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Als ik zou kunnen teruggaan naar de moment waar ik deze boek in een winkel in Amsterdam gekocht heb, wat zou ik anders kunnen doen? Het was en pijnlijk moment. Ik kan me nog herinneren. Ik verzamelde de boeken die ik wilde kopen in en zakje. Dat mocht niet, maar dat wist ik niet. De winkelier kwam naar me toe en vroeg me af wat ik was aan het doen. Maar ik kon hem niet verstaan, mijn Nederlands was niet goed genoeg. Ik wist niet wat hij me vroegte. Wij moesten het op het Engels gaan regelen.

Waarom kocht ik nu dit boek, ik kon niet even eens de titel verstaan. Ik weet het niet meer. Het was onder de populaire pas uitgekomen boeken. Op het boekomslag stond iets van een reis naar Los Angeles, dat leek me mooi. Als ik het maar beter zou hebben gewist, dat dit een boek was over de kracht van verhalen over trauma, dat zo grappig kon schrijven over de genezingsproces, ja dan... had ik de boek ook gekocht. Maar misschien zonder het in en zakje te doen, vanwege dat de winkelier het niet zal goedkeuren.

The confusing title leaves a lot to the imagination, so to set expectations correctly: This book is in essence a do-it-yourself guide to language learning using the flashcards method. It provides a general overview of the science of forgetting and remembering, and it talks about proper habit forming in depth. It presents a learning journey that starts with getting to know the difference between sounds in your target language all the way to reading literature and watching TV. It also includes an introduction into phonology and the International Phonetic Alphabet for those who need it.

The bulk of the book is a guide on what kinds of flashcards to create and how to use them at which step of the learning process. It goes into great detail with countless examples and provides options for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners. True to the do-it-yourself nature of the approach, Wyner gives the reader a lot of tools and information and recommends a lot of professionally-edited philological works: he recommends frequency dictionaries to create an initial word list, and monolingual dictionaries for intermediate learners. He provides many different options based on the learner’s personal budget and talks about the importance of connecting with speakers of your language, their culture, and how to effectively spend time with professional tutors. In the current climate of „trust the approach“-style language learning and addictive gamification that aims to take options away from learners rather than present them to them, this is a refreshingly traditional and human-focused approach.

Wyner then proceeds to put his foot in his mouth with his callous admission that, actually, he is using a lot of ChatGPT these days instead of the frequency dictionaries and personal tutors he was just recommending. Several pages of the book are a guide on how to properly prompt your LLM to spew correct-sounding stuff back at you. Volume-wise this advice isn’t very prominent in the book, so you’ve still got a lot of approaches to choose instead, and many of his ideas are good to excellent. If you’ve never successfully learned another language, this book can give you a lot of great tips if the flashcard approach is right for you. But the stench of outsourcing human thinking and craft to codswallop regurgitated by the word machine is a major blemish of Wyner’s work.

Archeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman dissect the Hebrew Bible's tales starting with the myths about the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and end with the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

For each topic, they discuss the Bible's account of the events, the previous attempts of archeologists to harmonize the archeological data with the biblical account, as well as a description of the revised archeological consensus as of the publication of the book in 2001. Among the way, the authors rehabilitate kings that the Bible decried as heretics, while giving us a fascinating view of how archeological findings are combined to form our theories of ancient civilizations.

While we can reject the historicity of the Exodus and the united monarchy under King David because of the available evidence to the contrary, we do learn a lot about the real history of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Juda, and how that division can be seen a long time before there even is a people called the Israelites and a language called Hebrew, back to the settlement patters of the hill country in the Early Bronze Age.

The civilization-destroying effects of the Late Bronze Age collapse left the people of 7th century Judah no choice but to paint their history in very broad strokes that gets less accurate as we go further back in time. The rhetorical needs of a country under threat of invasion by the great powers of the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, dictated how that golden age of mythical past needed to be designed.

What really happened under Kings Hezekiah and Josiah? This book opens the curtains to reveal the real history of the prosperous kingdom of Ancient Israel, its ultimate fall to the Assyrians, and how the kingdom of Judah was left over to pick up the scraps. It's a timeless story of joy, determination, struggle, and ultimately failure, ruin, and rebirth.

