The Kominsky Method (2018-2021)

TV shows used to give work for actors at the beginning or at end of their careers. Jumping board for young unknowns, retirement shelter for washed-up has-beens. Their entertainment value was accordingly measured. That has shifted (to realize how much, check how many of the first X-files episodes you can watch and compare the experience with what you get from a just below-average show of today). Although it's old news that TV shows have caught up with feature films in prestige and surpassed them in quality, it's still quite rare, and therefore feels special, when an A-movie actor appears in one. 

Rolf&Alexandra Becker: Dickie Dick Dickens

Dear listeners, don't forget to turn on your radios next time to follow the spectacular, sensational, and astonishing adventures of the most dangerous man in America, Dickie Dick Dickens!

- with these words and a cliffhanger ends every episode of the story of a larger-than-life thief who rises to be the most famous gangster of the 1920s Chicago, if not the world.

Charles Wheelan: Naked Money (2017)

For many years, Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist and its sequel, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, were my favorite go-to books when I wanted to remind myself of the basics behind some current economic phenomena. My only formal education in the field was a 2-semester, 4 hours per week, economics course at university, which taught me exactly a handful of primary school-level equations with acronyms whose meanings I didn't know even during the exams I passed. (I don't want to be unduly harsh to those professors, so hanging them for wasting hundreds of thousands of hours of young lives I wouldn't recommend. Just fire them ceremoniously.)

 

Robert Wright: Why Buddhism Is True Book (2017)

Earlier I admitted that, although I'm generally, albeit moderately, interested in Buddhism, I can only really appreciate books on the topic from Western authors. Since then, my snobbism has raised to new heights (or sunk to new lows), as nowadays I can only digest the rare Buddhist books from Western scientists. I think the reason is that with something both so subjective and abstract, even very smart people can get carried away by wishful thinking, confirmation bias, or just insufficient training in critical thinking. A scientist is trained to avoid logical fallacies, to think in probabilities rather than certainties, and to distrust even beautiful theories until they are confirmed by data. They are not infallible, but at least more immune to self-deception.

Michael Shermer: Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist (2019)

Should Intelligent Design be taught alongside evolution in public schools? What sort of government should we set up on future Mars colonies? Should Nazi speech be banned? What's the story with Jordan Peterson? Does the scientific community stifle dissenting voices of mavericks? Could the monuments at Göbekli Tepe be the legacy of a great civilization predating every other we currently know about? Would the ban on assault weapons decrease the number of mass murders in America?

Michael Shermer's new book is a collection of 27 of his essays over a wide range of topics as the examples above suggest. They focus on religion, politics, humanism, controversial intellectuals, and most of all, the primacy of free speech.

Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven (2013)

On July 24, 1984, Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter were brutally murdered in their Utah home by Berta's brothers-in-law, Dan and Ron Lafferty. The sequence of events that led to the tragic death of Brenda and Erica was set in motion in 1829 in Palmyra, when a man named Joseph Smith, avowedly inspired by an angel of the Lord, set off to write his own book of revelations. Nine months later the Book of Mormon rolled off the printing press for the first time.

George Hawley: Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (2016)

The mainstream American conservative movement was founded in the 50s by a patrician young man named William F. Buckley. He and his like-minded thinkers abhorred the grand ideas of social engineering that were gaining popularity among the liberal intelligentsia (despite constant horror stories from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe). They were skeptical about science, progress, and human nature, and they placed their faith in God and the Constitution.
Buckley managed to forge an intellectual movement to support the conservative political agenda by successfully identifying the greatest common denominator of the different strands of conservative thought. The defining traits of the emerging movement were anti-communism combined with a strong military presence in the world, reverence for religion, and the commitment to small government. Buckley was not only the de-facto leader of mainstream conservatism in the next half-century, and an inspiration for generations, but also an active gatekeeper of it. For decades he decided what and who stood the test of acceptability, pushing overt antisemites and racists out, and keeping sympathetic but radical thinkers at arm's length. This book is about these rejected extremes, the schools of thought that did not get into the canon. George Hawley offers a guided tour through this versatile territory of intellectual currents that are usually referred to simply (oversimply), as the Right.