Q1/2 2026 books
Getting the best of it by David Sklansky. This is something that’s been in my list of books to read since I got out of grad school. It’s often recommended for getting a quant finance job for the sort of gambling puzzles it contains. Most of the poker stuff is lost on me, as I’ve never played or even thought about poker, but some of the other stuff is pretty good, and I get the basic ideas he’s conveying. Stuff like what’s the optimal fraction of bluffs in play: makes sense. A bit of his math is questionable. It’s interesting, but not a requirement for anything other than perhaps professional gamblers.
Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World by Oliver Bullough. This was touted by some youtube sperdo as being about money laundering. Well, it’s not really. It starts off in Ukraine after the Maidan when everyone was touring the palace of Yanukovych, wondering at all the kitch nonsense and splendor he had acquired. He does give some interesting history of the eurodollar and bearer bonds I wasn’t so familiar with. Goes into corporate shells. Corporate shells bad! It keeps divorcees from cashing in on their rich asshole husbands! It keeps malpractice lawyers from looting every cent from doctors! It keeps tax collectors from looting every cent from business owners! The author basically reveals himself to be a moralizing socialist dimwit. I have no sympathy for women who feel entitled to half a man’s net worth for sexual favors, nor the existence of malpratice lawyers; I feel strongly enough about this I moved to a higher tax country where such things are impossible. Some of the case studies where dictators looted some turd world shithole and moved it to Citibank are pretty funny, but most of them are very much out of date. KYC laws everywhere are becoming onerous enough to make life impossible for normal people. Those are the answer to the problem, along with strict anticorruption laws and modest capital controls in countries with weak law enforcement. Actual money laundering, while it includes things like corporate shells, also includes things like cash businesses (Europe seems to be curiously and suddenly full of Thai massage parlours now), non-profits, property ownership, fancy watches, freeports and art pieces, and he seems profoundly incurious about these actual nuts and bolts parts of this sort of thing; it’s not difficult to find out. As he points out there’s a whole industry around it, all you have to do is go talk to those people pretending to be an African warlord or something. The author seemed awfully concerned with small scale corruption at a Ukraine hospital; I mean, dude really doesn’t like doctors. If you’ve ever been there, literally everything is corrupt: that’s the system. Why I should be concerned about this anecdote is beyond me; presumably it’s a reworked newspaper article he used to stuff the page count. If you know people from that part of the world, it’s obvious they’re doing their best under the circumstances. The following chapter on equatorial guinea is also revealing of his addle-pated sense of morality. Before decolonialization it had a high standard of living and more per capita hospital beds than its Spanish colonial overlords. After colonization it was a shithole. He blames colonialism (the dudes who provided a high standard of living and free hospitals), rather than the low-IQ maniacs who took over afterwords, I guess because the colonialists are white or something. BTW this has nothing to do with money laundering; he’s just rattling on about irrelevant bullshit and caterwauling his moralizing nonsense. Lots of kvetching by FBI agents they don’t control everyone’s money. No indication why we should take some cop’s view that totalitarian banking controls (what could go wrong?) are the right way to run society. He’s right that the US and UK are pretty much peak at criminal money laundering. He’s not right about how it works or why these places are selected (because they have laws, basically: the kinds of laws this numskull would like to get rid of which would turn such countries into …. Ukraine). The irony of all this of course is the fact that the author himself appears to be embarrassingly rich; able to gallivant around the world as a “freelance author” attempting to interrogate corporate shell companies. If you look at his photo, he looks like someone Bertie Wooster throws buns at in the drone club. Of course it was perfectly legal for his ancestors to steal from peasants, Indians or deal opium to Chinamen or whatever his ancestors did to enable this lifestyle “journalism.” Just as most of what he describes is also perfectly legal, but apparently we’re supposed to think it immoral if the wrong sorts of people engage in it. If I were involved in “moneyland” I’d ensure this numskull gets as much press as possible: making him the daring investigator of AML shennanegins ensures nothing useful will ever be done about it. Peak insanity in this book; he interviews … Bill Browder. Browder is an actual looter of 2nd world shit-holes who was called on it as Russia got its shit together. Half the reason the west is mad at Russia is Browder didn’t think he had to pay taxes there. Because the author of this book is an incurious fucknut, he uses heroic Bill Browder as a victim of venue shopping for libel laws by Russian policemen: something that … Bill Browder is known to have done, even in the US, which has the first amendment. The sheer topsy turvy insanity of using the hilariously villainous Browder as a positive example here is something like picking Hermann Goering as an example of a heroic London real estate developer in the early 1940s. This pretty much sums up this book.
Dynamical Theories of Brownian Motion by Edward Nelson. This was suggested to me by frequent commenter chiral3 for a review of stochastic calculus, which I need for understanding things like Khrennikov’s theory and some new stochastic calculus stuff from Terry Lyons. This is a famous 120-page paper, freely available online, and I wanted to read it offline, so I bought the amazog book. Don’t do this. The amazog book is the first edition of the paper, which is written with hand-drawn 1967 era equations. You’d think this doesn’t matter compared to nicely formatted LaTeX, but it absolutely does: crabbed hand drawn/typewritten equations are difficult to read and the formatting is a trashfire. Beyond this it’s almost $40, which is outrageous. It even says on the product page that it is the second edition: it isn’t. I would have returned it, but realized all this after the return window expired. Pay $10 to print the second edition spiral bound at the print shop. Special thanks to Japanese autiste Jun Suzuki who agrees with me on formatting issues, and fixed a number of errors besides in the second edition, which is a real treasure, entirely attributable to him and his classmates. Otherwise this is an excellent paper which people interested in stochastic calculus should have a look at.
