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Molly Rookwood asked: I find it shocking that more people haven't commented on the title. I have searched through articles, and while they mention the obvious connection to Hitler, none of them ask about it in detail. WHY would he call it that, and what point is he trying to make? I can't bring myself to read the book, brilliant though it may be, because the title is too horrifying for me to move past. I think it is like satire, it that can have a double meaning, a differentiation from the original. While in one, Hitler "outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany", the other has Knausgard describing the "banalities and humiliations of his life." It is in fact a mock of Hitler. As for his point, that is the question that you need to answer, since literature is rarely so cut-and-dried as to plainly state its meaning, but provides one via interpretation. This is the quote regarding Hitler's Mein Kampf from the article that Dramatika l

In response to a Krugman article: Why do conservatives react so extremely, so ignorantly? Studies have pointed to several traits more common in conservatives. Maybe it is the fear of change, or maybe disgust at the foreign and unknown, or the greater fear of death. Regardless, about major issues, they are almost always wrong, hysterically shrieking while they drag us into their puritan, militaristic, know-nothing existence.

Saga, Volume 4 by Brian K. Vaughan My rating: 5 of 5 stars This series is relevant to the concerns of our day, and really seems to resonate with women. Focused on two (2) beings from different worlds that have a child together and ultimately told from the child's eyes, the series is funny, irreverent and a bit crazy. I love the series, and simply devour the books when they arrive. View all my reviews

The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy by Stanisław Lem My rating: 5 of 5 stars Get into the rhythm... This satire has a particular patter, very fast, and once you go with it, the ribald 'ride' becomes immensely enjoyable. View all my reviews

A response , to the article  Work Policies May Be Kinder, but Brutal Competition is Not : You were making a point that I had hoped you would complete, that some of us choose to "play in the tournament", and some of us do not. Tough work environments are fine for the people that choose to work in them - that is not true either, because those same environments have ingrained biases - but I imagine most do not choose to be treated inhumanely. People that would choose to have a positive work-life balance, or have priorities outside of work, e.g., sport, charity, friends, will be trampled for the profits of someone else. They will be tracked, harangued, and stressed. I do not welcome the new serfdom-like piece work that technology enables.

A response to The Rise of Phone Reading : Way back when, when the Palm Pilot was ascendant, I would try to read books on my devices, but never found the experience satisfactory, nor did I succeed. It did not help that I was trying to read James Joyce's Ulysses. Now, with a large screen Samsung Note II, or alternatively an iPad, and the Kindle app, I am finishing up on Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, an equally large and dense work as Ulysses, but an altogether enjoyable experience.

This is a response to an article, How the Skills Gap Is Affecting IT Teams : The problem is manifold, but other types of specialization are treated as normal, e.g., doctors and lawyers, and even then there is so much variation and incompetence. Maybe technology itself is the problem, since the work is not easy enough to hand off to a monkey or to automate completely, yet. Maybe people are just comparing normal to great, similar in ways to expecting an average person to understand graduate level research. It is unrealistic to expect that the average [software team, developer, organization] can implement that exceptional [technology implementation] here. We can't all be above above average, let alone great.

I realized that de Blasio's accomplishments go unnoticed, primarily because affluent white people do not benefit from them. The benefits the mayor has brought are often corrections to the abuses of Bloomberg's, along with prior mayors', policies: Policing The NYPD conducts fewer stop-and-frisks. The city dropped its stop-and-frisk appeal. NYPD officers are starting to use body cameras. New York police officers are being retrained. Carrying a small amount of weed will probably result in a ticket, not an arrest. Teenage inmates are no longer put in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. The city has settled with the “Central Park Five.” Poverty There are 23 new homeless shelters in the city There's a new rent subsidy program for homeless families. More public housing units are available to homeless families. Traffic Pedestrian deaths are at a record low. The speed limit was lowered from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour. There are harsher

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 by Jonathan I. Israel My rating: 4 of 5 stars Excellent book and ideas, with some flaws I found irritating. First, some quotes are provided without translations - I wish my French was better, and i have no real understanding of Dutch - and it would have been nice to link to the translation, if not had it displayed in the text. Second, the history is very detailed, a bit too much for my taste, and I would have preferred a somewhat higher-level view of the actions of the various actors in the enlightenment drama. View all my reviews

A post on On-Demand Workers: ‘We Are Not Robots’ , subtitled, Is Technology Liberating or Squeezing the New Class of Freelance Labor? My personal experience with Uber has been pleasant, albeit troubling. We recently visited friends in California, and the male partner touted how it was great, that he knew of a driver who could piece together work, and could work whenever he wanted to for some extra cash, but I met a driver like this. He had a masters degree in computer science (CS) from a US university, but as an immigrant could not find a sponsor; he had not worked in CS for several years. His primary job was as a dispatcher for the shipping industry, but also had small side jobs picking up mail for non-resident Chinese homeowners who lived elsewhere, and as an Uber driver.  Although my friend painted this situation as freedom, it sounded a bit more like desperation... A poster responded, in typical WSJ reader fashion, that he made his own choices, to which my response was: @K

Along these lines, from a recent release, and supportive of your post: "Previous portraits of Davos delegates as uprooted jetsetters or global networkers easily overlook their influence on society. Our findings reveal that the forum actively shifts the burden for the solution of problems from governments and corporations to individual consumers, with significant personal and societal costs," the authors conclude. The release from Eurekalert The article and original post from me.

A response to  Should Schools Teach Personality? The push to discipline, while seeming 'good for kids' is questionable for several reasons: Why not teach openness to ideas, another quality shown correlated with academic performance. Conscientiousness is a slightly more conservative quality, while openness is a liberal quality (it is the stronger correlate of political viewpoint), and this just seems to push the same negative conservative agenda. The blame for failure is simply pushed further on to students, without any awareness about larger societal issues and/or social issues impacting one's ability at discipline. Teaching personality might have secondary negative effects As to the last point, I have read of a study showing an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and fluid intelligence, and an increase in g with some dimensions of intelligence, although it was not verified in a follow-up study: Original: What Facets of Openness and Conscientiousnes