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.

Jungle Beat

Szentül hiszem, hogy az Ice Age sikere a motkánynak köszönhető. A legelső trailer, a könnyezve röhögés rengeteg embert becsábított a mozikba, mégha a dolognak semmi köze sem volt a filmhez (nekem ez csalódás volt). Enélkül a trailer nélkül az Ice Age-ből aligha vált volna franchise. Így gondolhatta a Dél-Afrikai Starburst Animation stúdió is, mert erre a koncepcióra húztak fel egy egész sorozatot. (Bár ez nem egy klasszikus sorozat, mert rengeteg időt tesznek egy-egy epizódba - talán inkább rövidfilmek folyamaként érdemes rá gondolni). Gyönyörűen rajzolt állatok, vicces szituációk, rengeteg nevetés. Egy kis kikapcsolódás, amit az egész család együtt élvezhet. 

Fire in Paradise

The wildfires in California are of interest to me. I can't tell you why. I've been trying to find a book that would explain the whys and hows, but so far without success. This documentary by Netflix doesn't achieve that either, nor does it even attempt it. But it does a marvelous job in conveying the abject terror that come with these natural events. In case of the Camp Fire that this covers, the director (and the photographer) did a great job in depicting the survivors and in downplaying the drama that occurred in the parking lot which has already been widely publicized in the media.

Morten Strøksnes :: Shark Drunk

What makes a writer and an abstract painter to hunt for a Greenland shark? A creature which roamed the arctic ocean before the age of the dinosaurs and remains quite the mystery despite the fact that at some point it was hunted heavily. We may never learn that, but we'll still learn a lot from Morten Strøksnes' book about life north of the arctic circle. Most reviews painstakingly avoid comparison to the Old Man and the Sea as that would be an exaggeration, and yet ... this book comes pretty darn close.
Maybe it's the meandering story telling, maybe it's the associative jumps from one topic or aspect to another which follows the conversations of Aasjord and the author, but the book does have a distinct high-literature feel to it. Either way, it does spirit you away into the (surprisingly not so) frozen north where the jagged peaks reflect over the water and the fishermen have frost in their beard; into a world where two friends can sit in a leaky rubber boat and lament life itself while they fish for a predator that weighs a ton, lives for hundreds of years and existed for eons. And this, maybe this is what makes this book so exceptional. This conflict between the eons (i.e., how things used to be) and the modern day. Our generation may claim that we were born to this age, but humanity as a whole arrived to this point in time after a long journey and we who are alive today have a foot in both the past and the future. And what could be more jarringly 21st century than the paradox of nonchalantly throwing an emptied paint can filled with graks overboard while bemoaning the destruction of the planet? This book is about all of us.

Unbelievable

This series doesn't start well. I guess, intentionally so. The first episode is just painful to watch - it's like being invited over for dinner only to witness the fight of another couple and your only wish is to somehow leave and get out of this situation. But there's just no way you can do that. It's grey, it's depressing and really doesn't give you the slightest promise that it can get any better. Bleak would be a word for it exacerbated by the fact that you know that you are watching a true story. It leaves the sour taste in your mouth as sexual assault is bound to do that you'd rather not know about this. But this actually happened. And it happens all over the world probably every single day.