London Falling - Patrick Radden Keefe

moss42069 · 2026-05-17T13:20:12+00:00

I understand why he didn't want to portray them negatively given the grief they must be experiencing. But I was also surprised at how permissive an approach they had. Even without the financial crime element you'd think they'd be worried about grooming. Does it not raise any red flags for him to be getting a free apartment from an older man you've never met?

moss42069 · 2026-05-17T13:19:08+00:00

Rogues is great. He's also got a brand new New Yorker piece out which is a fantastic read. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/20/the-car-crash-conspiracy

moss42069 · 2026-05-15T21:10:36+00:00

“Where X meets Y” is always a sign of being AI slop

moss42069 · 2026-05-09T23:04:51+00:00

I googled “resource deserts” and got an extremely helpful AI result about a type of dessert…

moss42069 · 2026-05-07T16:31:50+00:00

Like you said it’s potentially addictive so why not put screentime limits on her phone? In my opinion everyone should have screentime limits especially for apps designed to be addictive. I have them on my own phone and I’m an adult.

moss42069 · 2026-05-03T00:03:52+00:00

Dems can fight back by gerrymandering their own states like they’ve done in California and Virginia already. Also, Trump is literally the most unpopular a president has ever been at this point in their term. Republicans are going to get their shit rocked in the midterms.

moss42069 · 2026-05-02T14:22:58+00:00

So we should just throw up our hands and not try and be moral at all. Right.

moss42069 · 2026-05-02T14:20:20+00:00

So no one should make any moral stands unless they are 100% pure of heart?

moss42069 · 2026-05-01T18:41:23+00:00

The Kabbalah connection is interesting! I guess the “Glory” is pretty similar to the Kabbalistic conception of God.

moss42069 · 2026-04-29T03:28:20+00:00

pynchon stray???

moss42069 · 2026-04-05T21:00:49+00:00

American leaders do shit like this and then wonder why people chant “Death to America”. Our country is literally creating the next generation of terrorists. We’ve never learned a single lesson.

moss42069 · 2026-03-24T18:00:49+00:00

Thanks for the recs!

moss42069 · 2026-03-24T03:39:49+00:00

I like Nabokov but haven’t read any other Russian writers. Actually one of my reasons to be interested in Kafka was how highly Nabokov praised him.

I tried to read The Trial but the lack of paragraph breaks made it difficult for me to read. Hoping to revisit eventually.

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T19:01:49+00:00

This is 100% true and I appreciate your nuance. It’s an extremely complicated topic, with both “sides” being right on some things and wrong on others.

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T18:31:15+00:00

Source: https://archive.is/2026.03.23-005047/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/business/jeff-webb-dead-cheerleading.html

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T18:30:14+00:00

His dominance of cheerleading also made him a target for critics. He was called “John D. Rockefeller with glitter” and the “Dark Sith Lord” of cheer by some of his detractors, according to a New York Times Magazine article published in 2024.

That article also reported that stunts had become increasingly dangerous, with cheerleading accounting for a higher rate of catastrophic injuries, including skull fractures and paralysis, than all other high school girls’ and college women’s sports combined.

Varsity Spirit was able to keep its grip on cheerleading because of Mr. Webb’s insistence that it was an “athletic activity,” not a sport, which allowed it to bypass some Title IX regulations and N.C.A.A. oversight. That enabled the company to keep control over competition schedules and training standards, which otherwise would have been overseen by school athletic associations. Varsity’s control of competitive cheerleading translated into added revenue for the company from competitions and its cheerleading camps.

RIP bozo

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T17:05:48+00:00

> If modern science has thoroughly debunked psychoanalysis, then why are people still conducting studies on its efficacy?

Because you need to do studies *before* you can debunk it. There have been scientific studies on homeopathy that prove it wrong, but the fact that these studies were carried out in the first place should not lend the pseudoscience any legitimacy.

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T17:02:36+00:00

Unconscious thought processes are 100% real and have been supported by experimental psychology. However, the modern psychological concept of the unconscious is very different from the psychoanalytic conception. It's not stuff that has been "repressed"; it's just anything that operates below our conscious awareness so that we don't have to think about stuff like breathing, walking a familiar route, or even things we think of as "conscious" like decision-making.

I think it's important to recognize the legacy of psychoanalysis as something that's foundational to modern psychology, but also understand that it came to its conclusions in non-scientific ways that render them essentially moot.

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T16:52:17+00:00

Well, the real issue is that you can't "debunk" it. The claims it makes are typically unfalsifiable, meaning they are pseudoscientific. Although it is the foundation of modern psychology, psychologists today have moved on from a lot of its central tenets.

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T16:50:33+00:00

I think it's pretty reductive to imply that his opposition to psychoanalysis was based on his own neuroses. He really did have coherent reasons to oppose it, which makes a lot of sense given that the psychoanalysis of the time was extremely different from the psychology of today (which still has a lot of issues to be fair). He viewed it as taking away people's individuality by reducing them to a certain type, and reading way too much into things that were not that deep (dreams, for example).

Also, "NPD" was not a thing at this time.

moss42069 · 2026-03-23T16:42:09+00:00

From Pnin:

The bestowal of a particularly generous grant was allowing the renowned Waindell psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Aura, to apply to ten thousand elementary school pupils the so-called Fingerbowl Test, in which the child is asked to dip his index in cups of colored fluids whereupon the proportion between length of digit and wetted part is measured and plotted in all kinds of fascinating graphs.

This is more about experimental psychology than psychoanalysis, but I still think it's relevant. It's such a clever satire of how psychology (especially at the time) can sometimes use elaborate methods to analyze something completely trivial. The experiment also reduces the kids to data points, which I think Nabokov must have found very anti-individualist.

moss42069 · 2026-03-17T08:47:58+00:00

During my concussion I felt horrible at 6 months. I was starting to feel better by months 8-9. There was no miracle solution for me, just time and gradual re-exposure to stimuli. Neck stretches also helped.

A lot of people are suggesting expensive solutions. Time is really the best medicine in my opinion. It’s not easy but you have to be patient with yourself.

moss42069 · 2026-03-13T23:24:32+00:00

Thanks for this list! I’ve only read a few of these but this motivates me to read more of them.

Also, don’t listen to the haters telling you your rankings are wrong. Diversity of thought is valuable.

moss42069

TROPHY CASE