Exactly 54 days ago, I stumbled across a blog post by a Rebecca Dai titled 50 Things I Know.

She wrote fifty short observations about life.

I enjoyed it, and after reading it then I decided I was going to use it as an inspiration for my own post. But I’d been too lazy to get down to it until today.

Instead of quick sentences, I’m writing full paragraphs. Instead of 50 things, I’m doing 30. And for each one, I’ll reference a book I’ve read that you might want to explore if the topic resonates with you.

This is the blog post I am talking about here

Fair warning: this is going to be long. Probably the longest post I’ve ever published on my blog. But I had an absolute blast writing it, and I hope you have even more fun reading it.

At its core, the purpose of this piece is to show that the more books you read, the more things you will know. And if you act on those insights, the more places you’ll go because you become a better-informed person, capable of having thoughtful conversations on a wide variety of topics. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with such a person? Better yet, who wouldn’t want to be such a person?

So grab a drink, settle in, and let’s go. Here are 30 things I know—thanks, in part, to some of the best books I’ve ever read.

#1

**11/22/63 by Stephen King **

The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 dramatically changed how the U.S. Secret Service handled presidential motorcade routes and public appearances.

Before JFK’s death, it was common practice for newspapers and local media to publish the exact route of a presidential motorcade in advance.

The Secret Service stopped releasing detailed routes publicly. Even local law enforcement and officials now receive only the minimum information needed, and it’s often shared just hours before or day-of.

The Secret Service began developing multiple alternate routes for every trip. Drivers and agents train on several possibilities so they can change direction instantly if there’s a threat.

#2

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

99.999999% of Earth’s history passed before humans ever appeared.

If you compress Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single 24-hour day, life doesn’t show up until around 4 a.m., complex organisms arrive at about 8:30 p.m., dinosaurs stroll in shortly after 10 p.m., and humans don’t appear until a few seconds before midnight.

Here’s another analogy which I think Richard Dawkins once described as his favorite analogy for representation of this fact.

Imagine your outstretched arms — the distance from the tip of your left middle finger to the tip of your right middle finger.

Let that entire distance represent all 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history.

Life appears somewhere around your left shoulder.

Dinosaurs don’t show up until around your right wrist.

Human beings don’t appear until the very tip of the nail on your rightmost finger.

Everything we think of as “history” fits into a microscopic sliver of time at the very end.

It’s a humbling reminder that the world is ancient beyond imagination, and we’re incredibly recent guests.

#3

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer cells can become resistant to treatment in the same way microbes become resistant to antibiotics. Chemotherapy drugs are designed to wipe out fast-growing cells, but cancer mutates quickly. Within a tumor, a few cells often acquire random genetic changes that make them less vulnerable to the drug. Those resistant cells survive, multiply, and eventually become the dominant population.

It’s evolution happening in real time, inside the body.

If even one cell happens to carry a mutation that protects it from the drug, that cell survives. When the sensitive cells die off, the resistant cell suddenly has: no competition, no pressure, plenty of nutrients, an empty landscape to expand into.

Resistant cancer cells are not a public-health threat the way drug-resistant microbes are because cancer is not contagious. But it is a huge problem for the individual.

#4

**The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins **

“Memes” weren’t born on the internet but were Dawkins’s way of explaining how ideas evolve. He argued that cultural habits spread the same way genes do: by copying themselves. A tune that gets stuck in your head, a superstition that refuses to die, a slogan people repeat without thinking — all of them survive only if they’re good at being imitated.

During my final year in school, and I wrote about this at the time, virtually all my classmates, after our last exam in school, participated in a "signing out" activity. Signing out is something final year students do in universities across the country after what they believe to be their final exam as an undergraduate. It involves the final year student wearing a white shirt which is then signed by others with a marker. Ask any final year student why they participated in "signing out", or ask any current final year student why they plan to sign out, and you’ll most likely hear them say "I don’t know, it’s the tradition."

I didn’t participate in this activity because I felt it was completely meaningless. But this activity is the perfect example of a Meme.

Dawkins even uses everyday examples like why people start wearing hats a certain way, or why a fashion suddenly takes hold in one generation and disappears in the next. These habits spread not because they’re rational or useful, but because they’re contagious. Culture, in his view, is a giant evolutionary arena where ideas compete for survival just as ruthlessly as genes do in biology.

