep in one of those protracted moments of rapture which scatter this journey like asterisks…”

Patrick Leigh Fermor is the man James Bond dreams of being. A polymath, Nazi fighter, and freewheeling traveler, Fermor narrated his first great adventure in A Time of Gifts, in which he walks on foot from the Netherlands to Hungary relying only on the kindness of strangers. This is some of the most beautiful travel writing you’ll ever read. While Fermor does occasionally get bogged down in his obsession with rooflines (recalling Adso’s door ecstasy from The Name of the Rose), he’s also a wizard at conjuring impressions from his travels, from an impromptu career as a sketch artist in Prague to the harrowing theft of his luggage at a hostel. Since the great journey took place between the World Wars, there’s also a pervading sense of mourning a Europe soon to disappear under the Nazi onslaught.

46. The Dream Thieves — Maggie Stiefvater

“…the new thunder of his suddenly operating heart…”

The second book of the Raven Cycle, and probably my favorite, puts the spotlight on the byronic Ronan Lynch — who can pull objects out of his dreams, and as a result has never quite learned to live in reality. Where The Raven Boys was all Halloween, this installment is a summer fever dream, with a standout sequence in which Ronan repeatedly drugs himself to sleep to practice pulling new and stranger dream objects into waking life.

47. Silver on the Tree — Susan Cooper

“…Look at it now. Look well. Keep a little of it alive…”

The conclusion to Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising sequence isn’t quite as epic as it should be, suffering a bit from Cooper’s determination that the novels be readable in any order. Still, there’s great pleasure in seeing Will and Bran brought together with the Drew children for one more showdown against the Dark.

48. The Golem’s Eye — Jonathan Stroud

“…Each empire thinks it’s different, thinks it won’t happen to them…”

In the second Bartimaeus novel, a teenage Nathaniel now works for England’s oppressive wizard-ruled government, and summons Bartimaeus again to help him find a slippery group of rebels. Rebel leader Kitty joins as a point-of-view protagonist, showing us that it’s not just djinn being trodden down by the wizard regime. Absolutely a young-adult novel, but one with a lot to say about the long shadow of the British empire.

49. The Alloy of Law — Brandon Sanderson

“…The city betrays everyone…”

Brandon Sanderson is clearly a kind and friendly person, and he’s working incredibly hard to force the publishing industry to respect all its authors equally. I just wish I liked his books more. There’s nothing wrong with The Alloy of Law, the first book added to the Mistborn saga after the original trilogy; there’s just nothing exciting about it, either. It felt like reading a mid-tier Marvel movie.

50. Ptolemy’s Gate — Jonathan Stroud

“…I rather think he knew anyway…”

There’s nothing mid about the finale of the Bartimaeus trilogy, though, which makes a daring and explosive case that nobody is too far gone to evolve. Nathaniel, leading sword of a vicious colonialist empire, and Bartimaeus and Kitty, who have suffered unimaginably at that empire’s hands, take tentative steps toward ending the cycle of oppression — and succeed in the only way possible.

Join me in my next post for the final 25 books!

Every Book I Read in 2024, Reviewed (Part I)

Long ago, I wrote a series of posts ranking every book I read in a year. That strikes me as a bit meaningless now, since even two books in the same genre can be so different that it makes no sense to compare them. But I did want to do another roundup — I had an amazing reading year in 2024, getting through 75 books and loving almost all of them.

So, for this three-part post, I thought I’d dispense with the competition and simply share micro-reviews for each one, along with a favorite line or sentence. This post will cover the first 25, with two more installments to come.

1. The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco

“…the devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt…”

I started The Name of the Rose in late 2023, but it took me until January to finish — not surprising, given that Eco himself admitted the first 100 pages are a test for the reader to earn the rest of the book, and six of those pages follow the narrator’s increasingly manic fascination with the carvings above a door. But not a word of this monastic murder mystery could stand to be cut. On the surface, it’s a rollicking whodunit that pits a 14th-century Sherlock Holmes against a series of grisly slayings and a perplexing labyrinth, but its genre trappings disguise a full-throated plea for the virtues of uncertainty and doubt.

2. The Letter for the King — Tonke Dragt

“…I don’t believe that there are no more secrets left…”

Speaking of uncertainty, you’d be hard-pressed to find a YA novel that understands it better than The Letter for the King. Every character is either misguided, disguised, or in the dark, and only the moral clarity of knight-to-be Tiuri and his faithful sidekick Piak can see us through the maze. The titular letter is the ultimate MacGuffin, keeping us riveted to the quest even though we don’t find out what it says until the book’s almost over.

3. Thistlefoot — GennaRose Nethercott

“…Their hands are full of fire. Their legs are trembling to flee…”

I would sell my arm for an elevator pitch like Thistlefoot‘s. Estranged twins Isaac and Bellatine reunite when they unexpectedly inherit the famous walking house once owned by Baba Yaga, and decide to tour America with an existential puppet show. As they travel, a sinister force called the Longshadow Man is in hot pursuit. From its heartrending shtetl flashbacks to its note-perfect finale, this is the book I wanted American Gods to be.

4. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain — Nghi Vo

“…assassination by mammoth had a rather storied history in the northern counties…”

In the second volume of Vo’s Singing Hills cycle of novellas, protagonist Chih, a gatherer of stories, is trapped at a campfire with a hungry family of tiger goddesses. Chih Scheherezades themself through the night by telling the story of Scholar Du, a woman whose love for another tiger-human shapeshifter led to tragic consequences. A milestone in the literary annals of monsterfucking.

5. Behind the Beautiful Forevers — Katherine Boo

“…that much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said…”

Maybe the largest gulf I’ve ever seen between the quality of a book’s title and the quality of the book itself. Despite sounding like a Wattpad fic about being sold as a concubine to Liam Hemsworth, Beautiful Forevers is actually a masterful nonfiction narrative about a swampy slum where people live in squalor within sight of Mumbai’s international airport. The people of Annawadi pick through trash, grub for political influence, and feed off the ragged edges of India’s economic transformation. Even for someone like me who believes in globalization, it’s a book full of urgent reminders. And the title actually does make sense once you read it.

6. The Memory of Babel — Christelle Dabos

“…I will make sure that I become that storm myself…”

This is the third book in Dabos’s Mirror Visitor series, a massive fantasy that’s almost impossible to summarize. My best shot: in a world where humanity lives on floating fragments of land dominated by gods that are both all-powerful and childlike, Ophelia is sent into an arranged marriage with Thorn, a man initially so cold and calculating he makes Darcy and Rochester look like teddy bears. However, Ophelia and Thorn not only find true love, but also combine their magical talents to investigate why their world is such a shattered wreck. Not everything about the cycle works — as you’ll see when I get to the fourth and final book later on — but I treasure it for its ambition, and for a romance that actually gets the Pride and Prejudice dynamic right.

7. Sharpe’s Trafalgar — Bernard Cornwell

“…ghosted towards hell in a wind so light that it seemed the very heavens were holding their breath…”

I won’t call Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books a guilty pleasure, because pleasure should never be inherently guilty, but they are the books I repeatedly return to when I need to recharge between more serious efforts. The gist is that every deed during the entire Napoleonic era that history remembers as done by “an anonymous solider” was actually done by one guy named Richard Sharpe. This installment meanders a bit in the middle as Sharpe stumbles into an affair with the aristocratic Grace Hale, but picks up again for a thrilling recreation of the Battle of Trafalgar.

8. The Brothers Lionheart — Astrid Lindgren

“…that I was healthy and well in every bit of me, so why did I need to be beautiful?…”

Lindgren, best known for Pippi Longstocking and Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, also wrote this bittersweet standalone tale. I first learned of it through the song “Nangilima” by Smith & Thell, and I’m glad I did: The Brothers Lionheart is mournful, beautiful, and utterly unique. In our world, the young lives of Jonatan and Karl Lionheart are cut short by tragedy, but when they’re reincarnated in the Norse fairy-tale land of Nangiyala, both boys discover their adventures have only begun. You could see it as a simple fable to help children deal with the harsh truths of loss, as a defense of faith, or as a subversive centering of the oft-objectified figure of the saintly sick child — it works as any and all of them.

9. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — John Berendt

“…its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener…”

I’ve heard this book described as “the only true-crime story that will make you want to book a long weekend at a B&B near the murder scene,” and I’m not even going to try to put it better myself. Like all great journalism, Good and Evil is the story of a place, in this case the perpetually sloshed time capsule of Savannah, Georgia. The true crime itself, concerning the shooting of a tempestuous young man by his wealthy older lover, is interesting enough, but it’s the tales around it that I’m still thinking about — especially the glorious moment when the pioneering drag queen Lady Chablis leads a nightclub exodus in protest of her skinflint employers.

10. Legends & Lattes — Travis Baldree

“…Was I foolish enough to believe I could make you see something other than what was there?…”

The first solidly mid book I read in 2024. Baldree’s tale of Viv, a former D&D-style adventurer who quits the game to open the world’s first coffee shop, is a lot like the cinammon rolls Viv serves: tasty enough, but not exactly a meal. A low-stakes story is one thing, but almost every problem in this book turns out to be a non-issue in the same chapter it’s introduced, leaving the impression that Viv and friends just sort of sleepwalk into their happy ending. I’m all for serious attempts to make happiness interesting on the page, but Legends & Lattes doesn’t do that half as well as the opening chapters of The Brothers Lionheart.

11. Wylding Hall — Elizabeth Hand

“…He even taught himself to play the viole de gambols, a true sign of a man with too much time on his hands…”

This was a rare re-read for me, as my book club picked it up. It made me think I should re-read books more often. Hand, who I worked with at Stonecoast, is the kind of horror writer who makes me forget I don’t like horror. Framed as the oral history of a legendary folk-rock record, Wylding Hall tells the story of Windhollow Faire, a band inspired by Fairport Convention who spend a summer recording at a rundown English manor house — only to later realize it was haunted by forces beyond mortal ken. The genius of this novel is in its exploration of how terror connects us to the divine; as with art, nothing can be truly sacred without being a bit frightening too.

12. City of Stairs — Robert Jackson Bennett

“…that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before…”

A masterwork secondary-world fantasy that marries the modern grime of a crumbling Soviet satellite republic with the living gods and power plays of an epic. Seventy-five years ago, an upstart power toppled the empire of Bulikov by devising a weapon that could kill its gods. Today, Bulikov is a shell of itself, stewing with resentment over its lost glory days — and now a murderer is stalking the streets. Diplomat and spy Shara Thivani is a great protagonist, and has an excellent foil in her terse bodyguard Sigurd.

