https://rwbookclub.com/ Since April 2003, the R/W Book Club has been reading together — mostly non-fiction, with members rotating who picks the next book. en-us Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-idea-machine/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-idea-machine/ Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Picked by Jamie. By Joel Miller. Books are our first and most lasting form of information technology. Books preserve ideas, yes, but they also provoke new ones— they are true tools for thinking. In The Idea Machine, Joel J. Miller shows that books are one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of our contemporary world. And they still have lessons to teach us. Polls indicate reading is on the decline, but as we deal with concerns about artificial intelligence and social and political division, the history of the book offers a path of understanding and patterns for engagement. They can even help us navigate what’s coming next. Starting with the surge of book culture in ancient Athens and then moving through the centuries, from monks and militaries to rebellions and the Renaissance, and even to more modern-day implications of books as tools of liberation and the novel’s impact on our humanity, Miller highlights the features and functions that make books indispensable to cultural evolution. Subject to its own periods of technological upheaval and social unrest, the history of the book can point us away from failed past responses and toward more fruitful adaptations that will benefit us all. The Idea Machine reframes the history of the book as the eye-opening story of humanity’s first mobile information device. Books do more than record thinking; they serve as tools to facilitate it. More than a history of the book as an object or a simple consideration of the literature it has contained, The Idea Machine is the history of the book as a technology that transformed the peoples and societies that embraced it, and which maintains a vital role in a world where technological advancements seem to render it obsolete and ideological division might render our shared future untenable. https://rwbookclub.com/books/patterns-in-nature/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/patterns-in-nature/ Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:30:00 GMT Picked by Tom. By Philip Ball. Though at first glance the natural world may appear overwhelming in its diversity and complexity, there are regularities running through it, from the hexagons of a honeycomb to the spirals of a seashell and the branching veins of a leaf. Revealing the order at the foundation of the seemingly chaotic natural world, Patterns in Nature explores not only the math and science but also the beauty and artistry behind nature’s awe-inspiring designs. Unlike the patterns we create in technology, architecture, and art, natural patterns are formed spontaneously from the forces that act in the physical world. Very often the same types of pattern and form – spirals, stripes, branches, and fractals, say—recur in places that seem to have nothing in common, as when the markings of a zebra mimic the ripples in windblown sand. That’s because, as Patterns in Nature shows, at the most basic level these patterns can often be described using the same mathematical and physical principles: there is a surprising underlying unity in the kaleidoscope of the natural world. Richly illustrated with 250 color photographs and anchored by accessible and insightful chapters by esteemed science writer Philip Ball, Patterns in Nature reveals the organization at work in vast and ancient forests, powerful rivers, massing clouds, and coastlines carved out by the sea. By exploring similarities such as those between a snail shell and the swirling stars of a galaxy, or the branches of a tree and those of a river network, this spectacular visual tour conveys the wonder, beauty, and richness of natural pattern formation. https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-overstory/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-overstory/ Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:00:00 GMT Picked by Erik. By Richard Powers. The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of―and paean to―the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours―vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. https://rwbookclub.com/books/enshittification/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/enshittification/ Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:30:00 GMT Picked by Tom. By Cory Doctorow. It’s not your imagination. Life online really does get worse by the day, and that is by intent. Misogyny, conspiratorialism, surveillance, manipulation, fraud, and AI slop are drowning the internet. For the monopolists who dominate online – X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple – this is all part of the playbook. The process is what leading tech critic Cory Doctorow has dubbed ‘enshittification’. First, the platform attracts users with some bait, such as free access; then the activity is monetized, bringing in the business customers and degrading the user experience; then, once everyone is trapped and competitors eradicated, the platform wrings out all the value and transfers it to their executives and shareholders. As a result, online public squares have become places of torment, and online retailers are hellish dumpster fires. The virtual gathering places where we once imagined the world’s problems might be resolved are now a sewer of hatred and abuse – thoroughly enshittified. Doctorow enumerates the symptoms, lays out the diagnosis, and identifies the best responses to these diseased platforms: the monopolies online must be shattered. Companies too big to fail or to jail – and much too big to care – must be cut down to size. Only an attack on corporate power will permit effective regulation and real privacy. Tech unions must protect the workers who should, in turn, defend us against their bosses’ sadism and greed. https://rwbookclub.com/books/heart-of-darkness/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/heart-of-darkness/ Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:30:00 GMT Picked by Nick. By Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’. Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-origins-of-totalitarianism/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-origins-of-totalitarianism/ Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:30:00 GMT Picked by Loren. By Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in her time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination. https://rwbookclub.com/books/co-intelligence/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/co-intelligence/ Tue, 24 Jun 2025 23:30:00 GMT Picked by Jamie. By Ethan Mollick. Something new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously. After millions of years on our own, humans had developed a kind of co-intelligence that could augment, or even replace, human thinking. Through his writing, speaking, and teaching, Mollick has become one of the most prominent and provocative explainers of AI, focusing on the practical aspects of how these new tools for thought can transform our world. https://rwbookclub.com/books/how-to-do-nothing/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/how-to-do-nothing/ Tue, 27 May 2025 23:30:00 GMT Picked by Erik. By Jenny Odell. Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent. https://rwbookclub.com/books/through-the-language-glass/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/through-the-language-glass/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Erik. By Guy Deutscher. This book confronts the thorny question of how and whether culture shapes language and language, culture. Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence languageand vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions isyes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water -- a "she" -- becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery. - Publisher. https://rwbookclub.com/books/army-of-none/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/army-of-none/ Tue, 17 Sep 2024 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Tom. By Paul Scharre. What happens when a Predator drone has as much autonomy as a Google car? Although it sounds like science fiction, the technology to create weapons that could hunt and destroy targets on their own already exists. Paul Scharre, a leading expert in emerging weapons technologies, draws on incisive research and firsthand experience to explore how increasingly autonomous weapons are changing warfare. This far-ranging investigation examines the emergence of fully autonomous weapons, the movement to ban them, and the legal and ethical issues surrounding their use. Scharre spotlights the role of artificial intelligence in military technology, spanning decades of innovation from German noise-seeking Wren torpedoes in World War II--antecedents of today's armed drones--to autonomous cyber weapons. At the forefront of a game-changing debate, Army of None engages military history, global policy, and bleeding-edge science to explore what it would mean to give machines authority over the ultimate decision: life or death. https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-power-law/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/the-power-law/ Wed, 29 May 2024 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Nick. By Sebastian Mallaby. https://rwbookclub.com/books/dictionary-people/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/dictionary-people/ Tue, 23 Apr 2024 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Loren. By Sarah Ogilvie. https://rwbookclub.com/books/medici-money/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/medici-money/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT Picked by Jamie. By Tim Parks. https://rwbookclub.com/books/dawn-of-everything/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/dawn-of-everything/ Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT Picked by Erik. By David Graeber and David Wengrow. The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. https://rwbookclub.com/books/otherlands/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/otherlands/ Thu, 31 Aug 2023 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Tom. By Thomas Halliday. https://rwbookclub.com/books/nation-of-takers/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/nation-of-takers/ Tue, 11 Jul 2023 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Nick. By Nicholas Eberstadt. In A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic, one of our country’s foremost demographers, Nicholas Eberstadt, details the exponential growth in entitlement spending over the past fifty years. As he notes, in 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government’s total outlays. Today, entitlement spending accounts for a full two-thirds of the federal budget. Drawing on an impressive array of data and employing a range of easy- to- read, four color charts, Eberstadt shows the unchecked spiral of spending on a range of entitlements, everything from medicare to disability payments. But Eberstadt does not just chart the astonishing growth of entitlement spending, he also details the enormous economic and cultural costs of this epidemic. He powerfully argues that while this spending certainly drains our federal coffers, it also has a very real,long-lasting, negative impact on the character of our citizens. Also included in the book is a response from one of our leading political theorists, William Galston. In his incisive response, he questions Eberstadt’s conclusions about the corrosive effect of entitlements on character and offers his own analysis of the impact of American entitlement growth. https://rwbookclub.com/books/men-without-work/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/men-without-work/ Tue, 11 Jul 2023 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Nick. By Nicholas Eberstadt. By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: the country is richer than ever before and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession—lower today, in fact, than for most of the postwar era. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work—most especially among America’s men. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, shows that while “unemployment” has gone down, America’s work rate is also lower today than a generation ago—and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged twenty-five to fifty-four—or “men of prime working age”—was actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940: before the War, and at the tail end of the Great Depression. Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at all—and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of “men without work,” argues Eberstadt, is “America’s invisible crisis.” So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society? Nicholas Eberstadt lays out the issue and Jared Bernstein from the left and Henry Olsen from the right offer their responses to this national crisis. For more information, please visit http://menwithoutwork.com. https://rwbookclub.com/books/a-supposedly-fun-thing-i-ll-never-do-again/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/a-supposedly-fun-thing-i-ll-never-do-again/ Tue, 30 May 2023 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Loren. By David Foster Wallace. A collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories -- which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere -- explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.Among the stories are "The Depressed Person", a dazzling portrayal of a woman's mental state; "Adult World", which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men", a dark, hilarious series of portraits of men whose fear of women renders them grotesque. https://rwbookclub.com/books/to-shake-the-sleeping-self/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/to-shake-the-sleeping-self/ Tue, 11 Apr 2023 23:00:00 GMT Picked by Jamie. By Jedidiah Jenkins. From travel writer and Instagram phenomenon Jedidiah Jenkins, a long-awaited memoir of adventure, failure, and lessons learned while bicycling the 10,000 miles from Oregon to Patagonia. On the eve of turning thirty, terrified of being sucked into a life he didn't choose, Jedidiah Jenkins quit his dream job and spent the next sixteen months cycling from Oregon to Patagonia. He chronicled the trip on Instagram, where his photos and profound reflections on life soon attracted hundreds of thousands of followers and got him featured by National Geographic and The Paris Review. In this unflinchingly honest memoir, Jed narrates the adventure that started it all: the people and places he encountered on his way to the bottom of the world, and the internal journey that prompted it--the question of what it means to be an adult; his struggle to reconcile his sexual identity with his conservative Christian upbringing; and his belief in travel as a way to "wake us up" to our lives back home. As he writes in his inspiring search for wonder and a life he could believe in, 'It's not about the bike. It's about getting out of your routine--and that could look like anything' https://rwbookclub.com/books/mni-sota-makoce/ https://rwbookclub.com/books/mni-sota-makoce/ Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT Picked by Erik. By Gwen Westerman and Bruce White.