#5

**Animal Farm by George Orwell **

It is terrifyingly easy for propaganda to replace reality. Orwell shows this through Squealer, the pig who acts as the farm’s official spokesperson. He doesn’t use force — he uses language. Whenever something goes wrong, he simply explains it again, louder and with more confidence, until the animals doubt their own memories. Rules are rewritten, past events are altered, and inconvenient truths are wiped away, all through the steady drip of confident lies. Before long, the animals aren’t living in the world as it is, but in the world they’ve been told to believe in.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, used speeches, newspapers, and films to reshape public perception, presenting lies as facts.

Jews, political opponents, and other targeted groups were demonized through repeated messaging, making the population accept policies that were morally outrageous.

In North Korea, the government controls all media and education, rewriting history to glorify the Kim dynasty.

Contradictory evidence is inaccessible, so the official narrative becomes the “reality” for most citizens.

#6

Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith

Ethical behavior doesn’t require belief in God, because morality can emerge naturally from human reasoning, empathy, and social instincts.

From an evolutionary perspective, cooperation and fairness helped human communities survive and thrive. Individuals who cared for others, kept promises, and punished cheaters were more likely to live in stable groups. Over time, these instincts became part of human nature. When we reflect on these instincts using reason, we develop ethical systems: laws, norms, and moral codes that encourage human flourishing.

Read more about this in my blog post tacking the Morality argument here

#7

**Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking. **

The universe could have begun from nothing, but the “nothing” isn’t emptiness without rules; it’s governed by the laws of physics. But then the natural follow-up arises: where did these laws themselves come from?

We don’t have a complete answer yet, but one compelling perspective is that the laws of physics may be fundamental aspects of reality, requiring no cause outside themselves. Just as mathematics exists independently of any one person to prove it, the principles that govern the universe could be intrinsic to existence — a framework that simply “is.” In this view, asking why the laws exist is like asking why numbers exist: they are prerequisites for anything else to exist at all. Or, asking what’s north of the North Pole — it’s a question that may not have a meaningful answer.

Science doesn’t yet have all the answers, but it shifts the discussion from invoking supernatural causes to exploring natural principles, encouraging us to look at the universe as something we can understand through observation, reason, and imagination.

#8

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

Almost none of us can remember anything before age three or four — a phenomenon called infantile amnesia.

The hippocampus, the brain’s filing clerk for turning experiences into retrievable long-term memories, doesn’t finish its basic wiring until roughly that age.

Even more fascinating: once the hippocampus does come online, we still need language to tag and organize those memories into stories we can later call up. Without words to narrate “this is me, this is what happened, this is how I felt,” early experiences remain locked in a pre-verbal fog. You only start forming memories when you learn to speak because only then did the brain finally have the tools to file the moment away in a way your adult self can find again.

#9

**Columbine by Dave Cullen **

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were never bullied. Eric was a cold, calculating psychopath; his journals are filled with chilling detachment, boasts of superiority, and detailed plans for mass murder on a scale that would make the world remember his name forever. Dylan, by contrast, was drowning in suicidal despair years before the attack; he wrote over and over that he just wanted to die and didn’t particularly care who came with him. Together they built bombs designed to kill hundreds, maybe thousands. The guns were backup.

When the bombs failed, the shooting started, but the death toll was still mercifully lower than they intended. Yet in the immediate aftermath, the media seized on a simpler, more digestible narrative that included bullying, and a girl named Cassie Bernall defiantly saying “yes” to God before she was killed. Cassie never said it (another survivor, Valeen Schnurr, did, after she was already shot and lived).

While reporters spun myths outside, police and SWAT followed the doctrine of the time: contain, call negotiators, wait for warrants. They waited four hours while wounded kids bled to death ten feet from safety, because no one had yet invented the active-shooter response (rush in, neutralize the threat, treat victims later).

Worst of all, the saturation coverage turned Eric and Dylan into the most famous teenagers in America. Their names, faces, and manifestos were everywhere. Future killers took notes. Columbine didn’t just traumatize a nation; it accidentally wrote the playbook for every lonely, angry, or psychotic kid who wanted infamy more than anything else.

#10

**Permanent Record by Edward Snowden **

The NSA’s most terrifying tool has a boring name: XKeyscore.