13. The Last Hero — Terry Pratchett

“…saw all them other worlds out there and burst into tears ‘cos there was only one lifetime…”

I never expected this oddity to rocket into my top three Discworld books, especially as one of the generally underwhelming Rincewind installments, but it completely stole my heart. The story, which teams Rincewind with the City Watch’s Captain Carrot on a space mission to prevent Cohen the Barbarian from inadvertently destroying the world, could have held up on its own, but it’s the pictures that really elevate it. A splash page of the main characters watching the giant turtle rise above the rim of the Disc’s moon is still with me more than a year later. The pure creativity of Discworld is sometimes overshadowed by Pratchett’s humor, characters, and social commentary, but The Last Hero reminds us that it can stand against any fantasy universe from Earthsea to Amber.

14. The Summer Tree — Guy Gavriel Kay

“…we know things of Her we do not realize we know…”

Guy Gavriel Kay is one of my favorite authors, but the first time I took a crack at his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, I didn’t finish. Years later, it was finally the right time, and I tore through all three installments. I still don’t think The Summer Tree reaches the heights of Kay’s best — Sailing to Sarantium, Tigana, Under Heaven, A Song for Arbonne — but it remains the most unique portal fantasy I’ve ever read. Five Canadian college students are transported to Fionavar, the original world from which all Earth’s myths originate; one by one, our heroes realize they’re here as far more than tourists, and are swept into battle against the forces of darkness. Hardly a groundbreaking plot, but that was never its intention. Without breaking the mold, Kay uses it so well we might as well throw it out after he’s done.

15. Babel-17 — Samuel R. Delaney

“…an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented…”

I can’t say I liked Babel-17, but I’m very glad I read it. This is the sci-fi equivalent of listening to Velvet Underground for the first time and realizing where all your favorite artists learned it from. In a work so brisk it’s technically a novella, Delaney anticipates just about every sci-fi trope of the ensuring fifty years — anyone who can claim to have inspired Ursula le Guin, Becky Chambers, C.J. Cherryh, and Ted Chiang has a pretty good argument for being a genius. But that density is a double-edged sword, with so much happening so quickly that I never formed much emotional attachment to any of it.

16. The Hidden Oracle — Rick Riordan

“…Exercise is nothing more than a depressing reminder that one is not a god…”

This year, I read Rick Riordan’s entire Trials of Apollo series, his attempt to grow with his readership and push his mythological romps to darker and more complex places. This first story, in which Apollo is flung to Earth in the body of fumbling mortal Lester Papadopolous, is mostly a bottle episode set at Camp Half-Blood. Despite the lack of a true quest, its amusingly conceited narrator and his slow-but-steady character development carry the story through.

17. The King of Elfland’s Daugher — Lord Dunsany

“…I would sooner give you a spell against bread, that all the world should starve, than give you a spell against the magic of wheat that haunts the golden hollows in moonlight…”

You know what? Fuck H.P. Lovecraft. Even leaving aside the racism, which is a lot to leave aside, the man was scared of everyone and everything he didn’t understand, and spent his career trying to convince us we should be scared too. With the exception of the Dream Cycle, I much prefer the work of Lovecraft’s contemporaries, like Robert E. Howard and especially Lord Dunsany. In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, his greatest novel, Dunsany charts the tension between the fear and promise of the unknown, between our love for home and our thirst for new horizons. While Lovecraft cowers under the covers, Dunsany flings the door wide, and almost casually changes the fields we know forever.

18. The Wee Free Men — Terry Pratchett

“…Suddenly, cheese had always been there…”

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t immediately warm to Tiffany Aching, finding Pratchett’s YA work a little preachy at first. However, after finishing both this book and its sequel A Hat Full of Sky, I’m completely won over. The emphasis on earthiness, farm work, and seeing the world clearly makes for a very different kind of “witchiness” than we’re usually sold. Plus, it all comes with messages that make me really hope children are reading these — that the most important thoughts are the ones you think second, and that there’s nothing wrong with being proud you know words like susurration.

19. Dreamer’s Pool — Juliet Marillier

“…Only a fool mixes lies and magic…”

Marillier is best known for books like Daughter of the Forest that mix political intrigue with classic fairy tales, but this is a departure — a tale of the lowborn healer Blackthorn and her loyal companion Grim, who may be in love with her but is content to just stay by her side. There is a prince, but he’s more of a problem to solve than a hero, as Blackthorn must figure out if his intended bride is under a curse. Not an earth-shattering book, but it has a lot to teach Legends & Lattes about how to make small, character-driven fantasies feel like they matter.

20. The Dark Prophecy — Rick Riordan

“…I really hate that about the mortal heart. It seems to have an infinite capacity for getting heavier…”

In the second Trials of Apollo book, Lester and Meg face off against the resurrected Roman emperor Commodus, who Lester happens to have personally murdered back in the 190s. As much fun as ever. I’ll try not to stew too much about the fact that Riordan set an entire book in Indianapolis of all places, but could only spare four chapters for Portland back in The Son of Neptune.

21. The Wandering Fire — Guy Gavriel Kay

“…the wild magic is meant to be free, whether or not it serves any purpose of ours…”

The second book of the Fionavar Tapestry sees our heroes returning to the First World by breaking into Stonehenge and summoning King Arthur himself back to life. This all happens in the first few chapters, which should tell you how hard this trilogy is swinging. Over the rest of the book, various characters will release the Wild Hunt, attempt to raise the child of an evil god, and have such amazing sex that it kills them in all possible universes. Only Philip Pullman goes anywhere close to this big.

22. The Sign of Four — Arthur Conan Doyle

“…every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him…”

Legend has it that Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde once found themselves at the same dinner party, where an editor encouraged them each to write a novel. If true, we have that editor to thank for both The Picture of Dorian Grey and the first great work starring Sherlock Holmes. He may have debuted in A Study In Scarlet, but The Sign of Four is where Holmes really became Holmes. Amid boat chases on the Thames and intrigues on far-flung islands, this cracking good mystery introduces the consulting detective’s penchant for elaborate disguises, his essential loneliness (as Watson leaves Baker Street to wed Mary Morstan), and his cocaine addiction, apparently inspired by Wilde.

23. The Philosopher’s War — Tom Miller

“…from ghosties and goulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, oh Mother, deliver us…”

The Philospher duology is an alternate history in which a magical power endemic to women sends both feminism and world politics on wildly divergent courses. Robert Weekes, a Montana farm boy, idolizes the flying women who rescue casualties from the battlefield — then gets a chance to join the Philosophical Corps as its first male sigilwoman. While the first novel, The Philosopher’s Flight, chronicled Robert’s training, this sequel pits him and his battle-sisters against a conspiracy to turn the tide of the Great War. In some ways, the story is let down by its choice of a male hero as our window onto this woman’s world, but it’s at least more complicated than a simple reversal of the expected gender roles: women still have to fight to be recognized as human, even when they can fly.

24. Angle of Repose — Wallace Stegner

“…even though the civilization he was trying to build was this cruddy one we’ve got…”

What a book. What a goddamned magisterial achievement that I could only insult by attempting to corral it into a paragraph. Conceived as a kind of anti-Western that would forever destroy the myth of the rugged lone cowboy, Angle of Repose is the story of a colonized American West transformed by the work of legions of people struggling to do their best. But it’s also about marriage, as Susan and Oliver Ward test how much strain can overcome true love, while their grandson Lyman wonders if he let his own marriage break too easily. But it’s also a tragedy about when a good and upright life fails to leave any mark on the world. But it’s also a long cry of pain that asks whether anything we do is worth the struggle, and why we’re so often wrong about what does matter. The “also”s never end — Angle of Repose is as deep and wide as the West. Only Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian come anywhere close.

25. The Black Penguin — Andrew Evans

“…a stony shadow above the ocean and a new memory tattooed on my brain forever…”

Bit of a comedown here, as this book was a disappointment to me. The narrative is certainly awesome: travel writer Andrew Evans decided to take the bus to Antarctica by the simple means of riding every available bus to its southernmost terminus. He interweaves this story with flashbacks to his decision to break with the Mormon church so he could marry the man he loved. Unfortunately, the telling lets the tale down. Evans is too much of an influencer to vanish into his story like John Berendt or Katherine Boo. He shrinks his adventure by constantly reminding us that he’s there and telling us how to feel about it.

That’s all for this post. Join me soon for parts 2 and 3!

5 Ways to Convince a Well-Meaning Liberal That Trans Kids Should Get to Play Sports

Content warning: This post discusses transphobia and suicide.

I’ll stop with the political posts when America stops handing power to gibbering fascists. Until then, buckle up.

According to some takes, the transgender debate cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election — that “debate,” of course, being cisgender people “debating” whether trans people have a right to exist. Unfortunately for those of us not in favor of erasing entire populations, the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction on this issue. A February 2025 poll by Pew Research tells the story. From 2022 to 2025, Americans became more likely to say that:

Transgender athletes should be forced to compete on teams matching their assigned birth gender (58% to 66%)Trans people should be forced to use the bathroom matching their assigned birth gender (41% to 49%)Healthcare providers should be banned from aiding minors with gender transitions in any way (46% to 56%)Public schools should be banned from teaching children about gender identity (41% to 47%)

Only two responses went down. 56% of Americans now think being trans should be a protected identity under the law (down from 64% in 2022), and only 22% believe health insurers should be required to cover gender transitions (down from 27% in 2022).

What changed in the last three years? The conservative think-tank industrial complex found an effective line of attack in their ongoing battle against trans Americans, their overwhelming favorite punching bag since they lost the culture war over the first three letters of LGBTQ.

Like all right-wing arguments, their line is so simple that it’s easy to miss how tooth-grindingly stupid it is. When trans women compete with cis women in athletic contests, so conservatives say, their bodies — developed by years of testosterone before their transitions — give them a natural advantage. As such, it’s manifestly unfair to pit them against cis women, and nobody could approve of such stacked contests unless they were brainwashed by the woke mind virus.

It’s a ruthlessly effective bit of hatred, mainly because it doesn’t sound like hatred at all. Anyone can say “Of course I approve of gender transitions, but surely you must agree that it wouldn’t be fair for them to compete in sports.” It sounds like a reasonable compromise position, instead of what it is: barring certain individuals from an otherwise universal activity in order to reinforce their otherness and grease the wheels for further persecution.