Real Analysis and Probability (first edition) Robert P Ash. This one, some youtube schizo recommended for learning real analysis applied to probability theory, which is directly relevant to book/paper mentioned above. There’s a later version of it extended with Catherine Doleans which covers the Ito Calculus, but I don’t give a shit about that, and can get it from other places. Key is this book has a solutions manual available so I can work out some of the problem sets and don’t have to rely on a LLM for solutions. I remember looking at somebody’s book on Real Analysis (probably Stephen Abbott’s book) as an undergraduate and thinking it was a lot of useless bullshit, at least for a physics major, but it turns out I actually need this crap. Nice, clear didactics, good notational explanations for retards like me who don’t inhale math formalism. I ain’t using this to do real analysis proofs; I don’t care about acquiring this skill, more a codex for following the more complicated proofs involving integrating over a bunch of noise. I am tool using ape, but it’s good to have some background for grug to use tool properly.
Doing Time Like a Spy by John Kiriakou. I’m a big fanboy of his youtube/rumble videos. He was the guy who blew the whistle on the CIA torture program. Because American dweeb state are a bunch of totalitarian numskulls he was the only one who went to prison over it. I know most of his stories from having listened to hours of his podcasts, so I picked this one at random, figuring he told fewer of these stories on podcasts. Anyway, some good stories in there, and good advice for operating in adverse social circumstances. It’s funny he’s recently had some good luck and signed with a big talent firm; hopefully it isn’t a spook-organized buy out. Spooks are chosen for mild sociopathic tendencies and charisma, and you can see it in the stories, and on occasion in his interviews; his recent interview with that chode Sean Hannity was pretty lol; can’t blame the dude, he’s trying to get a presidential pardon. Sometimes Kiriakou doesn’t come off well in the retellings which is kind of funny and indicates he’s being honest about what happened. Anyway good stories. Don’t go to jail, it sounds like hell. If you do go to jail, it helps to be a famous guy with CNN reporters visiting you. And now a word from our sponsors:
Seeing like a State by James C Scott. This is a book which I think I have been indirectly influenced by in a number of ways. As such, actually reading it is quite tiresome. It is a critique of High Modernism applied to societal construction, from architecture and city planning a la Le Corbusier/Brasilia to communism, collective farms, and villagization in Tanzania and so on. The guy who actually recommended it to me is a Palantir employee, which fits the theme. I find all this tedious because to me it is self-evidently true. High modernist projects like Soviet Communism have always failed because the people who dream this crap up have no idea how human beings actually work and interact with each other economically and otherwise. I’m pretty sure I knew that Le Corbusier made shit architecture, Brasilia is a shit hole, and communism is retarded before this dude wrote his book. Still, he did write the book, and wrap it all together in an overall critique of Modernism applied to human life. He also wrote a book on why Agriculture is a bad idea, “Against the Grain” -this has also been an indirect influence on me through people like REN and others. Yes, agriculture gives poor outcomes for human health compared to hunting and gathering, but it also enables people to develop technologies like penicillin, supersonic airplanes and vaccines. Mr. Scott is some kind of soft quasi-anarchist. This is an admirable point of view if you don’t take it too seriously. If you do take it too seriously you get an idiot like John Zerzan whose ideas would create mass death if implemented. I mean, if you want mass death, High Modernism is more humane, aesthetic and efficient. When Scott wrote this book in the 90s, High Modernism was well in the rear view mirror of most elites; at the time they were really into centrally planned “nudges” -that beigist nincompoop Cass Sunstein being a notable proponent, and strategic helplessness, like not having an industrial policy because it displeases people who make large campaign contributions. These represent the opposite and its midpoint for “High Modernism” antirespectively. As such, it would have been more socially useful for him to write a jeremiad against these things, rather than kicking the corpse of High Modernism which died 20 years previous with the Soviet Union. Certainly there are abundant examples of the failures of the Nudge and Strategic Helplessness, and already were when he started on his book on Modernism. Subsequent applications of these issues have done more harm since then than any subsequent High Modernist projects; to the point of wrecking entire civilizations, let alone merely making a kind of lousy city like Chandigarh. In short, humans are retarded and many of the plans of its elites come to naught, but sometimes we do cool things. I’m a non-fan of central planning in general, but sometimes it has to be done. For example, you’re almost certainly not going to invent microchips with central planning, but you’re sure as shit not going to manufacture microchips without a great deal of it. Sure, a lot of it is done in a distributed fashion, just like sending astronauts to the moon in 1969 used myriads of private contractors, but it is very obviously a good use case for High Modernism. Stuff like building a city out of giant rectangles: not so good for anybody. Anyway I skimmed after the first 300 pages, paying closer attention to the Tanzanian story as I was less familiar with it. Give it a pass unless you’re some kind of relic of the past who thinks central planning is the solution to all human problems.