A single analyst sitting at a desk anywhere in the world can type your email address, your phone’s IMEI, or even a phrase you used in a chat years ago, hit enter, and within seconds pull up a near-complete record of everything you’ve ever done online: every website you visited, every file you downloaded, every private message, every search term that made you wince the next morning, every webcam snapshot taken without your knowledge. No warrant. No supervisor approval. Just a justification field that Snowden says analysts routinely filled with copy-paste boilerplate or outright lies.

The NSA bragged internally that it was “the widest-reaching” system in their arsenal, covering “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” And because most of the world’s traffic still routes through undersea cables that touch U.S. soil or American-friendly countries, “nearly everything” really means nearly everything.

Snowden says the first time he used it in training, he typed in his own girlfriend’s email address just to test the system. In seconds her entire private life unfolded on his screen. That was the moment he realized the surveillance apparatus wasn’t hunting terrorists; it had quietly become a machine that could destroy any human being on the planet if someone in power ever decided they were inconvenient.

XKeyscore still exists today, bigger and faster than ever. Every nude photo you sent, every fight you had in DMs, every support-group post you deleted; somewhere in Utah, it’s still there, waiting for someone with the right clearance to look.

#11

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll

Secret CIA operations in Afghanistan during the Cold War, intended to counter the Soviet Union, had ripple effects that fueled future conflicts. During the 1980s, the U.S. poured money, weapons, and training into Afghan mujahideen fighters to bog down the Soviets, often working through Pakistan’s intelligence services to distribute aid. At the time, it seemed like a clever strategy: use local fighters to bleed the Soviets without committing American troops.

But Coll shows that these operations had unintended consequences. The influx of weapons, funding, and training empowered militant groups that later morphed into factions like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Infrastructure collapsed, warlords gained power, and extremist ideologies spread, creating a vacuum of authority that fueled decades of instability. What began as a secret, tactical maneuver against one enemy ended up reshaping the region’s political and social landscape, leaving a legacy that contributed directly to the environment in which the 9/11 attacks emerged.

#12

Human Universe by Brian Cox

Space is incredibly empty. Cox illustrates this with a striking scale model:

Imagine you pick up an ordinary black peppercorn and decide that, in your new model, this tiny speck now represents the entire Earth. To keep the proportions accurate, the Moon would be a pinhead 9 cm away, orbiting your peppercorn. The Sun, meanwhile, has to be upgraded to a glowing sphere 2.4 meters across (about the height of a basketball hoop), sitting roughly 250 meters down the road—picture it at the far end of two FIFA football fields placed end-to-end.

The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be another 2.4-meter ball… 6,500 kilometers away. That’s roughly the distance from London to New York and back again, with a little extra for good measure. If you started walking toward it at a brisk pace, it would take you more than 120 years nonstop just to reach the next sun, and that’s the closest one.

This perspective reshapes how we think about our place in the cosmos. Planets, stars, and galaxies are tiny specks scattered across incomprehensible distances.

#13

**Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris **

If the Bible were truly the inspired, inerrant word of a perfectly moral God, it would have at least one verse condemning slavery as the abject horror we all recognize today —instead, it repeatedly endorses, regulates, and assumes it as a normal part of human society, from the Old Testament right through to the New.

Start with the Hebrew Bible: Exodus 21 lays out God’s rules for owning people as property with chilling specificity. You can buy Hebrew slaves and keep them for six years, but if they marry and have kids during that time, the wife and children remain your property forever, unless the slave chooses to stay enslaved by getting his ear pierced with an awl against your doorpost (Exodus 21:2-6). Foreign slaves? No such mercy; Leviticus 25:44-46 says you can buy them from neighboring nations, treat them as inheritable property, and pass them down to your kids like livestock. And if you beat a slave so badly they die immediately? That’s murder. But if they linger a day or two before dying? No punishment, because "the slave is his money" (Exodus 21:20-21). This isn’t some obscure metaphor; it’s divine law straight from Mount Sinai, sandwiched between commandments about altars and oxen.

Fast-forward to the New Testament, where you’d hope Jesus or his apostles might finally call this out as evil. Nope. Jesus heals a Roman centurion’s slave without a word about freeing him (Matthew 8:5-13). In parables, he compares God to a slave owner who beats his servants for disobedience (Luke 12:45-48). Paul, in Ephesians 6:5-8, tells slaves to "obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ." Colossians 3:22 echoes it: "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord." Even Philemon, often twisted as an anti-slavery hint, is Paul gently asking a Christian slave owner to forgive his runaway slave Onesimus—not to free him, but to treat him "no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother" while still sending him back.