You can tell it’s effective because it’s bewitched more than conservatives — it’s also flipped much of the center-left. Former President Joe Biden argued for restricting trans athletes. The New York Times has infamously spilled hogsheads of ink “just asking questions” about whether trans kids should be banned. Most recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom launched a podcast by simperingly agreeing with tiny-faced goblin Charlie Kirk that trans women should not be allowed in women’s sports.

It’s only the latest example of a depressingly common pattern. The right bloviates about a made-up problem with a catchy name, like “welfare queens” or “cancel culture” or “critical race theory” or “partial-birth abortions” or “grooming,” and the left can’t find a counterattack because we’ve been put in the impossible position of proving a negative. To anybody not deeply versed in the issue in question, it looks like one side is offering common-sense solutions to a pervasive national problem, while the other is ignoring it entirely. Not to dive too deep into prognostication, but I don’t think Democrats will be able to hold onto power until we find a way to counter this.

I’m no expert, but to my mind, the best way to fight conservative whisper campaigns is to rip off their masks of reasonableness to reveal their inner core of wingnuttery. The right flips well-meaning liberals like Biden and Newsom by appealing to their desire to foster compromise and collaboration. When influential leaders flip, regular people follow.

So, for anyone who knows a compassionate and left-leaning person who just thinks it’s “unfair” for trans kids to play sports as their preferred sex, I’ve prepared five arguments you can use to show them this isn’t a compromise they want to make.

Before we start, I should mention that this post is heavily based on two sources: John Oliver’s excellent trans sports episode of Last Week Tonight, and the episode “The New York Times’s War on Trans Kids” of the If Books Could Kill podcast by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. The former is free online and a must-watch. The latter is a bonus episode that requires supporting their Patreon, but it’s well worth it.

1. Enforcing a ban would require inspecting teenagers’ genitals.

Bathroom bills, youth sports bans, and most other performative transphobic bigotry are all founded on the same misconception that it’s possible to identify any trans person on sight. This is not the case — it’s easy to misidentify trans folks as cis, and cranks frequently call cis people trans when they don’t conform closely enough to their gender role.

This means that one of two things must be true about any law requiring student athletes to play for their birth-assigned team. The ban will either:

Be enforced only against cis and trans kids who are less able to fit the role of their preferred gender, thus directly punishing children for their looks, ORBe enforced by regularly inspecting every child in the athletic program to ensure they have the right organs for their team.

You may have noticed that both options result in overwhelming humiliation for kids and teens who are just trying to play sports with their friends. Conservatives might say that the shame will only fall on trans athletes who try to flout the ban. That argument is more commonly phrased as “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” So-called common-sense bans on trans kids in sports can’t be implemented without turning every youth athletic program into an invasive and arbitrary police state.

To put it another way: when one side of a debate is obsessed with children’s genitals, you generally want to be on the other side.

2. Biological differences are already part of sports.

Opponents of banning trans kids from sports often argue that differences between men and women only apply at the very end of the bell curve. While a man in the 99th percentile may be stronger than most women, very few men — by definition — are in the 99th percentile. Almost nobody in youth sports will be exceptional enough for biology to matter.

I find this argument compelling, but it doesn’t go far enough; it still implicitly accepts that a trans woman may exist who is too physically powerful to compete with cis women. That’s an absurd premise, since it ignores the wide range of body types among cis athletes. Among athletes from the same age group, sex, and sport, you’ll see massive variations in height, weight, lung capacity, endurance, muscle mass, coordination, and all the other traits that make up an athlete’s skill — many of which don’t map onto gender at all.

If you watched Katie Ledecky swim in the 2024 Olympics, you know what I’m talking about. She was competing with swimmers who were technically her peers, and yet in every race, she beat them by so much they couldn’t even reach her wake to eat it. In most of her races, NBC literally didn’t have cameras positioned to see both Ledecky and the other swimmers at the same time. I swear I saw her lap someone in a two-lap race.

The difference between an average trans woman and an average cis woman in the same event is miniscule compared to the difference between Katie Ledecky and any average swimmer, or Usain Bolt and any average sprinter, or Serena Williams and any average tennis player. Through a combination of training and natural biological advantages, some people are just better at sports than others. Athletes have always known this. It’s the Republican Party that’s conveniently forgotten.

One more point hasn’t come up yet, but should be on your mind throughout: the conservative arguments against trans athletes never admit the existence of trans men. Their narrative requires innocent cis women to be brutalized at the hands of thuggish trans women while woke schools stand by and allow it. According to the right-wing framing, a trans man should be a victim, endangered by schools honoring his gender preference over his safety. But they can’t stand to side with a trans person, even performatively, so it’s easier for them to pretend there are no trans men at all.

3. There is no evidence that any male-assigned athlete has ever transitioned to female to increase their odds of winning at sports.

Another reason the right doesn’t mention trans men in the sports debate is that many of them are secretly thinking it’s all a grift.

Republicans don’t believe that anyone is really transgender. That belief informed the bathroom bills, which assumed that men would put on dresses so they could assault women in public restrooms, and it’s rearing its head here too. In the conservative mind, any trans female athlete is actually a man competing in drag for a better chance of winning medals.

There is no proof whatsoever that this has everhappened, ever, in the fullness of time. If it had, even once, you can bet every Fox News talking head would be contractually obligated to carp about it twice an hour. But they don’t. They can’t. Because it’s never fucking happened.

South Park‘s knee-jerk libertarianism has done massive damage to our political conversation, but it has occasionally gotten things right. In the 2004 episode “Up the Down Steroid,” Eric Cartman fakes a disability to enter the Special Olympics, believing he’ll be able to destroy the competition. He gets his ass kicked, since all the other athletes actually trained.

Cartman shows us that a small biological headstart means nothing without fundamentals, coaching, and practice. The advantage a theoretical man might gain from pretending to transition would pale in comparison to almost all other sources of athletic advantages. The scheme wouldn’t be worth the effort it would take to file the paperwork.

4. Kids are transitioning due to medical necessity, not “wokeness.”

Why do Republicans push the idea that it’s not morally abhorrent to ban trans kids from playing sports as their preferred gender? It flows from the idea I brought up in point #3: they don’t think gender dysphoria is real, or that anyone is actually trans. At the heart of every right-wing objection to the trans movement is the certainty that this is just a phase, that kids are only coming out as trans because it’s cool right now, and that the whole thing will blow over if we just refuse to indulge them.

This finds its culmination in the risible idea of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” where parents complain that their formerly well-behaved child is suddenly convinced they’re trans due to a sort of viral collective madness.

(Actually, its real culmination is Donald Trump’s assertion that school nurses are somehow capable of performing complete reassignment surgeries over the course of a single school day. But since Donald Trump is to being the worst person alive what Katie Ledecky is to swimming, I’m giving a nod to the runner-up to keep things fair.)

There is about as much scientific evidence for rapid-onset dysphoria as there is for anything else Republicans are afraid of, which is to say it’s too dumb to even count as a testable hypothesis. The facts tell the real story. Hormone therapies for trans teens correlate with lower rates of depression and suicide. Getting treatment as a teenager results in better mental health outcomes than waiting until adulthood. A two-year study showed that “apperance congruence” — i.e. outwardly looking like one’s preferred gender — reduces anxiety and increases satisfaction. We see the same massive benefits from puberty blockers and confirmation surgery.

If you click on a few of those links, you may notice a common thread: a serious risk of suicide. In fact, two participants in the apperance congruence study killed themselves during the two-year study period. When lives are literally in the balance, there’s no moral argument for another second of hand-wringing about these treatments.

Banning trans kids and teens from sports may not be as immediately harmful as denying them puberty blockers, hormones, or top surgery, but it’s still punishing them for a medical treatment they need to live their full lives. The benefits of youth athletics are extensively documented (I didn’t play any sports, and now I spend all my time writing angsty fantasy novels and grouchy blog posts — don’t let it happen to you). Kicking trans kids out of sports is a barely disguised intimation that you wish they’d stop existing at you.

Bottom line — if you’re in favor of kids transitioning, you’re also in favor of them playing sports afterwards. Otherwise, you aren’t actually supporting either one.

5. Trans sports bans are not a compromise policy. They’re a conservative smear campaign.

Trans advocate Erin Reed said on PBS that trans issues came to the fore in 2024 as the Trump campaign ran millions of dollars worth of fearmongering ads. This would explain why public sentiments have shifted recently, but the attacks are older, dating back to Trump’s first administration. Ads and rhetoric about trans athletes are a campaign strategy for Republicans looking to claw back territory in the culture wars.

And they’re succeeding. Somehow, they’ve put Democrats like Newsom and Colin Allred on the defensive by doing nothing more than reheating the same crap they spewed for decades about gay people. Some proponents of the “social contagion” theory even accuse trans adults of “recruiting” and “grooming” kids, because these people have not had an original idea since the 18th god-damned century.

Like all other conservative outrage campaigns, this is not about “protecting the children.” It’s about controlling the media narrative. Nobody has illustrated this better than the eloquent fencer Red Sullivan, who recently found herself the main character of the hatespewing-industrial complex. After a competitor refused to fight Sullivan at a tournament, that competitor was lionized for her bravery by essentialist fuckshovels like J.K. Rowling, while Sullivan was kicked off her NCAA team.

As a fencer myself, I’m well-positioned to see how manufactured this controversy is. Biological sex grants very little advantage to a fencer; speed and timing are far more important than strength and reach. Sullivan’s competitor regularly fences against cis men in mixed tournaments. Moreover, as Sullivan herself points out (seriously, read the Rolling Stone article, she’s great), fencing is not exactly the biggest sport in America — nobody cares about it unless conservatives are using it to pioneer new forms of apoplexy.

Fencing isn’t the only sport drawn into this new culture war. Conservatives have gone so far as to claim biological sex confers an overpowering advantage in darts. Darts. What’s next, chess?

Should you need more proof that this is about banning gender transitions altogether, look back at the poll I opened with. If the fury against trans sports were only about fairness, Republicans should be advocating for young people to get on puberty blockers and HRT as early as possible — that way, when it comes time to compete in athletics, the supposed biological advantages of men and disadvantages of women should be largely negated. But they’re not saying that, any more than the anti-abortion crowd ever advocate for better sex education and more available contraception. They’re instead complaining about evil doctors who approve transition-related therapies “too soon” for our innocent children. It lays the hypocrisy bare, and while the right has made hypocrisy its entire platform, it’s still something that matters to liberals.

