Drink Your Way Sober - Blocked (Receptors) and Reported (Sobriety)
Part memoir, part science writing, part history, and a lot of blaming her neighbor for her empties. Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol By: Katie Herzog Published: 2025 208 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? You may be familiar with Katie Herzog from Blocked and Reported, the podcast she hosts with Jesse Singal. Or you might have seen her byline on the Free Press. What I didn't know (at least before she started promoting this book) is that she's also a recovering alcoholic. I also didn't know about the Sinclair Method for "extinguishing" alcohol use disorder (AUD). Finally I didn't know that we are now calling it alcohol use disorder. So you could say this is a book about a bunch of things I didn't know. What's the author's angle? Herzog failed to get her drinking under control using any of the more common methods. Willpower, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), overwhelming shame, etc. The Sinclair Method was what finally worked for her. This method involves taking naltrexone before you drink. This blocks the reward circuit allowing you to train your body out of alcohol dependence. It's also something that not a lot of people have heard about, so her angle resembles that of a fiery recent convert, who believes that people trapped in similar despair need to hear the good word. Who should read this book? As someone who's never had a drink, I'm loath to recommend anything in the sobriety space. In the same manner that a fish doesn't know about water, can I have anything meaningful to say about sobriety? That very large caveat aside, if you have AUD, and nothing else has worked, and you haven't tried the Sinclair Method (or if you know someone who fits this category) I would definitely recommend this book. If you're thinking of reading it just as Herzog memoir, there's some pretty good stuff in here, but not enough to justify reading the entire book. But if you're on the fence I would push you towards getting the book. Specific thoughts: So why isn't the Sinclair Method better known?
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Replay - Groundhog Day in Novel Form, Sadly Without Any Groundhogs
Replay By: Ken Grimwood Published: 1998 320 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? A man dies and is sent back to his 18 year old self to relive his life over, and over, and over. Every time he dies he's sent back. He dies in 1988, and awakens in 1963, so there's a lot of discussion of those years (Kennedy Assassination, Moon landing, Iran Hostage crisis, etc.) Who should read this book? I came across a recommendation for this book on a Youtube channel that was doing a survey of all the movies that had functionally the same premise as Groundhog Day. And he included the book as sort of an appendix in other things people might want to check out. If you're a big fan of the Groundhog Day contrivance, then I think you'll like this book. Specific thoughts: Great on a personal level, weak on a world-building level. This review will go from spoiler free to light spoilers to full on spoilers. I will let you know at each transition.
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What Fresh Hell Awaits Us When SEO Is Replaced With AIO?
It took 20 years from Bell inventing the telegraph before someone sent an ad with it. It took ~7 years for the first piece of email spam to be sent. Any bets on what it will look like for AI? Experimental AI Summary: I open with my own costly, underwhelming SEO experiment and the fact that I've mostly abandoned Google for LLMs, arguing that if AI chat replaces search then AIO (AI optimization) will replace SEO. I frame influence as "numerous / high-reputation / mentions," recall the web's shift from Yahoo's directory to Google's PageRank—where "reputation" changed everything and spawned link-farm tactics—and ask how the same gaming might hit AI. I sketch possibilities: models pre-vetting training data and tagging low-trust commercial pages; spam-style gatekeeping of AI inputs; straightforward paid placements inside AI answers; or darker outcomes where cheap marketing pollutes corpora and bad actors weaponize hallucinations. The core question for me is whether LLMs can build sturdier reputation defenses than Google or whether their architecture makes them easier to spoof. For now, AI search feels like Google circa 1998—astonishingly good—but I doubt it stays pristine once marketers and scammers fully arrive.
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Modern Physics and Ancient Faith - Don't Mess With the Strong Nuclear Force!
If you had been placing bets 150 years ago around what physics would have to say about the existence of God, you would have lost a lot of money. Modern Physics and Ancient Faith By: Stephen M. Barr Published: 2003 312 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? Barr takes all the discoveries of 20th-century physics, stuff like the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, the various forces, and argues that all of these things are more compatible with belief in God, specifically a traditional Judeo-Christian God, than with a belief in pure materialism. This is illustrated most succinctly in the underlying values for various background constants of the universe. For most of these if they varied even slightly then life would be impossible. This is known as the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, and Barr lays it out in rigorous detail. What's the author's angle? Barr is a scientist, and a believing Catholic. So he definitely has a dog in the fight, but he also does a good job of steelmanning the other side of the argument. Also it's important to clarify what the fight is. It's not a fight between religion and science. Barr is both a believer and a scientist. It's a fight between religion and materialism. Which is a different animal. This is not to say he's dogmatic (perhaps I shouldn't keep using the word "fight") the tone is very reasonable. He's mostly targeting a lazy "modern science shows that God is silly and unnecessary" crowd. Who should read this book? This was one of the books mentioned by Ross Douthat in his book Believe (see my review of Douthat's book here, or check out the PSmith's far superior one here). And I was glad I followed Douthat's recommendation, the book did not disappoint. If you're at all interested in the fine-tuning argument or related ideas I think you'll love this book. But I can clearly see where it's too niche for the majority of people. What does the book have to say about the future?
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Age of Diagnosis - Words Have Power! (said the podcaster)
You've heard about placebo's? Well what about nocebos? The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker By: Suzanne O'Sullivan Published: 2025 320 Pages Briefly, what is this book about? The idea that putting labels on something is not a free lunch—like everything else there are tradeoffs. Rather than framing numerous illnesses as being psychosomatic, O'Sullivan seems more to be suggesting that humans are very suggestible. (I get the meta-ness of the statement.) As such, once you generate a label it has a tendency to warp identities, and make people seek out confirming evidence. This all creates a sort of nocebo effect which may increase the severity of whatever symptoms they're experiencing. To put it more succinctly, labels have power and we should be circumspect about applying them. What's the author's angle? O'Sullivan is a neurologist who noticed that lots of patients have "normal" tests, but are also indisputably suffering. As someone more focused on the brain than other parts of the body, she has long contended that expectations, culture, current fads, etc. play a much bigger role than most doctors want to admit. It's not all about biology, psychology also has a role. Previous books include It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness and The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness. Who should read this book? Anyone interested in a broader discussion of how the world outside of medicine interacts with the world of medicine. How the epistemic crisis, culture, disease advocacy groups, bureaucracy, and patient longing all affect the act of putting a label on a cluster of symptoms. What does the book have to say about the future?
We Are Not Saved discusses religion (from a Christian/LDS perspective), politics, the end of the world, science fiction, artificial intelligence, and above all the limits of technology and progress.
Ireland