I had set myself a goal of 35 books for the year, but lack of travel meant I could squeeze in a fair bit more. I’ve tried to read more fiction, but not very successfully (most of the books here are non-fiction). Nonetheless, here is my reading list for 2020. (1/9)

1. The Quantum Spy — David Ignatius
2. The Siege of Mecca — Yaroslav Trofimov
3. The Only Plane in the Sky — Garrett Graff
4. American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson
5. Rise and Kill First — Ronen Bergman
6. Return to Sri Lanka — Razeen Sally
7. Scale -- Geoffrey West (2/9)
8. Bridgital Nation — Roopa Purushottaman & N Chandrasekaran
9. Backstage — Montek Singh Ahluwalia
10. Spillover -- David Quammen
11. The Theory the Would not Die -- Sharon McGraves
12. The End of October -- Lawrence Wright
13. Team of Teams — Stanley McChrystal (3/9)
14. Galileo’s Daughter — Dava Sobel 15. The Gated Republic — Shankkar Aiyar
16. Powerful — Patty McCord
17. The Paladin — David Ignatius
18. India Moving — Chinmaya Tumbe
19. How Innovation Works — Matt Ridley
20. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll (re-read) (4/9)
21. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap — Yuen Yuen Ang
22. Phantoms in the Brain — VS Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee
23. Seeing like a State — James C Scott
24. El Jefe: The stalking of Chapo Guzman — Alan Feuer (5/9)
25. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity — Toby Ord
26. Viral Storm — Nathan Wolfe (re-read)
27. Breaking Through — Isher Ahluwalia
28. In our Mad and Furious City — Guy Gunaratne
29. The Biggest Bluff — Maria Konnikova
30. The Curse of Bigness — Tim Wu(6/9)
31. Putin’s People — Catherine Belton
32. Twilight of Democracy — Anne Applebaum
33. Ride of a Lifetime — Bob Iger
34. Alexander the Great — Philip Freeman
35. Loonshots — Safi Bahcall
36. Hillbilly Elegy — JD Vance
37. V2 — Robert Harris (7/9)
38. Rise of the Creative Class — Richard Florida (re-read)
39. Saturday — Ian McEwan
40. Warnings: Finding Cassandras to stop Catastrophes — Richard Clarke & RP Eddy
41. One Billion Americans — Matthew Yglesias
42. The Perfect Weapon — David Sanger (8/9)
43. Rules of Contagion — Adam Kucharski.
I hope more of you will post their reading/movie/music lists, because I get a fair number of recommendations via these lists.

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.

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Still wondering about this 🤔


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