Actual abolitionists like William Wilberforce had to argue against biblical literalists who used these verses to defend slavery right up to the Civil War. And globally? The transatlantic slave trade flourished under Christian empires quoting Scripture.

The real kicker is what this silence reveals about divine morality. If God is omniscient, he knew slavery would cause untold suffering for millennia—whips, chains, families torn apart, the Middle Passage’s floating hells. Yet his "perfect" book regulates it like dietary laws or temple taxes.

#14

Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden by Peter Bergen

At 1 a.m. on May 2, 2011, two stealth Black Hawks skimmed over the walls of the Abbottabad compound. The first pilot tried to hover above the courtyard so the SEALs could fast-rope down, but the air inside the high walls was hotter and thinner than the rehearsals in Nevada. The helicopter slammed into the ground, and cracked its tail. For a terrifying moment the entire mission hung in the balance: twenty-three SEALs, a translator, and a combat dog now had only one working bird and a compound full of unknowns.

The SEAL team, undeterred, blew up the disabled helicopter to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

They had adapted instantly. While half the team cleared the guest house and main building, others set demolition charges on the wrecked Black Hawk to destroy its classified stealth skin and radar-defying coatings. The explosion lit up the night and woke the whole neighborhood. When the shooting stopped twenty minutes later, bin Laden was dead on the third floor, shot above the left eye. The SEALs stuffed his body into a body bag, grabbed hard drives, notebooks, and anything that looked interesting (five hundred pounds of material in the end), and sprinted for the remaining helicopter.

Problem: the intact Black Hawk was now overloaded with men, gear, and a corpse. There was literally no room inside for the body bag. So they strapped bin Laden’s remains to the outside of the helicopter on the left skid like a piece of luggage, lashed down with bungee cords, and lifted off with rotors screaming, the most wanted corpse in history dangling in the slipstream as they flew back into Afghanistan.

The raid was preceded by months of careful intelligence-gathering. To confirm that bin Laden’s family was inside the compound, the U.S. paid a Pakistani doctor to run a fake hepatitis vaccination program. By collecting DNA samples from the children under the guise of a public health campaign, intelligence operatives could verify the occupants of the compound without tipping off anyone. If the kids matched bin Laden’s known relatives (especially his sister, who had died years earlier and whose brain tissue the U.S. had quietly obtained), the agency would finally have proof.

#15

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

The Chernobyl explosion wasn’t the result of a single mistake, but the inevitable outcome of a flawed reactor design combined with secrecy, bureaucracy, and human error. On April 26, 1986, at exactly 1:23:40 a.m., the reactor exploded with the force of 40–70 tons of TNT, launching its 1,000-ton lid through the roof like a champagne cork.

Firefighters arrived within minutes, confronting intense fires with bare hands and leather helmets, unaware that radiation levels were measured in thousands of roentgens per hour; many died within weeks. Despite knowing by noon that the reactor core was exposed and radioactive smoke was drifting across Europe, Soviet authorities kept Pripyat open for 36 more hours, letting children play in radioactive fallout.

Three men volunteered to wade through radioactive water beneath the melting reactor to open valves and prevent an even greater steam explosion. All three survived.

The cleanup required 600,000 “liquidators”, mostly conscripted soldiers and reservists, who shoveled radioactive debris with bare hands and were exposed to lifetime doses in minutes. The initial test that triggered the explosion had been delayed ten hours to keep Kyiv powered for the evening, leaving exhausted operators to run the reactor on a skeleton crew they barely understood.

Watch the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. It’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever watched.

#16

Psychology: A Very Short Introduction — Gillian Butler & Freda McManus

Eyewitness testimony is far less reliable than we intuitively believe. People often feel confident about what they remember, but psychology shows that memory is constructive, not reproductive: it doesn’t record events like a video camera. Within hours, details can be altered, added, or omitted, especially if someone asks a leading question. This is why two witnesses to the same event can give wildly different accounts.

