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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3353 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 24, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Sayers' Whose Body? Also reading Abelson's The Seven Liberal Arts after rereading Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

Currently reading:

  • Desolation Island Patrick O'Brian
  • The Monastery of the Damned Nicholas Tobias
  • Interwar Articles Ernst Junger
  • The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 Mark Peterson
  • High Output Management Andrew S. Grove

I really need to read some Junger. Never heard of him before the SSC reviews of Marble Cliffs but his work sounds so cool.

There are basically three Jungers - the man lived to be a hundred and two. The early Junger, roughly Storm of Steel to The Worker, is a warrior-poet writing on his war experiences and how the War (and particularly the emergence of technology's power over man) changed the world. He rejects the Nazis when they come to power and his techno-nationalist thought takes a mystical turn, this is where we get Marble Cliffs and some of his real hidden gems. After WWII, he's able to write more freely, and his thought becomes explicitly centered on individual inner freedom under the rule of technology, with The Forest Passage and Eumeswil his best-known works, as well as his writings on psychedelics (he was a friend of Albert Hoffmann and coined the term "psychonaut"). All his books except for his diaries and correspondences are very short, so you can start anywhere that takes your fancy.

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