As Chase Strangio explained in GQ, Republican lawmakers often complain that there are “too many” trans people now, which makes their efforts to reduce that population an openly eugenicist project. I don’t think that Newsom, Allred, Biden, or any other Democrats who have come out against trans athletes want to eliminate the trans population altogether — but they have been tricked into tacitly agreeing with the eugenicists out of a misguided desire to make the Democratic brand more appealing to independent voters.

That’s a devil’s bargain. Trans rights are a barricade we must hold at all costs. There is no compromising with anypolitical position that holds certain people shouldn’t exist.

Conclusion: The Only Reasonable Position is to Fight for Trans Rights

The thing that most often strikes me about the evil loosed on America over the past ten years is its bottomless, sniveling cowardice. While claiming to abhor the power of the state, the “anti-woke” squad want to use it to deny millions of people the right to live their full lives. They want women foot-bound and constantly pregnant, black people back on the plantation, immigrants shot at the border, and the right to burn at the stake anyone else who fails to confirm to their constantly shifting definition of a “real American.”

Yet almost as galling as the positions themselves is the fact that the conservatives never own any of them. It’s all communicated through sneering dog-whistles and mass gaslighting. We see this playing out at the highest levels, with the Trump administration trying to pretend Elon Musk isn’t actually in charge of DOGE, or blubbering that they can’t rescue Kilmar Abrego Garcia because those meanies in El Salvador won’t let them.

These people can’t open their mouths without lying. And yet, when they say the Democrats lost in 2024 because we “went too far with woke,” hordes of enlightened centrists are ready to take them at their word.

Here’s what the anti-wokes are against: being nice to people, and minding your own business. If you meet a person named Joseph, and he asks you to call him Joe, you don’t pitch a fit and rush home to write an obnoxious Substack post about it. If you’re walking with someone who uses a wheelchair, and they take a few more moments to go around the accessible ramp, you wait for them. You accomodate the other person’s wishes because it costs you nothing.

The cost to accepting the existence of trans people is, at most, a fraction of a penny of your tax money toward funding healthcare that vastly improves their survival rates. There’s no evidence that they injure other players more than cis kids, win more medals, sexually harass teammates in the locker rooms, or do anything else the hate campaigns accuse them of. To “compromise” with such campaigns is to accept and allow violence.

You Don’t Want a King, You Just Like Lord of the Rings

One of the lesser but still aggravating consequences of the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump is that we are now all forced to pay attention to Curtis Yarvin, a failed slam poet and professional internet troll best known for arguing that America needs to replace its democratic government system with an all-powerful CEO. Yarvin, whose work as a “philosopher” is mainly comprised of unreadable walls of text on various blogging platforms, is a direct political influence on Vice President J.D. Vance, who — given that bronzer and hatred are the only strands still binding Trump to this mortal coil — stands a very good chance of inheriting the top job.

You probably already know that Vance is an odious blob of a man who openly disdains his own children and will say literally anything if he thinks it might get him close to people more powerful than he is. (The only decision of Trump’s that I approve of so far is sending Vance to a frozen wasteland to have doors repeatedly slammed in his face.) What you may not know, though, is that there’s a consistent intellectual underpinning to everything he does — and that it’s somehow worse than most of what he says out loud.

According to a 2022 Vanity Fair article that is vastly kinder to all these people than they deserve, Vance actually agrees with me about one of the main ills plaguing modern America: that the rising tide of our increasingly globalized and service-oriented economy has failed to lift all boats. However, while I naively believe the solution lies in labor solidarity and public-sector investment backed by progressive taxation, our Vice President has a much more intellectual idea — income inequality is caused by America not having a big, strong man as its autocratic tyrant.

Through sheer coincidence, this belief is shared by Peter Thiel, the bankroller of Vance’s career, a known associate of Yarvin, and a walking cautionary tale about the dangers of reading Ayn Rand as a teenager. This nexus of Thiel’s soft power and Vance’s constitutional power means Yarvin’s ideas, loosely clapped under the term “neo-reactionary,” are dangerously close to going mainstream. This, in turn, means it’s no longer funny that they’re all shaky, internally inconsistent, and downright puerile much of the time.

In a loose sequel to my previous post on Elon Musk, I want to examine neo-reactionary thought from a humanities perspective to try and figure out why people are so bewitched by this garbage. Remember from that post that state repression and extermination camps are not the selling points of fascist ideologies; they always start by promising things that everyone can agree on.

What is a neo-reactionary?

Corey Pein of The Baffler wrote a good summary in 2014, but I’ll start with my own quick primer. As I understand it, there are five key tenets of neo-reactionary or “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy.

History is not the story of the sustained development of humanity toward ever more ideal societies. In fact, most of the developments of the last five centuries that seemed to promote greater freedom have had negative long-term effects.Democracy is inherently chaotic and incentivizes our worst impulses. Only a single sovereign leader is capable of maintaining an orderly society. This person has a personal stake in the success of the state, much like the operator of a family business, and will use their absolute power to act in the state’s best interest.Natural hierarchies exist as a consequence of immutable human biology, making some people innately more qualified for all forms of leadership. These hierarchies, neo-reactionaries believe, conform to outwardly visible racial traits.Empathy in a leader is a weakness that prevents them from taking the necessary actions to maintain order.There exists a “distributed conspiracy” of educators, businesses, politicians, thinkers, and the media — variously called “the Cathedral,” “the regime,” or “the paper belt” — that suppresses any public discussion of all the above points.

If you’re horrified, remember that the above represents my best attempt to neutrally summarize what these people believe (I had to wash my hands after typing #3). In short, the Dark Enlightenment is racist, sexist, fascist, essentialist, anti-intellectual, and driven far more by grievance than any consistent ethos.

The factual tenets of neo-reactionism have been extensively refuted, perhaps best by Scott Alexander, another blogger of the wall-of-text school. Now, Alexander’s Slate Star Codex is also a clearinghouse for terrible beliefs. He’s espoused “human biodiversity,” or HBD, which is what racists now call eugenics because they can’t call it eugenics anymore. Even in the piece I’m about to link, he can’t resist claiming that only “30%-or-so” of feminists are sane.

In short, take Alexander with a full saltshaker, but his anti-reactionary FAQ does a fair job of laying out the material case against the Dark Enlightenment. Some of the best points:

The claim that modern societies are on a trajectory of decadence and decline contradicts the data. Deaths in war, suicides, and homicides are all decreasing, as is debt as a percentage of GDP, while happiness, wealth, and leisure time are rising.Autocracies throughout history have been vastly more likely than liberal democracies to murder their own people. Neo-reactionaries try to lump Hitler and Stalin in with modern democracy by claiming they ruled “in the name of the people,” but those two have much more in common with old-school monarchs than with the democratic states that existed alongside their rule.There is no requirement for a lone sovereign to govern rationally, and no way to remove them if they govern irrationally.Progressive, democratic nations are more economically successful by every measurable metric. The few wealthy reactionary states, like Saudi Arabia and Singapore, are prosperous because they control massive sources of wealth, not because of their political systems.Progressive ideals did not spontaneously manifest in the late 1700s. Examples can be found at least as far back as the Roman Republic, generally arising wherever increasing urbanization brings more people into close proximity. There’s no need for a “Cathedral” to explain their current prominence.Running a country as a joint-stock corporation, as Yarvin has proposed, means the government’s best option is to shoot anybody who’s no longer producing value.

That’s the gist of it, although there’s more. The most striking thing is how paper-thin it all is. Neo-reactionaries always either rely on outright falsehoods — such as that monarchs have no incentive to kill their own citizens — or on turtles-all-the-way-down arguments like “the rule of law” preventing a corporate government from liquidating unproductive citizens. One of their most common arguments is that “exit rights” would allow citizens to leave oppressive dictatorships and relocate to nicer dictatorships, but why would a mad king respect their right to leave?

This brings us back to my humanities question, and one that Alexander’s primer ignores: why is such a flimsy, cloudy belief system so attractive to some people, from vampire gazillionaires to our furniture-appreciating vice president? I propose four reasons.

First, that cultural narratives provide a lukewarm defense of democracy while full-throatedly endorsing tyranny.

Second, that many adherents have not received the rewards from meritocracy that they believe they deserve, and have concluded that society is at fault.

Third, that a great deal of them perceive that the Dark Enlightenment has correctly diagnosed the flaws in modern democracies, but confuse willingness to point out the problem with the ability to solve it.

Fourth, that adherents believe anything contrary to the popular orthodoxy must be true.

These four build on each other, so I’ll cover them in order.

Reason the first: Fiction makes autocracy sexier than democracy

Recently, some friends and I were trying to think of an example of a pro-democracy anime. The closest I could come up with was Persona 5, in which a band of Tokyo teens with supernatural powers battle an evil MP’s plot to rig an election. Someone rightly pointed out that Persona 5 is a video game, not an anime. The only other example we found was Fullmetal Alchemist, which ends with the protagonists overthrowing a military dictator — only to replace him with another dictator, albeit one who promises to eventually relinquish his power.

The problem isn’t limited to anime. Quick: off the top of your head, what’s the last thing you watched, read, or played with a democratically elected leader as a hero or heroine? What about a civil servant (other than a cop or military commander), or, god forbid, an election campaign staffer?

Chances are you either thought of The West Wing, or something where technically heroic characters are still portrayed as buffoons, like The Campaign or Parks and Recreation. But it’s much more likely to see democracy cast as an incubator of finger-tenting villainy or obstructive bureaucracy. For every Lincoln or Air Force One, there’s an Ides of March, a House of Cards, an All the President’s Men, a Mars Attacks!, a Wire, an Election, a Veep, a Metal Gear Rising, a Winter Soldier, a Revenge of the Sith.

And that’s a good thing! The whole point of democracy is that people can challenge and criticize a government that isn’t doing its job. Most of those titles above are quite good, and very few of them intentionally condemn democracy as a system.

However, when you set them against the list of films, books, shows, and games that praise the power of a single ruler, a pattern starts to emerge. Frequently the autocrats are out-and-out heroic: Black Panther, the first book of Dune, Dragon Quest, almost every Disney Princess film, and even some works I dearly love, like Lord of the Rings, The Last King of Osten Ard, and practically anything about King Arthur. Tolkien didn’t like autocracy — for him, kings represented continuity with the past, not any particular political system — but it’s easy to read him otherwise.

You might claim that media about corrupt tyrants, like Game of Thrones and The Tudors, offer counterexamples, but those still tend to portray the autocrats as commanding events from the centers of their worlds. Star Wars ends with the Empire overthrown, but with little interest in the politics that will need to fill the void — instead, the focus from start to finish is on the superhuman Jedi knights who did the overthrowing. We don’t think about how much better Westeros would be if Joffrey were replaced by a parliament; we long for him to be replaced by Tyrion, who could wield the same power more intelligently (neatly expressed by the series finale’s nasty little joke at Sam Tarly’s expense).