The Innocence Project, which uses DNA to exonerate the wrongly convicted, reports that eyewitness misidentification played a role in 69% of their first 364 DNA exonerations (252 cases), with many victims spending decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

A striking demonstration of the fallibility of memory comes from the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment. Participants were asked to watch a video of people passing a basketball and to count the number of passes. Many were so focused on the task that they completely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. Afterward, when asked, participants were shocked — they had been confident they saw everything, yet their attention filtered out one of the most obvious details. This illustrates inattentional blindness, showing how easy it is for people to miss critical details even when they are looking directly at them.

#17

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.

Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.

Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record — the famous Voyager Golden Record — Sagan’s committee spent two years choosing what to put on it. The contents:

• Greetings in 55 human languages.

• A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

• 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing.

• Two deliberately nude silhouettes — a man and a woman standing side-by-side, arms raised in greeting — because Sagan insisted that any species advanced enough to play the record would have to understand reproduction and would not be shocked by bodies. (NASA’s bureaucrats almost vetoed the nudes; Sagan won.)

• 90 minutes of music: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Peruvian panpipes, Navajo chants, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, Indian raga, Japanese shakuhachi, and the sound of a kiss.

• Natural Earth sounds: thunder, wind, surf, birds, whales, a human heartbeat, laughter, and the sound of a mother’s first words to her newborn.

The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.

Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.

And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.

It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

***It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. ***

That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.

#18

**The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction by Robert J. McMahon **

The CIA had confidently assured President Truman that the earliest the Soviets could possibly test a bomb was mid-1953; most analysts said 1955 or later. They were wrong by almost four full years, and the reason was treason on a scale almost unimaginable. Stalin was running not one, not two, but at least four separate espionage rings inside Los Alamos. When the first seismic and radioactive fallout data reached Washington in early September 1949, the President reportedly stared at the report and said, “You’re telling me those sons of bitches have it already?” The American nuclear monopoly had lasted exactly four years and twenty-four days.

Fast-forward to October 1962, when those stolen secrets almost ended human civilization.

By 1962 the Soviet Union was desperate. The U.S. had thousands of warheads and forward bases in Turkey and Europe; the USSR had a few hundred unreliable liquid-fueled missiles that took hours to ready. Khrushchev’s solution: sneak medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles into Cuba, ninety miles from Florida, and present Kennedy with a fait accompli. In mid-October U-2 photos proved the missiles were already there and operational within weeks.

For thirteen days the world balanced on a knife edge. Kennedy’s ExComm debated invasion, airstrikes, and blockade. The Joint Chiefs unanimously demanded immediate attack. Kennedy chose a naval “quarantine” instead, but privately told his brother Robert that if the missiles weren’t removed he would have to bomb and invade—and he estimated an 80 % chance that would trigger global nuclear war.

The absolute nadir came on Saturday, October 27—“Black Saturday.” An American U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot. Another U-2 accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace over Siberia, forcing Soviet MiGs to scramble and American F-102s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles to intercept. At the same time, a Soviet submarine, B-59, surrounded by U.S. depth charges, lost radio contact for hours. Its captain, Valentin Savitsky, believing war had started, ordered a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo readied. Under Soviet rules it required three officers’ consent: the captain, the political officer, and the second-in-command, Vasily Arkhipov. The political officer agreed to fire. Arkhipov alone refused. One man, exhausted, seasick, and breathing diesel fumes in a sweltering hull, saved the world.

That same night in Washington, Robert Kennedy met Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in a last-ditch back-channel negotiation. RFK delivered a secret ultimatum: remove the missiles or face invasion. But he also offered a secret concession: the U.S. would quietly remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months (a deal Kennedy could never admit publicly). Khrushchev, facing hardliners who wanted to fight, took the deal. The next morning, Sunday October 28, Moscow Radio announced the missiles would be withdrawn.

#19

**The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander **

The War on Drugs was never about drugs at all; it was the most successful racial containment project since Jim Crow, deliberately engineered to neutralize the political power of Black America after the civil-rights victories made old-style segregation legally impossible; and its triumph is measured in one obscene statistic: today there are more African American men under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850.

The strategy was drafted in the White House itself. In 1982, when crack had barely appeared and overall drug use was declining, Reagan declared drugs “public enemy number one” and launched a war that received almost no funding from Congress. Top Reagan aides later admitted on the record that they knew the crisis was manufactured.

