Weekend Insights – Why Read?

I’m wanting to get back to posting about news and views that I’ve read and pondered over the week. I hesitate to say I’ll do this every week, but I’m going to start trying! Getting into a good rhythm is hard. 

Why read? from the Farnam Street blog. “The late Harold Bloom, literary critic and professor, may well have been one of the most prolific readers of all time. Given that, Bloom was uniquely well positioned to answer the question of why we should read and how we should go about it.” For what it’s worth, Farnam Street is one of the best discoveries I’ve made on the web recently. Definitely worth subscribing.

And speaking of the books department, I’ve been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. Great book, it’s all about habit development, learning, and changing your life by understanding all of the cues that drive action. Highly recommended.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to pre-order the Kindle version (and the paperback too!) of LCI’s new book Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions. It releases November 10, and the special Kindle pre-order price is just 99 cents. Trust me, it’s awesome.

Reason has a great tribute to Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose TV series that was on PBS in 1980. After watching the tribute, I immediately went out to find where I could watch the full series. Turns out you can do it on both Amazon (with Prime) and Youtube. What a world! Check this out:

More from the streaming media department: A few enterprising Poles have just released a new documentary about Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. I haven’t watched this yet but it comes highly recommended from our good friend Lawrence Reed at FEE. (He wrote the foreword to Faith Seeking Freedom!)

Sacha Baron Cohen, Rudy Giuliani, and the Death of ‘Disinformation’ As a Useful Term. “The Hunter Biden story has exposed the media’s selective skepticism.” Really interesting article about the state of American media.

To conclude with the “I’m completely baffled” department, Paul Krugman recently published an opinion pieced titled “When Libertarianism Goes Bad”. His logic is so strange, so bizarre, that he’s literally blaming Ayn Rand for deaths from COVID-19. Really. If the Contra-Krugman podcast were still happening, they’d tear this apart limb from limb, but since it isn’t I’m hopeful that Tom or Bob will do so on their own.