Books read in 2024

  Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2024.

• James Bamford, Spy Fail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence (2023)
• Benjamin Breen, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
• Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)
• Bryan Burrough, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra (1992)
• Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990, 2010 foreword)
• Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King (2012)
• Daniel C. Dennett, I've Been Thinking (2023)
• Cory Doctorow, The Bezzle (fiction)
• Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2002)
• Jon Friedman & John Meehan, House of Cards: Inside the Troubled Empire of American Express (1992)
• Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022)
• John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
• Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)
• Martin Kihn, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time (2005)
• Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2020)
• Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (2017)
• Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America
• Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (1955)
• Michael Warren Lucas, git commit murder (2017, fiction)
• Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference
• Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (2006)
• Ryan J. Reilly, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System (2023)
• Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Volume 2 (2016)
• Zoë Schiffer, Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
• Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism

Top for 2024 published in 2024: Doctorow, Breen, Ganz; other top reads for the year: Gage, Dennett, Kinzer (2020), Cohen, Gessen, Rodda

A few non-books of relevance for 2025:

What the Southern Baptists used to believe, but no longer do: https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-moral-character-of-public-officials/

Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism," New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995

Dorothy Thompson, "Who Goes Nazi," Harper's Magazine, August 1941 (but contrast with Mayer 1955 and Gessen 2017 above)

A few planned or already (or still) in-progress reads for 2024:

G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)

John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (2020)

Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History (2017)

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)

Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014)

Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom (2013)

(Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.) 

NRA CEO Doug Hamlin's cat killing story

 Per Stephanie Kirchgaessner in The Guardian, 14 October 2024:

Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time.

Hamlin pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty brought against him and four of his fraternity brothers in 1980, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The charge was brought against Hamlin under a local Ann Arbor ordinance. All five members of Alpha Delta Phi were later expelled from the fraternity.

The details of the case, described in local media reports at the time, are gruesome. The house cat was captured, its paws were cut off, and was then strung up and set on fire. The killing, which occurred in December 1979, was allegedly prompted by anger that the cat was not using its litterbox.

The case caused such a furore locally that some students and animal rights activists wore buttons and armbands in memory of BK.

While The Guardian notes that Hamlin's role was not clear, Judge S.J. Elden singled him out for particular criticism as the president of the fraternity who had a responsibility to prevent it--and not, as was attempted without success, to cover it up.

(See other conservative animal abuse tagged posts, about Kevin Roberts, Bill Frist, Kristi Noem, James Dobson, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Jerry Falwell.)