Rutger Bregman writes this book for people who already feel like the world is full of problems and want to do something about it, and tells them to put their money where their mouth is. Bregman identifies two types of activism that aren't doing enough: realism that trades in ambitious goals for what can be easily done, and raw ambition of the "noble loser", whose ambition stops them from making necessary compromises or reflect on how to make their activism more productive.

The book then intends to both increase your ambition of what you can achieve, and to present what kinds of methods have worked in the past to achieve ambitious goals. Bregman wants to instill the reader with a sense that it isn't enough to have good intentions, you should not be above reviewing what about your activism works and doesn't work and change accordingly. The current problems he identifies are hunger, child mortality, lack of access to medical care, animal rights and the fight for climate change. The historical analogues he makes to show what has and hasn't worked in the past discuss the fight for abolition of slavery, women's and civil rights, and sheltering of Jewish People during Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

He firmly states that awareness of problems existing is far from enough, and you should get out there and actually do effective work, preferably as your entire career path. As he puts it, this book isn't written for people who "already have a labrador, a mortgage and a cake server." His examples of successful activists include founders of associations for the fight against malaria, vaccine researchers, diplomats in the fight against biological weapons, environmentalist lawyers and somebody who is helping poultry farmers to move away from the meat industry.

Parts of his book read like you should exploit and overwork yourself in a kind of charity start-up culture for the common good. Sure, later chapters tone it down, but it's there. There's a plea for finding the way to help the largest number of people as possible, to "disrupt the good deeds market" like a venture capitalist would. There's an entire spiel of philanthropy by very rich people and what they can achieve, too. Because this book is more about what you could do instead of why, I suspect there's going to be two kind of ways to walk away from it after finishing it.

The first kind of person would take the mentions of Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried (who are portrayed negatively) and the entire chapter full of Hogwarts analogies (very much uncritically - "be the next Dumbledore!") and decide that the moral "good" they should fight for is dismantling the rights of trans people, fight against abortion access, join an AI startup, or join a cult about GameStop stocks because of a belief that doing so is a moral good - nay, THE moral good - that's going to change the world for the better. The book doesn't explicitly argue for this, but it certainly doesn't inoculate its readers enough against joining these cults. For example, the only mention trans people get in the book is where he derides trans activists for sabotaging the potential collaboration of conservatives in the fight for reproductive rights by insisting feminism be trans-inclusive.

The other way to walk away from this book, then, is to take what works from it and discard what doesn't. No activist should be above looking at the effects their current efforts have had, critically examining them, and adapting methods and changing course if necessary. Being aware of an issue isn't enough, you need to get off your sofa and do something to create lasting change. You need to form coalitions, be ambitious and realistic at the same time, look after yourself and your health, and don't get roped in by understanding activism as allegiance to charismatic leaders. Maybe Rutger Bregman is himself one of those.

Dr. Dan McClellan is a scholar of religion with an education in Biblical Hebrew and Greek, among other things. In this book, he challenges some assumptions roaming our collective discourse about what the Bible supposedly says. We learn about what Biblical authors thought about hot-button issues of their day and today, such as monotheism, hell, abortion, slavery, homosexuality, any many more. In general, there is two kinds of myths McClellan takes on in this book.

The first, modern Christian readers of the Bible would like the Bible to have clear opinions on the culture war hot points of our day, such as abortion and eternal damnation to hell. McClellan investigates these claims according to what we have been able to reconstruct about the beliefs and rhetorical goals of the individual Biblical authors. For example, he finds that abortion is not unambiguously condemned in the Biblical text and talks about how abortion became such a divisive subject in the modern day as a means to structure political power into the Christian Right of today.

He also talks about the history of the conceptualization of divine punishment, which slowly over time shifted from punishment in life to punishment after death, as ancient Jewish and Christian people sought to explain how their persecutors clearly went unpunished in life.

The second myth he investigates is, when the Bible clearly endorses behaviors that are today considered evil, such as slavery and genocide. He speaks out against people trying to ignore the plain reading of the text that describes slavery as good and natural. He entirely dispels the myth that God somehow laid the "seeds" to the abolition of slavery over 2000 years before it actually happened.

