David František Wagner
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Abundance – Yes, We Can for 2020s
Abundance, but for whom? I finished Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson with a slightly odd feeling: I liked it, I agreed with most of it, I even underlined a few passages — and I still don’t quite know who this book is actually for. Because if you’re already in the “progress is good, build things, let’s fix problems instead…
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Summer of 25
Summer is over. This summer was very, very eventful — and it also serves as a kind of summary of where I am in life. (Spoiler: in a good place.) It was such an intense summer that I want to leave a record of it somewhere. It started with me running the third Bitva pod Horou. Even though it faced…
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Conspiracy Against Human Race
(cover of The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Chris Mars) Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) occupies a singular space at the intersection of literary horror and philosophical pessimism. Subtitled A Contrivance of Horror, the work draws heavily on the thought of Peter Wessel Zapffe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Philipp Mainländer, and Emil Cioran,…
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Knižní shrnutí – květen 2025
Květen byl ve znamení příprav Bitvy pod Horou, uvádění Requiemu a poměrně intenzivní práce, včetně bezpečnostní konference v Kyjevě.Protože jsem ale při tom dost cestoval, stihl jsem i nějaké ty knihy. Největší banger? Asi Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. Cenu za umělecký dojem a kontroverzi si odnáší Natasha’s Dance. Taky jsem napsal víc delších reflexí než obvykle, což je…
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Book summary – May 2025
English May was all about preparing Bitva pod Horou, launching Requiem, and working pretty intensely, including a security conference in Kyiv.But since I was also travelling quite a bit, I still managed to get through some books. The biggest banger? Probably Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. The award for artistic impression and controversy goes to Natasha’s Dance. Also,…
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Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts is one of those rare books that attempt to reframe how we think about a whole discipline: and do not fall flat. Its central claim is simple: historical thinking is not natural. Instead, it’s a cultivated skill, requiring empathy, skepticism, cognitive humility, lots of context and specific skills. This premise alone…
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Why the West Rules?
Why the West Rules—For Now by Ian Morris Please consult the graph above, it should be clear now from Moriss own Composite Social Development Index . Or read on. Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now presents an ambitious synthesis of world history through a comparative civilizational lens. At its core lies the “social development index,”…
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Book reviews – April 2025
I don’t have much to say about April, except that the biggest flop was Death’s End (the final book in the trilogy starting with The Three-Body Problem), and the biggest banger was, completely unexpectedly, the essay collection on the border between music writing and reflections on life, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.…
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Knihy – duben 2025
Nemám co víc říct o dubnu, než že největší propadák byl Death’s End (poslední díl trilogie začínající „Problémem tří těles”) a největší banger byl absolutně nečekaně sborník esejů na pomezí psaní o hudbě a o životě „They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us”. Což je jedna z vět, které si nikde jinde než tady nepřečtete – zdravím oba své fanoušky.…