You also have to look at which specific stories are influencing the neo-reactionaries. Peter Thiel named his investment firm Mythril, not Valyrian Steel. And while Dune Messiah makes the urgently necessary argument that Paul Atreides was never the hero, most people stop reading after Dune. Or perhaps neo-reactionaries loved Discworld, but missed the part where the Patrician never exercises his supposedly absolute power (except once on a donkey).

I contend that this is an artifact of what we look for in stories. As I touched on in my essay on the Ursula le Guin Carrier Bag Theory, most people want to see stories about heroes: exceptional people facing seemingly insurmountable odds. Whether the protagonist’s goal is to find love, solve a mystery, seek a magic sword, or save the President from ninjas, they will almost always have at least one rare quality that makes them suited for the job. Competence is a baseline requirement for a likeable character; we the audience want to know we aren’t wasting the time we spend with this person. Even a total everyman, the sort often played by Chris Pratt or James Stewart, must be exceptional in his ordinariness.

Autocrats of all sorts slot perfectly into this role. We love to follow monarchs, criminal kingpins, generals, iron-fisted bosses, or anyone else with the sole authority over their sphere of influence. The work of deal-making and consensus-building is mostly difficult and boring. A character keeps the plot moving when they can snap their fingers and make things happen. Each example reinforces the cultural imaginary: democracy dithers and gets nothing done, while autocracy forges boldly ahead.

I’m spending so much time on fiction not just because it’s my area of expertise, but because Yarvin and other Dark Enlightenment gurus started it. Star Wars is a foundational text for them. Pop culture references are the language these extremely online people share with each other, but I, a filthy progressive, speak that language too.

So, fiction trains people to believe that the best way to solve any problem is to find the right exceptional person and point them at it. What happens when the consumers of that fiction come to believe they are the exceptional people? Well, we get the second point.

Reason the second: Neo-reactionaries believe meritocracy failed them

If you weren’t paying close attention to the tech industry in the 2010s, you may not understand just how hard we jerked these people off for more than a decade. Media and venture capital joined forces to valorize the iconoclastic lone tech founder and the genius coders who supported them. This led to a lot of disparate outcomes, from Theranos to the belief that Elon Musk has ever known how anything works, but the upshot is that we swallowed every word any startup hacker said about making the world a better place.

The Silicon Valley Bank implosion and the mass layoffs of the early 2020s finally put the brakes on the hype train, but it’s still rolling today; the only difference is that Marc Andreessen won’t give you One William Dollars unless you say the words “AI-powered” first. But I’m losing the plot.

The point is that if a moderately talented coder at any point in the last 15 years wanted evidence that they were personally saving the world every day at work, they could find it anywhere they cared to look. Every day, it seemed, a Berkeley dropout wrote some lines of code that destroyed an entire industry. If they ever had anything to do with democratic politics, it was when they ran into regulatory obstacles. The conclusion is obvious: I am the protagonist, and the government is merely an obstacle on my hero’s journey.

It’s a short leap from here to imagining you could do the politicians’ jobs better than they could, which all Americans are primed to think anyway. Yet there remains no route for a genius coder to control the government, except by winning over voters in several consecutive elections. Why should I have to? the neo-reactionary thinks. Why can’t they just see my genius and follow me? Why is power still vested in the hands of these incompetent rubes who keep dragging our rightful god-kings before congressional inquiry panels?

This is when they find Curtis Yarvin and his intellectual allies. They take the longstanding idea — reinforced by fiction — that individual skill and talent should translate into power over others, and begin to turn it into an ideology.

However, this doesn’t explain the entire movement. Why should it also attract the J.D. Vances of the world, who came up through traditional Ivy League power channels? To answer that, I’ll have to complicate the Dark Enlightenment a bit, and delve into my own intellectual history at the same time.

Reason the third: Neo-reactionaries are sometimes right about the problems of society

As an insufferable college student, I went through a phase in which I believed Rene Descartes was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. I came to argue that the Enlightenment deprived our species of its essential connections to both each other and nature, forcing science and rationalism to answer questions they could not answer and fulfill roles they weren’t equipped to enact. I caught myself citing statistics about rising rates of mental illness, depression, and deaths of despair in developed countries.

To my own relief, and thanks to the inexhaustible patience of my friends and family, I grew beyond that phase to a view I hope is more nuanced: that modernity, while a good thing on balance, comes with trade-offs that should be anticipated and addressed. For example, when a new technology or trade agreement puts citizens of one community out of work, that community is morally obligated to invest in alternatives instead of hanging the disenfranchised out to dry.

But not everyone who goes through that phase makes it out — a fact which explains an important strain of neo-reactionary thought we haven’t explored much yet. You could call it the Vance school, as opposed to the Yarvin school. In the words of the Vanity Fair profile:

“Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class — a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime” — to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.”

This is the Trumpian side of the Dark Enlightenment. Adherents like Vance don’t care as much as Yarvin about arguing that dictatorship is the inherently superior form of government. Rather, they see a “Caesar” as necessary for a specific moment in America, in which the rights of the people they see as “real” have been captured and subordinated by the Cathedral. Later in that same story, Vance appears to get teary-eyed as he pleads that America’s choice is between a conservative dictator or forcing his children to grow up in a progressive hellscape.

Vance and others are drawn into the Dark Enlightenment because it’s occasionally correct about the trade-offs of modernity. I agree with them that technology erodes communities, whether it’s TVs keeping people home, cars making urban landscapes unlivable, or the internet spreading misinformation that turns us against our neighbors. They’re absolutely right that some people have enjoyed disproportionate benefits from globalization, while others have shouldered more than their share of the burdens. I even partly agree about the so-called crisis of masculinity; while it’s asinine to blame women or feminism for any of it, the rise of Andrew Tate clearly indicates that something is deeply wrong with boys and men.

Here’s where we differ: the neo-reactionaries claim that nobody is talking about these problems. I counter that scores of people all over the place are talking about these problems. However, since all those people are leftists, academics, feminists, and/or Democratic elected officials, nobody who tilts even slightly rightward will give them the time of day. You truly have to be wearing blinders to think that the only people still imagining utopias are the ones who want those utopias to be run as joint-stock corporations by all-powerful CEOs.

Most of us have problems with the world as it is, and want to imagine a better one. But the most powerful utopias are those dreamt by the people at the bottom of the ladder. If you’re on top — say, if you’re an investor with an Ivy League degree, or a software developer making a massive salary — you probably aren’t inclined to listen to, or even notice, those on the bottom. That creates the illusion that Curtis Yarvin is the only one talking about how to build a better world.

Reason the fourth: Disagreeing with neo-reactionaries proves them right

According to the Behind the Bastards podcast episode on Yarvin, followers who discovered him during his Mencius Moldbug period would pass his links around like illicit drugs. Check out what this guy’s saying, they’d tell each other, but don’t let anyone know you’re reading it.

The lure of forbidden fruit is the final piece of the cultural puzzle. Not only was someone telling right-leaning business elites that they deserved to run the world, but they were dispensing their arguments as hidden knowledge, concealed from the scolding persecution of the Cathedral. There’s no substitute for the rush of thinking you’ve discovered something nobody else knows.

The reason neo-reactionary arguments are so often flimsy, circular, ill-defined, or directly contradictory is that — much like the flat-earthers — it’s a movement against, not a movement for. Much of Yarvin’s work boils down to saying the most offensive thing he can think of, then arguing that it must be true because people get mad at him for saying it. In fact, since Yarvin’s father worked for the State Department, it may aid understanding to add the phrase “What do you think of that, DAD!?” to the end of every sentence he’s ever typed.

The neo-reactionary sense of persecuted rightness is buoyed by their solutions being so much simpler than the ones democracy always tries. Why does America need all these branches of government when a CEO could run things so much more efficiently? Why is the Cathedral trying to suppress the obvious solution of putting a dictator in charge? The idea of a “social construct” is too confusing to grasp — why bother when we can simply argue that race and gender derive from immutable biological truths?

To sum up, the Cathedral is not simply one component of the Dark Enlightenment belief system — it is the belief system. If you believe there’s a way things should naturally be, and things are not that way, then there must be some force bending the world out of its proper shape. Fighting nature is evil, so anything the outside force disagrees with must be good.

Can we fight this?

As long as there has been oppression, there have been spurious arguments justifying oppression. Those arguments have always been most attractive to people already in positions of power who are trying to grub more of it to themselves. Sometimes that power is conferred by wealth, and sometimes by membership in a privileged race or sex, but the trend is the same.

As Donald Trump shows us every day, you can be the most powerful person in the world and still throw tantrums about all the things you can’t do. We might fairly say that the most corrupting influence of power is its false promise.

Neo-reactionaries are so used to power that they’re unable to conceive of a system where they don’t hold it. In their visions of utopian city-states run by enlightened CEO-kings, they’re always in charge or close to the palace; they’re never the peasants whose only inalienable right is the freedom to flee. They cannot imagine a mad tyrant who would persecute them.

Another of my favorite podcasters, Jamie Jeffers of The British History Podcast, said something while discussing the Norman conquests that has never left me. “Strength isn’t an inherent quality. It’s a temporary condition. If you create a world that isn’t safe for the weak, eventually you create a world that isn’t safe for you.”

That’s why I think the only valuable ideas about utopia come from the people with the fewest advantages in our current system. I’m not interested in people from the top 1% explaining why they deserve to be in the top 0.01%. If we want to fight the Dark Enlightenment, we need to amplify the voices of the women, people of color, working-class people, disabled people, and all the other marginalized populations who have been screaming at us the whole time about how to create a better world. Shockingly, you won’t find many of them arguing that the markers society already uses to confer privilege should confer even more privilege.

The neo-reactionary movement is a temper tantrum that has gone on far longer than it should have. Some people might be swayed toward it if they believe Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Michael Anissimov really are the only people asking how we can build a better world — so it’s imperative that we use our own imaginations to fight back against their rancid dreams.

Cultural Imaginaries: An Attempt to Explain Muskian Fascism

Why blog about Elon Musk? Isn’t paying any attention playing into his hands?

I admit that it’s partly because he’s so thin-skinned and terminally online that there’s a non-zero chance he’ll actually read this, and I’d relish even an unlikely opportunity to remind him just how divorced he really is.