The Odyssey translated by Peter Green. I think this is my lifetime third read of The Odyssey. As with the last time I read it, it starts slow; Odysseus doesn’t even appear until book 5 of the 24 total books. I’ve always preferred the Illiad for the action and gore; this is a much more sedate book. It’s also much more complicated as a story; a good part of the story is related by Odysseus telling a story about stuff that happened to him in the past in front of other people. This is a fairly sophisticated story telling technique, arguably the first such example in human literary history. It is also interesting for the various direct interventions of the gods, which were not so immediately present in the Iliad. I can understand how Julian Jaynes came up with his wacky Bicameral Mind idea after reading the Odyssey -it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him from the Iliad. It is also more psychologically rich, in that it deals with politics, running an estate, and family life rather than grimdark “only war.” I love Green’s translations; it varies in meter, allegedly sticking closely to the original Greek text. Fun lines I didn’t remember (I wasn’t in liftwaffe the last time I read it), Book 17, lines 283–286 where some rando goatherd suggests Odysseus could get swole thighs working on his farm and drinking goat whey. I also am going through the existent film adaptations; there’s an old Italian one with Kirk Douglass which isn’t awful. An Italian TV series which looks very complete, and a 1997 movie which looks cheesy but has its moments. The Christopher Nolan movie of course is already a disaster (it isn’t out yet); he used that numskull Emily Wilson’s translation and made half the characters black (I mean, Calypso could have been: the rest, nah). Stanley Lombardo would have been the correct translation to use.
Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA: A Confession from the Profession by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte. This is something I have awaited for years. A decade and a few years ago, I recognized that the Devil’s Wurlitzer was alive and well, particularly in well-colonized places like Germany. The mass media is controlled by government spooks and gangsters. The Fourth Estate is actually a puppet show from the First Estate. Seems trivially obvious now to all but the most thoroughly propagandized with various revelations from the Twitter Files, the nonsense around Snowden and Wikileaks revelations, and the work of Mike Benz. Back ~12 years ago, when I’d say stuff like “the national advertising council and USAID is a spooky government op” people would be fitting me for a tinfoil helmet. Ulfkotte wrote his book in 2014, and I had always wanted to read it, but didn’t realize the thing had been translated to English until recently. It’s pretty much what you’d expect, though obviously more directed to the situation in Germany. While people in the US knew all this from the Church Hearings in the 1970s, somehow it was forgotten or assumed that everything was fine after that. It’s kind of funny looking at this dude’s wiki entry. Doesn’t talk much about his career before he went off the spook reservation, and is all double-plus ungood words about his terrible, naughty, forbidden “you better not be like this guy” ideas, giving fairly short shrift to his assertions about the corruption of the mass media. Fairly not funny that he died of a heart attack at 56, like many others who say things like this.
Return of the Kettlebell by Pavel. I wasn’t even aware of this book’s existence until hearing of it in a Dan John podcast. It’s so obscure there’s only one copy of it on filesharing (buying Pavel’s old books is impossible; I think he had a falling out with his old business partner). Most of these books are basically repetition of stuff he’s talked about in other books. This one is a little more oriented to double kettlebell work and high volume stuff, which is more or less what I’ve been doing lately. For completists.
Beyond Quantum by Andrei Khrennikov. I’ve discussed this guy’s work, mostly in the comments in the Conditional Probability shitpoast. I discussed it at length in another post, probably to be followed by Ballentine’s book which mostly seems to be a conventional QM book, but with statistical picture firmly in mind. Ballentine is presently languishing in my library mostly unread (excepting for the excellent and crucial Chapter 9). If you are interested in quantum weirdness or are some kind of quantum mystic you should probably look at these two books. Ballentine is 100% correct in every way: every other interpretation of quantum mechanics is nihilism or unearned mysticism. This will always be true unless there are experimental proofs (which all inherently use Ballentine/Einstein statistical picture) to the contrary. Khrennikov might be right, and it’s close enough to right it should be taken as seriously as any other book on quantum mechanics. It’s essentially quantum mechanics as Brownian motion; hardly the first man to notice this (I had forgotten you need stochastic calculus tier tricks in the Feynman path integral picture), but one step closer to glorious truth.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham. Burnham’s more famous book is about “the managerialists” -this one is about political scientists, starting with Dante and Machiavelli. I dunno, it’s pretty weak on these thinkers in my opinion, consisting in long quotes from stuff I’ve already read. Mosca and Pareto are also featured; less familiar with Mosca, but I know something about Pareto, and I don’t think these thinkers have a lot in common other than the fact that they’re all Italian. I can’t recommend this book really, unless you happen to be interested in this group of thinkers, who I do not see as particularly related to each other. They are interesting in themselves, and there is a lot of good history in it, but it’s a flawed book which should be called something else, along the lines of “early shitalian political scientists I have known and loved.”
This is a sparse two quarters from me for reading: been bogged down in technical books (which take longer) and various work related treadmills.