When Senator Mike Lee compared Donald Trump to Captain Moroni in 2020 it caused a storm of controversy. At the time, I found the comparison ludicrous, but subsequent actions by President Trump have made reading Alma 60 (the Book of Mormon chapter that contains an epistle of Captain Moroni to Chief Judge Pahoran) more interesting, and now the comparison seems rather apt.1 In that epistle, Captain Moroni accuses Pahoran and his fellow judges of either being incompetent (sitting “upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor” (v.

Each year I rate each book according to my assessment of its quality and my level of enjoyment. The three best books I read in a year are the ones that have the highest combined rating of quality and enjoyment. This year, these three were as follows: A House for Mr. Biswas A House for Mr. Biswas essentially revisits the plot of his first novel, Mystic Masseur. By the time he writes A House for Mr.

For the third year running, I rated each film or show according to my assessment of its quality and my level of enjoyment. The best ones are the ones that have the highest combined rating of quality and enjoyment. You can see these in the graphic below. The best movies I watched this year Oppenheimer Won enough plaudits (including Best Picture) that I won’t waste time extolling it as a movie.

It doesn’t take long watching Survivor to identify good and bad players, or rather, to identify contestants who are more likely to go far in the game. I had some intuitive guesses about why some players were succeeding and others failing, so I decided to try keep track of those factors quantitatively. Hence this post, where I keep an updated list of Survivor seasons I have watched to see if there is any evidence supporting the reasons I believe some Survivor contestants succeed while others fail.

My dissertation focuses on elites’ usage of regions and regional identities to alter public opinion in order to achieve their political preferences. Hence, my delight to discover Rethinking the Mediterranean in the Fulbright Library here in Morocco. It is a book that details how elites and scholars have thought (or more accurately—not thought) about the Mediterranean as a region and a concept over time. It is a useful case study inasmuch as the Mediterranean is certainly a very fixed region in popular conceptions of the world today.