But the bigger reason is that I deal with stressful situations by putting them in context, and the entire nation — at least the segment of the population whose brains still function — are currently being forced through an extremely stressful situation, by people who have basically no talents except raising everyone’s blood pressure simultaneously. So. Consider this my first way of fighting back.

As I write this, Musk, Hand of the King to his gibbering uncle Donald, is engaged in a crusade against the federal workforce, transparently targeting agencies that make business more difficult for the companies he owns. Neither of them have any authority to do any of this, and are accordingly taking L after L in the courts, but they’re still capable of doing a lot of damage before being restrained.

The question of how we got here is non-trivial, so I’m narrowing my focus to figuring out precisely what elements of American culture produced someone like Musk. The wisdom goes that political change usually follows social change — the government tends to respond to what the people want, even if the people don’t necessarily know they want it. Like the hapless Ray Stantz in Ghostbusters, a lot of us had to think of the Stay Puft Muskmallow Man before he appeared. So what have we been thinking?

Edison Selling Teslas

I don’t believe anyone has ever failed upward harder and faster than Elon Musk. Born into an emerald-mining family that directly profited off the cheap labor of black South Africans oppressed by Apartheid, Musk enjoys posing as a self-made man despite having approximately no skills. His modus operandi is to use his vast wealth to buy companies, then, through relentless self-promotion, tout any achievement of those companies as a personal achievement of Musk himself. In this endeavor, he is all too often aided by a simperingly compliant media, ready to declare that “Elon Musk” did something that was actually done by real engineers at Neuralink or SpaceX or whatever.

Much has been made of Musk idolizing Nikola Tesla but having far more in common with Thomas Edison. It’s abundantly clear that when one of Musk’s companies achieves something — which Starlink, SpaceX, and Tesla have admittedly done — it’s in spite of his presence, not because of it. SpaceX employees have openly said that it’s much easier to get things done when Musk is distracted by another shiny object, and some of his companies even allegedly have full-time people whose only job is to occupy Musk’s attention whenever he shows up at headquarters.

In short, the man is the perfect encapsulation of the internet age: image is everything, substance is nothing. I don’t know how else to describe someone who literally paid another person to level up his character in a video game, then pretended he did it himself. Despite having fewer actual talents than the average Kevin James character, he is time and time again handed larger and larger things to ruin. It was only a matter of time before the only place left to fail up to was the U.S. government.

There is a danger in focusing too much on Musk. Evidence is mounting that he’s a bouncing ball meant to keep us distracted from all the heinous things done by everybody else in the Trump 2.0 administration. But I’m after him anyway because I’m interested in the currents that led him to his apparently inexplicable position. To me, the most important factors have to do with a concept called cultural imaginaries.

Cultural Imaginaries

In sociology, an “imaginary” is a set of connected beliefs that defines how an in-group sees itself in relation to nearby out-groups. The imaginary is what makes us us, and what makes us different from them. A cultural imaginary, therefore, is when a set of shared beliefs defines an in-group through the lens of cultural practices. The word “imaginary” is here used to mean made up of images: it’s based on vibes, aesthetics, and repeated memes, not necessarily on what actually happens.

Because of their haziness, imaginaries are naturally aspirational. We are who we are because of what we want — and those people are different because they want something different. Once you understand this, you’ll find hundreds of examples of imaginaries within arm’s reach. We American conservatives want a prosperous nation of independent thinkers; those liberals want the state to control everything. We true Europeans have proud and respectable traditions; those shifty immigrants teach their children to lie and steal. We National Socialists want Germany to be strong again, but those shifty Jews want to profit off your weakness. And so on.

I’m not trying to suggest that left-wing sociocultural groups are immune to such thinking — every social group, and indeed every country, is in some sense defined by an imaginary. But since modern liberalism embraces pluralism (or at least it should), cultural imaginaries are lately far easier to spot on the right.

They’re also, to my mind, a direct source of its current political strength. Thinkers like Roger Griffin and George Mosse have argued that understanding fascism demands “seeing fascism as it saw itself.” By this argument, fascist movements from Mussolini to MAGA arise because they claim ownership of broadly popular imaginaries. Perhaps the simplest is the idea of “strength,” but there are myriad other things that massive swaths of people can define themselves by wanting:

The continuation of an older cultural tradition perceived as more virtuous (“We must preserve our pure Viking heritage”)An end to political corruption (“Those career politicians can’t represent us because they’re not like us”)A meaningful life connected to nature (“Cities are corrupt and filthy, but a country boy can survive”)The alleged benefits of older forms of social organization (“Actually, being tradwives is freeing for women”)The identification of a culture with a language (“Real Americans speak English”)

Intelligent people often scratch their heads about why anyone would be attracted to fascism. Viewed from the outside, fascism demands the persecution of an out-group, and thus must continue narrowing the in-group until either the government is overthrown or nobody is left. Only an idiot would opt into a deal like that.

What we miss is that this isn’t how the fascists see themselves. They win adherents by laying claims to things that lots of people like. A modern center-left feminist may not think he wants anyone to become a tradwife, but he’ll make cottagecore moodboards and romanticize the past all the same. Imaginaries are deeply and powerfully rooted. And in a culture where everything has to be communicated to hundreds of millions of people, the simplest, most appealing aesthetics will spread the farthest.

What This Has To Do With Elon Musk

In modern America, few cultural imaginaries have more staying power than that of the self-made man. We define ourselves as a nation where anybody can get ahead with hard work and talent, with two important corollaries: anybody who’s struggling must not be working hard enough, and anybody who does get ahead must be hard-working and talented in proportion with how far ahead they get.

This is an extremely attractive image for obvious reasons — it removes the pernicious influence of chance from each person’s life. Like a video game, you’ll get out exactly what you put in. The role of chance, as John Rawls’s “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment shows us, is the reason we must create just societies (one might even say diverse, equitable, and inclusive ones). The self-made man imaginary mocks the very idea that we owe anything to each other. Yet people still buy into it, because it’s comforting to imagine being part of a video-game culture where grinding is all it takes to become a superman.

This imaginary combines well with the older and more powerful idea that culture is a product of culture heroes. The great go first and inspire us to emulate them, which leads to a society constructed in their images. Put these together and you’ll understand why people are constantly searching for their favorite celebrities’ net worth — if the figure who leads your culture has the most money, it means your culture is winning.

It also explains why everyone is constantly asking about Elon Musk’s rules for a successful life, despite it being plain to see he doesn’t have any. (For one thing, a successful life would mean he’d still be married and all his kids would still talk to him.) We assume that if someone is rich, they must have something to teach us; consequently, if someone is poor or even middle-class, they can’t have much to say.

Looking at it this way, it was inevitable that we’d eventually get to a point where the world’s richest man, who has nothing to offer, would be in charge of firing thousands of public servants with specialized skill sets and distinguished careers. It was inevitable from the moment we started praising Musk for successful SpaceX launches and Tesla rollouts, instead of the people who actually designed and built the rockets and cars. It may have been inevitable from the moment we started praising generals for winning battles, instead of their troops.

If asked directly, I don’t think a majority of Americans would say they wanted an inexperienced billionaire to smash up the federal workforce with no long-term plan. Musk’s cratering poll numbers tell that story well enough. But many of the people now disapproving of Musk really did want him where he is now. They asked for him by longing to imagine themselves in a culture where the smartest, strongest people got the farthest, and you could identify your heroes by their personal fortunes. The imaginary is attractive in its simplicity and brutally effective. For society to progress, we need something to counter it.

Imagining Something Else

It’s a cliche to say that we should be praising teachers and firefighters instead of CEOs and movie stars, but cultural imaginaries are just cliches people don’t roll their eyes at. The only imaginaries compatible with an advanced society are the ones that praise the common folk.

Right now, Americans who devote their entire lives to making one system work for everyone who encounters it are seen as stuffy dullards at best and conniving villains at worst. There’s nothing to respect about a civil servant unless they contrive to become a superhero. Trump and Musk and their ilk seem fundamentally baffled by the idea that somebody would choose to work for lower pay in a role that helps people. That’s probably why Republicans, going back to Reagan, assume bureaucrats must be constantly skimming money on the side — otherwise, they can’t understand why everyone isn’t in the private sector.

The big difficulty with forming a counter-imaginary, as I see it, is that praising the work of professionals and public servants makes it hard for heroes to emerge. Present a cultural imaginary without heroes, and people think you want to trap them in mediocrity. But the heroes of big business have dramatic life stories punctuated by soaring successes and dizzying (and usually self-inflicted) failures. Most of us can only dream of the strength it takes a single mother of three to work two jobs to provide for her kids, but while we may acknowledge her, we’re also privately afraid of becoming her.

It’s the same with Musk, but in reverse. We can’t get rid of him until people stop wanting to be him. It reflects a problem progressives have had for the whole last century — individualist traditionalism evokes images of country manors, while community-minded socialism conjures drab concrete apartment blocks.

I don’t have a perfect solution, but I think it’ll start with something like this: the rise of a new cultural imaginary that ties beauty to community and heroism to uplifting those around you. We need stories and images to argue that people can be part of a reciprocal network of obligations without being swallowed by it — and, of course, we need those networks to actually live up to the promise in real life.

It’s clear that we won’t get through this administration without some collective idea of what a better world looks like. We can’t just wish for none of this to have happened; we have to keep our eyes on a far green country under a swift sunrise.

In winter (we read in John Crowley’s Little, Big), summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. I know how hard it is to picture a bright future when the present feels like it’s always getting worse — believe me, that’s my daily struggle, and was even before the election. But in American history, times of upheaval are the best opportunity for dramatic reforms. If we can find that new imaginary, I have faith that this time, we can change things for the better without the civil war.

A Socialist View of “Perfect Days”

I recently saw the Oscar-nominated film Perfect Days at the urging of multiple family members. Directed by Wim Wenders, an auteur I frequently pretend to have heard of at parties, the film stars Japanese screen legend Koji Yakusho as Hirayama, a middle-aged man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. As the movie unfolds over two hours, Hirayama’s meticulous daily routines are upended by various interferences — his co-worker needs money, his niece appears out of the blue, he may be developing feelings for a bar owner, and so on.

Any of these could serve as the hook for a movie of their own, but none of them develop to crowd out the others. In an exceptionally realistic way, life simply goes on. In fact, while watching Perfect Days, I found myself thinking that the camera could have wandered away from Hirayama in any scene, following another character into an equally compelling narrative. This is not meant to denigrate the story we do see; I just mean that Wenders’s depiction of everyday life ennobles everybody who crosses before the camera.

