Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Ed., Mark Rippetoe (The Aasgaard Company, 2011).| www.thepsmiths.com
Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger (BenBella Books, 2024).| www.thepsmiths.com
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C. S. Lewis (1955; HarperOne, 2017).| www.thepsmiths.com
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber (Stripe Press, 2024).| www.thepsmiths.com
We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
The Children of Men, P.D.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Man Who Rode the Thunder, William H.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Variational Principles of Mechanics, Cornelius Lanczos (University of Toronto Press, 1949).| www.thepsmiths.com
How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Bark to Leaves, Tristan Gooley (The Experiment, 2023). Okay, I admit it: I read this book because I wanted to know more about the trees in my yard. I’m afraid that’s not how Tristan Gooley means it to be used. He’s an expert in what he terms “| www.thepsmiths.com
This is the ideal male body (also known as “This is the ideal make body”) refers to a series of tweets parodying a tweet by conservative, alt-right televis| Know Your Meme
Science in Traditional China, Joseph Needham (Harvard University Press, 1981).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, Bernard Yack (Princeton University Press, 1986). This is a book by Bernard Yack. Who is Bernard Yack? Yack is fun, because for a mild-mannered liberal Canadian political theorist he’s dropped some dank truth-bombs over the years. For example, check out his short and punchy 2001 journal article “| www.thepsmiths.com
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy, and Lose Weight, Herman Pontzer (Avery, 2022). Compare these two covers. The one on the left, with the cover design that says “this is pop science to shelve with your Malcolm Gladwell,”| www.thepsmiths.com