The racial numbers are surgical. Black and white Americans use and sell drugs at almost identical rates (the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the CDC have confirmed this for decades). Yet by the 1990s Black people were being arrested for drugs at ten times the rate of whites, charged more harshly, sentenced longer, and denied parole more often. A Black man born in 1975 had a one-in-three lifetime chance of going to prison; for white men the same age it was one in seventeen. In some states (Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey) more than 80 % of drug prisoners were Black, even though Black residents were 15 % or less of the population.

The result, by the early 2000s, was a controlled population larger than antebellum slavery. In 1850 there were roughly 1.8 million enslaved African Americans. In 2010, when Alexander first published the book, more than 2 million African American men were in prison, on probation, or on parole—an additional 4–5 million had felony records that barred them from voting and condemned them to permanent legal discrimination. Add them together and the total under correctional control was higher than the slave population at its peak. The Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” The War on Drugs became the exception that swallowed the rule.

#20

The Second World War by Antony Beevor

The Allies’ D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944—the largest amphibious assault in history, code-named Operation Overlord—was not won by brute force or superior numbers alone; its improbable success hinged on an elaborate web of deception that Beevor describes as one of the greatest intelligence coups ever pulled off, convincing Hitler and his high command that the real hammer blow would fall 150 miles east at the Pas de Calais, not the beaches of Normandy, and buying the invaders forty-eight critical hours to establish a foothold before the Panzers could roll in.

To sell the illusion, the Allies built an entire phantom army in southeast England opposite Calais: hundreds of inflatable rubber tanks, plywood aircraft, canvas trucks, and bogus landing craft, all meticulously arranged in fields and harbors visible to Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights. Dummy radio traffic crackled day and night from fake headquarters, simulating the chatter of a million-man force preparing to cross the narrowest part of the Channel—complete with scripted arguments between "units," supply requisitions, and even simulated football scores to add verisimilitude. Beevor notes how German spies (most of whom had been turned by MI5) dutifully reported back these "sightings," feeding Berlin’s confirmation bias that Calais, with its deep-water ports and proximity to London, was the obvious target.

Even captured German generals, unknowingly bugged in British POW camps, overheard "careless" Allied officers discussing this plan and passed the gossip up the chain when repatriated.

#21

**The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins **

The central claim of theism—the God Hypothesis, namely that there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us—is, at first glance, a scientific hypothesis like any other… and when you treat it that way, it collapses under its own weight because it is both spectacularly unfalsifiable and completely unnecessary.

Dawkins insists we take the claim seriously as science. A proper scientific hypothesis must, at minimum, be testable: there has to be some imaginable observation that would disprove it. If no conceivable evidence could ever count against it, it has slipped out of the realm of science and into metaphysics or fairy tale. And that is exactly where God lives. If a child dies of leukemia, the believer says “God works in mysterious ways.” If the child miraculously survives, “God answered our prayers.” If the universe is 13.8 billion years old with constants fine-tuned for life, “Look, design!” If it were a chaotic hellscape with no life possible, “God wanted to teach us humility through suffering.” Heads God wins, tails evidence loses. Every outcome is spun to confirm the hypothesis, which is the textbook definition of unfalsifiability.

I had previously written about this in a piece I wrote about the fallacy of Prayers which you can find in my blog here.

But the deeper blow is explanatory superfluousness. Science demands parsimony: do not multiply entities beyond necessity (Occam’s razor). For every phenomenon once attributed to gods—lightning, plague, the diversity of species, the origin of the universe itself—we have discovered natural mechanisms that work perfectly well without invoking a designer. Thunder is not Thor’s hammer; it is atmospheric electrical discharge. Smallpox is not divine punishment; it is a virus we eradicated with vaccines. The illusion of design in living things is not the signature of a celestial engineer; it is the expected outcome of four billion years of cumulative natural selection sifting random variation. Even the Big Bang, once hailed as the moment “creation” needed a creator, now has perfectly natural inflationary models that require no external push.

Worse, the God Hypothesis actively impedes inquiry. For centuries, “God did it” was the ultimate curiosity-stopper. Lightning? God. Plague? God. Stars? God’s decorations. Every time we replaced that non-explanation with a real one, human knowledge leapt forward. The moment we assume a supernatural agent is ultimately responsible, we have no incentive to dig deeper; we’ve reached bedrock that is, by definition, beyond testing. Science, by contrast, never declares any answer final; it remains permanently open to better evidence. God, Dawkins argues, is the mother of all cul-de-sacs.