I liked it a lot, in other words. However, I recently came across a review by Eileen Jones in Jacobin which challenged my reaction. Normally I enjoy Jones’s work — she’s one of the best working reviewers for pointing out which emperors have no clothes (for example, she was one of the few critics to lambast Oppenheimer). But I think that she missed the mark on Perfect Days, and moreover, that she could have better represented Jacobin’s socialist perspective.

Jones’s review argues that Hirayama’s spare, minimalist existence does not resemble any real working-class lifestyle. Most people with minimum wage jobs cannot afford to eat every dinner at a restaurant (as Hirayama does), visit a public bathhouse every afternoon (as Hirayama does, though this may be more affordable in Japan), or own a van better stocked with toilet-cleaning equipment than John Wick’s basement is with guns. Poor people have families to feed. They’re often in debt. They may be too disabled to work, surviving off meager government assistance.

In Jones’s own words: “Rich people can afford to have that one perfect sweater that wears like iron and always looks wonderful, among their other well-made and lovingly maintained objects, which have aesthetic status as well as lasting functionality. Working-class people are inclined to live in more confined spaces and have a lot of crap heaped up all over the place. Their belongings tend to be cheap and always breaking down or wearing out fast and having to be replaced by more crap, and there’s so much pressure involved in making a living, just keeping things in any kind of rough order is tough. Nobody’s sitting around lovingly tending their one precious object per shelf.”

Jones goes on to assert that rich people love to imagine how simple and carefree their lives would be if they were virtuously poor. This didn’t start with Marie Kondo — I remember guffawing with members of my freshman seminar about Seneca advising a wealthy Roman to set aside a wing of his mansion where he can practice being poor. These fantasies can become politically pernicious: if the poor demand better wages, the rich can accuse them of being too spiritually impure to be happy with less.

It’s a compelling argument, and it may do something to explain the festival-circuit success of Perfect Days. However, Jones has failed to mention a pivotal sequence that upends the perception of the film as a minimalist fantasy for the well-off.

Toward the end of the movie, Hirayama’s co-worker Takashi abruptly quits the toilet-cleaning gig minutes before the start of his shift. With no time to find a replacement, Hirayama’s unseen boss tells him he’ll have to hit twice as many bathrooms. It’s unnerving enough to see Hirayama yelling into a cell phone — in stark contrast to his usual monastic serenity — but it’s just a taste of what’s to come.

By this point the viewer has come to know Hirayama’s routine almost as well as Hirayama himself must. He cleans each bathroom carefully, pauses for a lunch break at a shrine, takes pictures of trees, searches for plants to bring home, occasionally helps a passer-by, and finishes with time to relax in the bath and then enjoy dinner. However, because of the whims of his faceless employers, he no longer has room to enjoy any of that. Even by rushing through each cleaning, jettisoning the pride he usually takes in a spotless toilet, he still can’t finish before dark.

This sequence is the heart of the film. It tells us that Hirayama’s ability to thrive on his routines doesn’t derive from being some sort of unique saint. Rather, his contentment is founded on having the time and space to become content. If he had to take a second job, or come back home to keep house for a family, or do any of the hundred other things the global working class must do to stay afloat, his routine would squeeze out all his appreciation for life, like pulp from an orange.

More than any other character, Hirayama reminds me of Platon Karataev, the Russian peasant who makes a brief but vital appearance toward the end of War and Peace. Karataev teaches Pierre Bezukhov his philosophy of loving the suffering that defines life — half Stoic, half Buddhist. Though Karataev’s teaching finally provides Pierre an answer to lifelong dilemmas about how he should live, Pierre proves more comfortable with an image of Karataev than with the man himself. As Karataev grows ever sicker from a festering wound, Pierre begins to avoid him. In the end, he doesn’t even see the moment his friend dies.

The death of Karataev and the double-shift sequence of Perfect Days lead us to the same conclusion. Eileen Jones is right that the upper classes love a working-class saint — look how the peasants sing as they labor! — but you can’t transform a person into a symbol without doing incalculable violence to that person’s humanity. Hirayama’s boss may have thought that he wouldn’t mind working a double shift, since he loves cleaning toilets so much. In a movie so concerned with the humanity of every character, that dehumanization is the greatest crime.

So, what’s the message? Everybody needs time off. Everybody needs a wage on which they can not just live but thrive — nobody should be forced to sell precious possessions just to fuel up their van. Finding contentment like Hirayama does should be a choice, not a demand we make on the working class. In a society that paid toilet cleaners $30 an hour for a four-day work week, Hirayama’s zen existence wouldn’t be an anomaly that set off Eileen Jones’s BS detector. It’d just be existence.

My Top 20 Onion Articles

I’ve been reading The Onion since it had a print edition, which was in the era when “fake news” was still a genre of comedy and not a direct threat to democracy. When you crank out as much material as The Onion has over the past few decades, much of it is bound to fall flat, but there are just as many triumphs. On a lark, I recently tried to list my 10 favorite articles, only to quickly come up with 20.

Surprisingly, very few of them are directly political: my hot take is that The Onion, much like Saturday Night Live, is a lot funnier when it isn’t trying to be relevant. Instead, these articles delve into the weirder, goofier, and more creative side of fake news.

Here’s my list with links, presented in no particular order. Once you’ve read, I’d love to hear about yours.

Frustrated Novelist No Good At Describing Hands

No matter how many times I read it, novelist Edward Milligan’s awful attempts to comprehend human appendages utterly slay me. From “glorious gripping machine” to “bony ball-sticks” to “flabby pink-tan logs, but a bendy kind of log,” the hits come thick and fast. I also felt a deep sympathy with Milligan’s use of shortcuts, like populating entire stories with amputees, or asking Philip Roth to explain how he does hands.

Milligan is one of The Onion‘s recurring characters, also featured in “Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out.”

BREAKING: Imperial Inspector To Arrive By Railcar This Very Afternoon

I love when The Onion does worldbuilding, and this one makes me more certain than ever that someone on staff is working on a fantasy novel. There aren’t really any jokes, except the overall joke that this was printed in a newspaper at all, but there are so many enticing details that I don’t care. Who is the Captain of the Dragoons? How does the Imperial Inspector’s young bride feel about being wed to “a severe man not given to humor”? Has the Armada really been as successful in the provinces as the propaganda would have us believe? And what one mistake by our protagonist will condemn his hometown, beginning an adventure that will take them to the very heart of the imperial fortress?

My Reclining Squirrel Kung Fu Stance Is Eminently Defeatable

OK, there’s only one joke in this, but goddamn if it isn’t hilarious. Quaking Rodent, Master of Losing at Kung Fu, taunts his rival Stunted Duckling with florid boasts about how much he, Quaking Rodent, sucks at martial arts. If you’re not howling by the line “I have journeyed for almost a day, detouring several miles to avoid the frighteningly high bridge over the Yue Jiang river,” you will be by the time Rodent admits to killing his own master.

I’ve Never Been So Accurately Insulted In All My Life

I admit I mostly find this funny because my cousin once read the whole thing to me in a note-perfect snooty character voice — Kelsey Grammer couldn’t have done a better reading of lines like “You sliced me to helpless ribbons, the English language your scalpel!” Since then, it’s a rare Chapman family gathering that goes by without someone saying “lose 30 to 35 pounds!”

Deciding Vote On Wetlands Preservation Bill Rests With The Littlest Senator

The best Onion articles are the ones that commit to a bit and ride it all the way to the end, and few do it better than the tale of Rhode Island Senator Dwight Q. Peabody. Though the big, mean senators bully him, Peabody finds his courage and learns that the littlest senator can make the biggest difference of all.

Ask An Elderly Black Woman As Depicted By A Sophomore Creative Writing Major

I’ve read submissions for a few issues of a literary magazine, and you’d better believe I’ve met Mrs. D’Lulah Jessups more than once. This article nails the specific cocktail of paternalism and performative allyship that arises when writers without imagination or life experience try to tackle weighty issues. Fictional author Brian Kirby gives Mrs. Jessups a grating dialect, an endless supply of southern-fried cliches, and a cheerful subservience to her employers.

Kirby’s satisfaction with his own open-mindedness oozes riotously from every line of “The Sun Behind the Sky.” I can easily imagine him sitting down at his keyboard after reading about the George Floyd protests, deciding to solve this gosh-darn race problem once and for all. It’s an expansion of my favorite ever entry in the Lyttle Lytton Contest: “‘Your life matters!’ I cried in solidarity, tenderly hugging the POC.”

Nation Afraid To Admit 9-Year-Old Disabled Poet Really Bad

Take note, conservatives: this is an example of actual transgressive comedy done right. It works because, while we’re invited to laugh at Luke Petrowski’s execrable poems, he’s not the ultimate butt of the joke. The article’s true targets are the hordes of well-meaning adults who flock to put Luke on a pedestal and refuse to engage with his work on its own merits. It reminds me of The Fault In Our Stars, which also points out the dehumanizing nature of the “inspirational sick child” trope.

Veteran Cop Gets Along Great With Rookie Partner

Nothing too special here — just an article challenging itself to take the piss out of as many police movie tropes as possible in 800 words. Vincent Tate’s unorthodox methods and lack of a drinking problem pair perfectly with Jason Hepplewhite’s fancy education and lack of a tragic backstory. I haven’t laughed so hard at a pair of cops since Danson and Highsmith leapt to their deaths in The Other Guys.

Mel Brooks Starts Nonprofit Foundation To Save Word ‘Schmuck’

This one is in here entirely because of the “5K Schlep for Schmuck Awareness.”

Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To ‘Quantum Flux’

OK, I may be slightly biased toward the ones about writers, but this is just so dang funny. Writing a novel without an outline is a dangerous activity, and Gabriel Fournier’s over-reliance on quantum flux to solve all his self-inflicted problems spirals rapidly out of control. It’s even funnier when he tries to pretend he did it all on purpose for thematic reasons. I have to admit, though, that I’m curious about what will happen at the end of A Flux Quantum.

I’m Sure That Out-Of-Control Water-Skier Will Avoid Our Outdoor Wedding

The tale of Penelope Stodgeworthy’s soon-to-be interrupted wedding is one of the rarest things an Onion article can be: truly heartwarming. Penelope builds tension by describing her increasingly precarious nuptials, then releases it in one gloriously long sentence that reveals she never wanted to marry Walter Priss in the first place — and gives her one more chance at happiness with her working-class lover Patrick.

