I recently finished a pair of books: The French: Portrait of a People by De Gramont and Barbarian Migration and the Roman West by Halsall. Both were interesting in their own right, but I found them even more fascinating from the standpoint of historiography. Both books were good reminders that history is not the dispassionate, factual, or objective enterprise that the general public mostly seems to regard it as. All history is subjective and reflects the worldviews, objectives, and morals of the historian (and the society in which the historian lives).

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.