Finally, the traditional attributes of God—omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence—generate logical contradictions that make the hypothesis internally incoherent. Who designed the designer? If complexity requires a creator, then an entity complex enough to create the universe must itself demand an even greater creator, leading to an infinite regress—unless you arbitrarily declare God exempt from the rule you just invented, which is special pleading.

In the end, Dawkins says, the God Hypothesis fails every criterion of a good scientific theory: it is untestable, unfalsifiable, makes no unique predictions, explains nothing that naturalism doesn’t explain better and more simply, and carries a mountain of logical baggage. It survives not because the evidence demands it, but because childhood indoctrination, fear of death, and tribal loyalty make billions of people desperate to believe it anyway. Strip away the emotional scaffolding, treat the claim with the same cool-headed skepticism we apply to Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the most powerful being ever imagined evaporates like morning mist under a Darwinian sun.

As Stephen Roberts famously said -

***I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” ***

#22

**Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne **

One of the most damning pieces of evidence for evolution—and against creationism or intelligent design—is biogeography, the geographic distribution of life on Earth.

Consider the basics: if all life was specially created in its current form, why aren’t similar environments around the world populated by similar species? Why don’t deserts everywhere have the same cacti, or rainforests the same monkeys? Evolution, coupled with plate tectonics, explains it perfectly: species originate in one place, spread as far as barriers allow, and diversify when isolated. Take Australia, the poster child for biogeographic weirdness. It’s dominated by marsupials—over 200 species like kangaroos, koalas, and the extinct Tasmanian tiger—while placental mammals (dogs, cats, deer, elephants) are almost entirely absent except for those introduced by humans.

Contrast this with creationist or ID explanations, which Coyne dismantles as hand-waving nonsense. They might say God placed species where he wanted for “aesthetic” reasons or to “test our faith,” but that predicts nothing testable and explains even less. Flood geology (young-Earth creationism’s flood dispersing everything from Noah’s ark) is laughable: how did kangaroos hop from Mount Ararat to Australia without leaving fossils along the way, while avoiding Asia entirely? Even human introductions prove the point: rabbits overrun Australia because no native predators evolved to handle them; cane toads poison everything in their path for the same reason.

#23

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

The single most powerful antidote to the creationist cry of “irreducible complexity” is a simple computer program—because when you watch artificial evolution unfold on a screen in real time, you realize that the most astonishing, intricate, apparently designed forms can emerge in a few dozen generations if you simply reward tiny, cumulative improvements; and this shows that the road from zero vision to a hawk’s eye is not a vertical cliff but a gentle 1 % ramp that natural selection can climb blindfolded.

In the book’s most famous chapter, Dawkins introduces the “biomorphs”—two-dimensional stick-and-branch creatures that live inside a 1980s Macintosh. The program starts with a single straight line (generation 0). Nine random mutations are applied to a set of developmental genes that control branching, angle, length, and symmetry. The screen then shows you the original plus nine mutant offspring. Your only job as the selector is to click the one you like best (bigger antlers, prettier symmetry, whatever catches your eye). The chosen biomorph becomes the parent of the next generation, nine new mutants are bred from it, and you pick again. That’s it—no foresight, no plan, just artificial selection guided by a human whim.

Now apply the same logic to the eye, the creationists’ favorite “irreducible” organ. Dawkins walks us up the slope in 1 % increments. Zero percent vision: a flat worm with no light sensitivity dies. One percent: a few light-sensitive cells that can tell light from dark—enough to swim toward daylight and find food, or away from silhouettes of predators. Two percent: the patch is slightly depressed, forming a shallow cup that gives crude directional information (light coming from left vs. right). Five percent: the cup deepens, narrowing the pinhole and sharpening the image like a camera obscura. Ten percent: the hole partly closes and a crude lens of transparent cells forms, focusing light better. Forty percent: a proper lens with adjustable focus, a vitreous humor, and an optic nerve. Sixty to ninety percent: refinements—iris, cornea, retina layers, color vision. One hundred percent: the eagle eye that can spot a rabbit two miles away.

Every single step is an improvement over the previous one; none requires foresight.

Complexity isn’t a barrier to evolution; it is evolution’s signature product when tiny advantages are allowed to accumulate over geological time.