‘The Case, Mr. Kerry, Give Me The Case,’ Demands Malaysian Ambassador Holding Dangling John Kerry From Petronas Towers Skybridge

For a while, The Onion was doing a bit where Secretary of State John Kerry was an international man of action and intrigue who fought tyrannical Russian oligarchs and seduced Arabian princesses. Every single one of these articles is gold, from Kerry disguising himself as Vladimir Putin’s masseur to saving his Moroccan companion Drumstick from quicksand. This one stands in for all of them because it’s fun to shout “The case, Mr. Kerry! Give me the case!”

You Shall Make An Excellent Queen

Most of The Onion‘s regular contributors are hit-or-miss for me, but one never wore out his welcome: Gorzo the Mighty, Emperor of the Universe. After taking over the universe sometime in the 30s, Gorzo lives only to destroy his nemesis Crash Comet, Space Commander From The Year 2000. In this thrilling vignette, Crash Comet rudely crashes Gorzo’s joyous marriage ceremony (in what I’ve just realized is the second fucked-up wedding on the list).

Love On A Budget

We can’t forget the other greatest regular contributor: Smoove B, Love Man. Smoove’s bit is that no matter what he starts out talking about, his columns always degenerate into long descriptions of elaborate dates that culminate in him freaking his woman doggy-style. In this column, Smoove finds himself short on cash and must treat his one true woman to a picnic and sneaking into a drive-in movie.

Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle With Cancer

I’ve always imagined that cancer patients, much like members of the armed forces, get tired of people constantly praising their bravery. If that’s true, reading this article must be cathartic for them. Russ Kunkel may be so deeply craven that his four-month prognosis turns out to be wildly optimistic, but in his own way, he’s taking a brave stand by refusing to conform to expectations.

If You Want To Date My Daughter, You’re Going To Have To Date Me First

I find the whole “shotgun dad” meme to be absurdly creepy and off-putting, so this article was a breath of fresh air. Lloyd Rutledge refuses to let his daughter Katie date until he’s dated the boy himself to make sure he’s worthy. It’s a lot more commitment than just threatening to shoot the date, and I commend Lloyd for it.

Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On Technicality

The Onion‘s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Bonus points for the perfect picture.

Oh, Area Man’s Aching Back

Where would The Onion be without Area Man? As newspapers become steadily less local, Area Man has become an anachronism, but he still resides in our hearts as the lackluster everyman hero of a hundred Onion articles. I like to think of him as Florida Man’s slightly quieter brother.

Ask A High-School Student Who Didn’t Do The Required Reading

“I would say that using animals to represent communists was a pretty good idea, because, historically, communists tried to do a lot of animalistic things, like aim nuclear bombs at America, and that is like something an animal on a farm might do.”

The Definitive Ranking Of Everyone In This Chinese Dragon Costume

I’m cheating a bit to get to 20, because this isn’t actually an Onion article — it’s from sister site Clickhole, which mocks clickbait sites like Buzzfeed. This is some of Clickhole’s best work. Not a week goes by when I don’t find some opportunity to say “Being in the dragon is about being part of a team” or “Listen, Gene, this isn’t a fucking conga line.”

Thanks for reading! And let me know if the Imperial Inspector guy ever writes that novel.

100 Alternate Histories

I love alternate history. It’s not even entirely a writer thing — just a really fun hobby. Nothing beats getting together with a bunch of history-buff friends and wiling away a dinner or a road trip trying to figure out what would have happened if Genghis Khan was a woman or France won the space race.

Alternate history is simple. You pick an inflection point, either a discrete event or a larger trend, and imagine it going a different way than it really did. Since a great deal of history comes down to happenstance and chaos theory, there’s a lot of fodder for believable new worlds here.

With that said, I’m going to get fired from my own blog if I don’t start complaining by the third paragraph, so here’s what bothers me. In popular culture, “alternate history” is far too identified with two specific hinge points: the South winning the American Civil War, and the Axis Powers winning World War II. I’m sick to death of both of these. They’re overdone, and worse, the only possible outcomes involve horrific suffering for ethnic minorities.

I’m not opposed to imagining how things could have gone worse — it’s always nice to remember that we don’t actually live in the Darkest Timeline — but those two alternate histories are played out to the point where they’ve become a common shelter for actual racists.

But good news! There’s a fractally infinite amount of history out there. So, whether you’re writing a story or just looking for a conversation starter, I thought I’d share 100 of my favorite pivot points to kickstart your alt-history imaginings. Here goes (arranged in roughly chronological order).

Homo sapiens evolves on Pangaea.Due to a paleolithic mutation, human fatty tissue stops accumulating heavy metals, so lead and mercury are no longer toxic.Agriculture does not become widespread after the end of the Younger Dryas.Humans never domesticate dogs.Humans never domesticate horses.Humans domesticate bears.The land bridge to North America is never discovered.Minoan civilization survives to interact with classical Greece.Siddhartha Gautama lives and dies as a minor noble functionary.The teachings of Confucius never receive official sanction in China.Xerxes conquers Greece.Socrates escapes from prison and writes several books of philosophy from exile.Phoenician sailors reach the Americas in 350 BCE.Researchers at the Library of Alexandria develop the printing press.Alexander the Great’s empire does not disintegrate.Hannibal sacks and destroys Rome.Germanicus Caesar survives to become emperor.Saul of Tarsus never converts to Christianity.Qin Shi Huang succeeds in establishing a long-term dynasty.China establishes diplomatic and trade relations with the Roman Empire.Julian the Apostate successfully re-establishes Roman paganism.Instead of Christianity, the Cult of Antinous becomes the Roman state religion.Emperor Aurelian ends the Crisis of the Third Century.Stilicho reunites the Eastern and Western Empires.The Council of Nicea never occurs, leaving the Church as a loose network of several competing creeds.The Roman recipe for mixing concrete is never lost.Al-Rahman defeats Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours and annexes France for the Umayyads.Scandinavians colonize Vinland in large numbers.Pope Leo IX resolves the Great Schism instead of aggravating it.Rebels unseat William the Conqueror and return England to Saxon rule.The White Ship returns to land safely.The Crusader States are entrenched by repeated battlefield victories in the Holy Land.Young Henry overthrows his father, Henry II, becoming king in place of Richard I.The Vivaldi Brothers arrive in North America.The Mongols invade and conquer Japan.Ogodei Khan survives, allowing the Mongols to continue invading Europe in 1223.The Bubonic Plague mutates into a more harmless strain soon after first appearing in Europe.Urban VI wins over the cardinals and prevents the Avignon schism.The Malians are the first to reach North America.First contact is made by Haudenosaunee sailing east.Before 1492, the population of the Americas is inoculated against Eurasian diseases by prior plagues.North America is settled from west to east by colonists from Asia.Henry VI refuses to marry Margaret of Anjou.Martin Luther’s protests lead to reform instead of a split between Catholics and Protestants.The Ottomans win the Battle of Lepanto.Atahualpa evades capture by Pizarro at the Battle of Cajamarca thanks to the Inca developing gunpowder from guano deposits.The Northwest Passage exists, and is discovered by John Cabot.Ivan the Terrible resists killing his son, leading to a much stronger succession.Cheap, effective birth control becomes widely available in 16th-century Europe.Yi Sun-Sin falls in battle, allowing the Japanese to conquer Joseon Korea.Martin Frobisher discovers rich gold mines in Greenland.The Spanish mount a ground invasion of England in 1588.William Shakespeare’s contemporaries do not save copies of his plays.The Dutch refuse to sell New Amsterdam to England.The English Commonwealth establishes a stable succession plan, making Charles the last king of England.Metacomet defeats the New England Confederation in 1675.The Ottomans capture Vienna in 1683.Enlightenment philosophers become obsessed with Arabic thought instead of Greek and Roman.Instead of tea, cannabis becomes the British Empire’s import of choice from India.Catherine the Great’s coup against her husband Peter III fails.Revolutionary France does not declare war on Austria.The Thirteen Colonies win independence from Britain without ever uniting into one political body.George Washington is killed by a stray bullet while leading troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.Napoleon decides not to invade Russia.Fear of the Haitian Revolution leads the United States to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in 1804.The United States surrenders to Britain in the War of 1812 and becomes a Crown colony again.Simon Bolivar succeeds in establishing the state of Gran Colombia.The cotton gin is never invented.The sewing machine is never invented.The June Rebellion of 1832 overthrows King Louis Philippe.The Great Famine leads to an Irish revolt that shakes confidence in Queen Victoria’s government, causing Britain to revolt in 1848.Russia revolts against the Tsar in 1848.Hong Xiuquan does not assassinate Yang Xiuqing; maintaining unity, the Taiping Rebellion overthrows the Qing Dynasty.France defeats Mexico at the Battle of Puebla.Abraham Lincoln survives and presides over a much stronger Reconstruction effort that withstands the Southern backlash.Chester Arthur works against the Civil Service act, keeping the U.S. patronage system in place.Thomas Edison consolidates power over the film industry and keeps it in New Jersey.Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower project is a success.The American government does not break up Standard Oil.Anastasia Romanov survives and becomes a rallying point for the White Army.Woodrow Wilson suffers his stroke two years earlier, preventing the United States from joining World War I.J.R.R. Tolkien dies at the Battle of the Somme.The Treaty of Versailles does not hold Germany responsible for the war, and demands no reparation payments.The anti-treaty faction wins the Irish Civil War and continues fighting the Crown.Lenin has Stalin killed shortly before his own death in 1923.Charles Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic in a dirigible, reigniting interest in lighter-than-air flight.The 1933 attempt on Franklin Roosevelt’s life is successful.Instead of a nonviolent independence movement, the British Raj in India is overthrown by a violent revolution.Instead of attacking Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japan signs a peace agreement with the United States.The 1944 attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life is successful.In 1945, a spy network distributes the secrets of nuclear weapons to dozens of nations worldwide.Britain, France, and the U.S. do not merge their zones of control in Germany.The postwar Jewish homeland is established in Suriname.The Soviet Union is the first to put a man on the moon in 1968.Instead of space, the US and USSR become embroiled in a race to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.Martin Luther King Jr. is not assassinated and continues working as a labor organizer.Richard Nixon escapes consequences for the Watergate scandal.Jimmy Carter defeats Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.The US government locks down the internet as a military secret, preventing any civilian access.Acting on allied intelligence, the Bush administration intercepts al-Qaeda and prevents the 9/11 attacks.

I hope those jumpstart some interesting thoughts! If you liked this list, please share a few of your own — especially in areas outside of Europe and North America where my knowledge is less strong.