The main thesis of his book is, then, that it is wrong to understand the Bible in terms of the dogmas of inerrancy, inspiration and univocality (the belief that the entire Bible was written in a non-contradicting way and speaks with a unified voice). We learn, among other things, how king Josiah's program of cult centralization formed the foundation of what was much later combined under the conceptional package of monotheism. We also learn that Paul's sexual ethics mostly consist of that people should be celibate like him.

The lesson is that what we find in the Biblical text isn't independent from the circumstances of the people who wrote it. There is no Biblical author, there are only Biblical authors, plural, and they wrote in many different time periods to achieve different rhetorical goals. Thus, anybody who wants to wield the authority of the Bible as a bludgeon to win a moral argument today has to ignore parts in favor of highlighting other parts - they have to negotiate with the text.

Throughout his book, McClellan clearly condemns using the Bible and its horrifically outdated ideas about sexual morality and other things as a way to asset power and ruin the lives of marginalized people today. While we might find inspiration on some of the betters parts today, reading the Bible teaches us one thing and one thing only: how the individual authors of the Bible thought about issues back in their day. And while that is incredibly fascinating, those views are entirely irrelevant today.

This book presents a handful of trivia and anecdotes for the world's 20 languages with the most speakers. It might be a showcase of Korean's onomatopoeia, Javanese's honorific system or - of course - Chinese's unique writing system. The trivia and anecdotes are something interesting, sometimes a bit boring.

This book is great if it's the first book you're reading about the world's languages, to get you interested for more language learning or linguistics. If you're already a passionate language lover, you're likely going to walk away from this book slightly disappointed that it didn't give you more thorough showcases of its languages. It's just an appetizer in that way.

I did roll my eyes a bit at describing specific language features as impossibly difficult to learn, and I hope this book doesn't encourage the kind of adversarial relationship many people have with foreign language learning. I'm glad, though, that the author took a clear stand against the myth that English is a lingua franca because of some intrinsic "easiness".

While reading through the last chapter, I recognize that Harari is himself a victim to the myths he so often talks about in the course of the book. The final pages of the book read like an advertisement for a venture-capital funded artificial intelligence startup that promises the future, while only caring about its owner's short-term wealth accumulation.

The core thesis that you are able to take away from this book, should you choose to do so, is that human societies and connections that go beyond the simple rural village or family clan require shared myths.

Harari calls everything a "myth" that doesn't exist in nature but is man-made. Be that religious beliefs, societal roles, money, the rule of law, a belief in individuality and human rights, capitalism, communism, and everything in between.

He manages to hold a position that calls religious beliefs an arbitrary invention, while simultaneously slamming militant atheists for rejecting religious beliefs wholesale because the atheist, too, shares beliefs (individualism, secularism, human rights, whatever you wish) that are ultimately cultural and made up by humans.

He attributes the fact that modern ideologies like capitalism, communism, imperialism, national socialism or feminism are not religions in a literal sense to medical progress and the reduction in child mortality in the modern era. If death is no longer a constant surrounding factor in your life, the capitalist, communist or feminist does not need to worry about promises of the afterlife, he says.

Another core observation he makes is that belief and hope in a better future did not necessarily exist in the Middle Ages and before in the way it does now. He says that pre-modern ideologies share the belief that the world is getting worse all the time, and the only way to make it better is to return to the golden age of the mythical past. Whereas a modern company manager cares to disrupt markets, the ancient priest thus saw heresy, the deliberate change of a prior-held belief, as sinful.

And he is not suggesting that this "progress" is a good thing, necessarily. He highlights at lengths how scientific progress in the age of "discovery" came hand-in-hand with the imperialist conquest of the world. You could say that the scientific progress of the past 500 years and our positive or optimistic views of the future are an unintentional side-effect of imperial conquest. At least, with the concepts Harari describes, this is a possible conclusion.

I really don't know what I think about this book and Harari's ideas in the end. I wonder how this book's conclusion would have looked like if it was written in the spring of 2025. Would he still postulate that soon humanity will create general artificial intelligence, androids, and genetically engineered superhumans?