#24

**The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins **

If evolution were false—if life popped into existence fully formed as creationists claim—then a single anachronistic fossil would shatter the whole edifice, like J.B.S. Haldane’s quip about finding “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian,” yet after 150 years of relentless digging across every continent, not one out-of-place bunny, because the geological strata form a flawless 3.8-billion-year chronological archive of life’s gradual unfolding, with each layer’s fossils precisely matching the predicted sequence of evolutionary debuts. The Precambrian (ending 541 million years ago) holds only simple microbes, algae, and no rabbits, no reptiles, no anything with bones—because complex multicellular life hadn’t evolved yet. The Triassic (252–201 million years ago) introduces true dinosaurs and the first mammals. The fossil record’s consistency is evolution’s triumph: life starts simple, gets complex gradually, with mass extinctions resetting the board but never scrambling the order. If a creator planted fakes or flooded the world 4,000 years ago (per young-Earth timelines), why the perfect illusion of deep time?

#25

**Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen **

A single Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) lurking undetected in the ocean depths carries enough thermonuclear firepower to incinerate every major urban center in Russia or China in under an hour, vaporizing tens of millions in firestorms; and at any given moment, 8 to 10 of these silent behemoths are on continuous patrol across the world’s oceans, their exact locations are a closely guarded secret known only to their captains and a handful of senior officers, deliberately compartmentalized even from the Pentagon’s highest echelons to ensure survivability against a decapitating first strike, forming the unassailable backbone of America’s "second-strike" capability in a triad that includes land-based ICBMs and strategic bombers.

On the Russian side, the mirror-image terror is colloquially known as the "Dead Hand", a semi-automated doomsday machine conceived in the 1970s amid fears of a U.S. decapitation strike and operational since the mid-1980s, designed to guarantee Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) by launching a full retaliatory barrage of thousands of warheads without any surviving human input if seismic, radiation, and atmospheric sensors detect nuclear detonations on Russian soil and communication links to the leadership go dark. The system ensures that even if Moscow were vaporized in minutes, it would interpret silence as command and trigger the cascade: emptying Moscow’s nuclear arsenal and blanketing North America and Europe in fire.

Yet the true horror unfolds after the flashes fade: in a full U.S.-Russia exchange, the immediate toll—hundreds of millions incinerated, irradiated, or crushed—pales against the nuclear winter that engulfs the planet for a decade or more, dropping global temperatures as 150–300 million tons of soot from burning cities loft into the stratosphere, blocking 50–70 % of sunlight and plunging the world into a frigid twilight where photosynthesis grinds to a halt. The war "winners" inherit a poisoned ice age.

And there is no meaningful defense, no bunker deep enough for 8 billion, no recovery blueprint that scales beyond Hollywood fantasies.

#26

**God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor J. Stenger **

If an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God really listened to prayers and occasionally suspended the laws of physics to heal the sick or raise the dead, we would have overwhelming, repeatable evidence by now, but instead we have the most comprehensive string of null results and debunked claims in the history of science, proving that the God hypothesis has been empirically falsified to the same standard we use to reject astrology, homeopathy, or psychic spoon-bending.

Start with intercessory prayer which is the single most testable claim any religion makes. Over the last two decades, multiple large, rigorously controlled, double-blind studies have been funded (some ironically by the Templeton Foundation) to see if strangers praying for patients they have never met can measurably improve outcomes. The gold standard remains the 2006 STEP project (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer), funded at $2.4 million, involving 1,802 coronary-bypass patients at six major U.S. hospitals. Patients were randomized into three groups: (1) prayed for and told they might or might not be prayed for, (2) not prayed for and told the same, (3) prayed for and told they definitely were. The prayers came from three Christian congregations using standardized scripts. Result? No difference between groups 1 and 2. Group 3 actually suffered significantly more complications (59 % vs. 52 %), a result consistent with performance anxiety or the psychological stress of knowing they were so sick that strangers had to be mobilized to pray. Ten previous major reviews and meta-analyses (including Cochrane Collaboration reviews) have found the same: prayer works exactly as well as placebo and no better. When the prayed-for group is blinded, the effect vanishes. Stenger’s blunt conclusion: if the Creator of the universe cannot beat placebo in a fair test, the Creator either does not exist or does not care.

Miracles fare even worse. The Catholic Church itself requires two verified miracles for sainthood, yet when the Lourdes Medical Bureau (established 1883) investigates the thousands of claimed healings at the shrine, fewer than 70 have been declared “medically inexplicable” in 140 years, and not one