If Books Could Kill

Peter and Michael discuss the media coverage of the protests at Columbia — from the crazed, bloodthirsty ravings of right-wing media to the more muted, respectful bloodthirst of centrist media.

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Peter and Michael discuss Michael Lewis’s bestselling book about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, a young prodigy whose only flaw was that he dreamed too big.

Where to find us: 

• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Michael Lewis Is Buying What Sam Bankman-Fried Is Selling 
• Michael Lewis Likens Critics of His New Book on Sam Bankman-Fried to a 'Mob'
• The SBF trial is a reminder that crypto is a rotten business
• Review: Michael Lewis's Going Infinite
• The Curious Case of FTX’s ‘Company Therapist’ (vice.com)
• FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident
• Going Infinite by Michael Lewis review – falling for the antihero
• The Second FTX Asset Recovery Report Is Packed With Bombshells
• Takeaways From a New Book on Sam Bankman-Fried
• Caroline Ellison Testifies Against Sam Bankman-Fried, Blaming Him for Crimes 

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

2 Better 2 Angels

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Jeffrey Epstein’s Science of Sleaze
• Pinker’s response to Epstein allegations
• How Jeffrey Epstein Captivated Harvard
• Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA
• It’s Official — Steven Pinker Is Full of Shit
• Pinker, Epstein, Soldier, Spy
• A century of sexual abuse victimisation: A birth cohort analysis
• The prevalence of child sexual abuse with online sexual abuse added
• Have Sexual Abuse and Physical Abuse Declined Since the 1990s?
• Explanations for the Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases
• The Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases
• Why Have Child Maltreatment and Child Victimization Declined?
• Spanking and Other Corporal Punishment of Children by Parents: Undervaluing Children, Overvaluing Pain
• Were There Really More Hate Crimes Last Year?
• Hate Crime Reported by Victims and Police
• The Sexual Victimization of College Women
• The "Discovery" of Child Abuse
• A Short History of Child Protection in America

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

We're finally discussing a good book! Naomi Klein's "Doppelgänger" chronicles the long, steady descent of another Naomi — Wolf (buddy oof) — from feminist icon to crank conspiracist. 

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg became an icon for women who wanted to move from middle management at a tech company into upper management at a tech company. Today, Peter and Michael examine the contents of her bestselling book, survey the wreckage of corporate feminism and ask whether women will finally find liberation in the Metaverse.

Where to find us: 

• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not
• Feminism's Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in?
• One Cheer for Lean In
• Is there an implicit quota on women in top management? A large‐sample statistical analysis
• Female tokens in high-prestige work groups: Catalysts or inhibitors of group diversification?
• Want Equal Pay? Get a Union.
• The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations
• What Was the Girlboss?
• New Research: Women Who Don’t Negotiate Might Have a Good Reason
• Now, Women Do Ask: A Call to Update Beliefs about the Gender Pay Gap
• What’s It Like Inside the Hive? Managerial Discretion Drives TMT Gender Diversity of Women-Led Firms
• I asked Facebook if I could work part-time from home after I had my baby. They said no—so I quit
• Women in the Workplace 2023
• Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
• Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

This week we're tackling Steven Pinker's 900 page dissection of the reasons why violence, torture and war have declined over the last 10,000 years. Was it an indeterminate mixture of politics, economics, technology and serendipity?  Or did some European guys write some books that said murder was bad?

Special thanks to Philip Dwyer, Eleanor Janega, David M. Perry and Doug Thompson for help researching and fact-checking this episode!

Where to find us: 

• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Darker Angels of Our Nature
• Getting Medieval On Steven Pinker
• The Decline of Violence in the West: From Cultural to Post-Cultural History
• Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
• Herding and Homicide: An Examination of the Nisbett-Reaves Hypothesis
• Peace in Our Time
• John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war
• The business class doesn't understand the Enlightenment
• Delusions Of Peace
• Pinker And Progress
• Norbert Elias and the History of Violence
• Modernization, Self-Control And Lethal Violence
• Explaining Long Term Trends in Violent Crime
• The Enlightenment’s Dark Side

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Before Donald Trump became America's most prominent politician and birth certificate inspector, he spent his days making everyone in New York City slightly uncomfortable. Michael and Peter discuss "The Art of the Deal," Trump’s 1987 bestseller chronicling his exploits as a celebrity slumlord.

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• When Donald Trump Took Down Holiday Inns 
• The Lost City of Trump 
• Who Runs New York Now? 
• How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions 
• Doer and Slumlord Both 
• Donald Trump Gets What He Wants
• Donald Trump was a nightmare landlord in the 1980s 
• Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

"There are two kinds of political scientists: The types who deal with noisy data and post on Twitter with a bunch of caveats. And then there are the types who write books about identity politics."
 
Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Sam  Huneke's "Yascha Mounk’s Woke Straw Man"
• Jacob T. Levy's "The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics"
• Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's "Elite Capture"
• Aaron Huertas's "We Need to Talk About Reactionary Centrists"
• Mary Lin Elementary under federal investigation
• Parents refute claims of segregation at Mary Lin Elementary School
• School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000
• 60 Years After Brown
• School choice and racial segregation in US schools
• Student Population Has Significantly Diversified, But Many Schools Remain Divided Along Racial, Ethnic, and Economic Lines
• U.S. public school students often go to schools where at least half of their peers are the same race or ethnicity
• The Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences
• Why The Democrats Have Shifted Left Over The Last 30 Years
• Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change
• Trump, the 2016 Election, and Expressions of Sexism
• Changing Norms Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: The Trump Effect on Prejudice
• Changes in Americans’ prejudices during the presidency of Donald Trump
• The CDC slide presentation
• Model-informed COVID-19 vaccine prioritization strategies

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

You stare, mouth agape, at the bookstore display. It’s a self-help book, but with curse words in the title?! This must be a revolutionary new framework, not simply the same dull, reactionary ideas repackaged as hip and new.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (Blog Post)
• Where A is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940-2009
• We’ve Been Handing Out Participation Trophies for 100 Years
  Positive Disintegration‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%!’ Review: A Blunt Philosophy

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

In 1996, a frustrated screenwriter got a fellowship in Italy. Twenty years later, Beyoncé released "Lemonade." 

Content warning: This episode includes a mention of suicide.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell”
• Kelly Link's "White Cat, Black Dog"
• The Half-Century in Bullshit: On Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” and Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power”
• A Book of Anecdotes, 1957
  The Little Brown Book Of Anecdotes
• Fear Nothing: Self-Fashioning and Social Mobility in 50 Cent’s The 50th Law
• The fear of conflict leads people to systematically avoid potentially valuable zero-sum situations
• The Immigration Dilemma
• You Can Win But I Can't Lose
• If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups
• Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
• A Genesis of Conflict: The Zero-Sum Mindset
• Forbes Winslow’s Physic and Physicians
• The role of masculinity in men's help-seeking for depression: A systematic review
•  The Strange, Sad Story of Joe Orton, His Lover, and 72 Stolen Library Books 
• A Failure Of Initiative
• New Orleans reaches settlements for police shootings after Hurricane Katrina
• Post-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans With Impunity

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Retailers have been sounding the alarm about a shoplifting epidemic driven by organized criminal syndicates. In a shocking twist, it turns out that their story is mostly made up. Join us as Peter tries to figure out where this panic originated and as Mike finally comes clean about his criminal past.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

This week we're tackling "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," a book that dares to ask: What if everything that experts think about homelessness is wrong, and everything that one crank on Twitter thinks about homelessness is right?

Thanks to Ned Resnikoff for helping us with the research for this episode!

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Inflection Points in Community-level Homeless Rates
• How Housing Costs Drive Levels of Homelessness
• The 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report To Congress
• The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness
• San Francisco Homelessness Benchmarking Report
• Homelessness is a Housing Problem
• A randomized trial of permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless persons with high use of publicly funded services
• San Francisco Department of Public Health Update Report on Mental Health Reform
• Civil Commitment in the United States

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Have you ever wanted to escape the grind and follow your dreams? This week we're discussing "The 4-Hour Workweek," which reveals that all you need is a plan, a willingness to take risks and a modestly sized fraud operation built on Third World labor.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Fraud and the Four-Hour Workweek
• Revisiting "The 4-Hour Workweek"
• New! Improved! Shape Up Your Life!
• From Productivity to Psychedelics: Tim Ferriss Has Changed His Mind About Success

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

But her e-mails! Michael explains the non-scandal that captivated the mainstream media in 2016 while Peter attempts to sow the podcast with anti-Hillary sentiment.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Oops all grievance.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• No Ivory Tower : Mccarthyism And The Universities
• The Fire Is Upon Us
• The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
• The Passion of William F. Buckley: Academic Freedom, Conspiratorial Conservatism, and the Rise of the Postwar Right
• Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?
• Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955
• Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley
• How William F. Buckley Jr.’s Right-Wing College Crusade Paved the Way for Ron DeSantis
• The Right v. Higher Education: Change and Continuity
• The Buckleys: A Family Examined
• The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War
• What About “God and Man”?
• The Attack on Yale
• The academy on the firing line: William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and the modern conservative critique of higher education
• Conservatives charge that universities are hotbeds of liberalism. They’re wrong. 

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

For this month's bonus episode we dissected Harry Frankfurt's gloriously brief bestseller and applied the concept to our favorite op-ed page. 

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Who poses the greatest threat to democracy? Is it the movement that openly identifies with the symbols, goals and policies of fascist governments? Or is it the median bureaucrat at the Department of Health and Human Services?

In 2008, a National Review nepo-baby attempted to answer this vexing question.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• History News Network: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism
• The Nature of Fascism
• How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
• The Anatomy of Fascism
• Mussolini and Fascism: The View From America
• The Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era
• Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America
• What Hillary Rodham Clinton Really Said About Children’s Rights and Child Policy
• The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930
• A campus takeover that symbolized an era of change

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

In our "Rules" and "Game" episodes we didn't get a chance to dissect the phenomenon of online dating (i.e. describe our worst dates and read cringe profiles out loud to each other), so that is what we are doing on today's bonus episode. 

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod