Empire of Silence (Sun Eater, Book 1), by Christopher Ruocchio (2018)

I really like this book. The world-building is rich and coherent. The galactic empire, ancient technology, and enigmatic aliens deliver classic space-opera scale. The close combat sword fighting adds energy. The politics hold interest. The plot moves with purpose.

The story follows Hadrian Marlowe, a noble-born son in a far-future human empire that spans many star systems. The narrative frames his life as a retrospective account of how he becomes a figure of legend. Early events push him out of privilege and into exile, forcing him to navigate new cultures, harsh environments, and shifting power structures. The setting blends feudal hierarchy, interstellar travel, and remnants of lost technologies, while an alien threat lingers at the edges of human expansion.

The weaknesses sit in the ideological framing. The official religion, with its bureaucracy, leaders, and zealots, reads as one-sided, with no spirituality, piety or internal complexity. The protagonists have no empathy for competing worldviews outside their Humanist, Enlightenment core value. That narrow lens limits the moral tension the setting could support.

Even with these limitations, the story works. The setting carries weight. The narrative sustains momentum. I am glad I found the series. 5/5 stars.

Transformed by Marty Cagain (2024)

I always enjoy Marty Cagan’s books. He does not just describe features, benefits, and processes. He explains the reasoning and data behind them. More important, he dwells on the friction, sabotage, and failure modes teams face when they try to adopt his methods. That pattern continues here. The book is clear about the pain required to move from output-driven delivery to true product organizations.

Cagan lays out the core ideas in practical terms. He contrasts empowered product teams with feature factories. He defines the roles of product, design, and engineering. He explains continuous discovery, product operations, and leadership responsibility for creating the right environment. The goal is an organization that can learn, adapt, and ship valuable products at speed.

He is also blunt about talent. Success depends not only on skills and experience but also on innate talent, intelligence, capability, and capacity. He treats those factors as prerequisites, not optional enhancements. That stance is rare in management books and central to his argument.

The transformation focus is where the book stands out. He catalogs blockers in detail: legacy processes, weak leadership, misaligned incentives, and cultural resistance. He describes how teams will struggle, stall, and sometimes fail. That warning is credible because it matches the reality most practitioners face. His vision remains aspirational, but he does not hide the cost of reaching it.

The timing matters. Large enterprises are under pressure to adopt generative AI as a baseline capability. Cagan’s framework helps organizations build the product discipline required to absorb that shift, even though the book is not about AI mechanics.

I value Cagan's clarity, his honesty about difficulty, and the insistence on high standards.

5/5 stars.

The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1962)

I enjoyed this novel. Singer tells a long, direct, and engrossing story that opens a vivid window into Jewish life under persecution in Eastern Europe. The novel is set in the aftermath of the Khmelnytsky massacres in the 17th century during a centuries-long era where 3 million jews were killed before the holocaust, reminding me of this book. That setting gives the book much of its force.

The protagonist, Jacob, is a devout Jewish survivor who is captured and enslaved after communal violence destroys his world. Later redeemed by a Jewish village, he struggles to rebuild a life while carrying grief, faith, and desire. He returns for Wanda, the non-Jewish woman he loves, and she must hide her identity within a rigid religious community.

Singer uses Jacob’s journey to explore several themes: trauma after massacre, the pull of love against law, exile, communal suspicion, and the meaning of devotion amid suffering. The novel also shows how ordinary people understood fate, sin, duty, and God in a brutal age.

The prose feels simple, but the moral and emotional questions run deep. The suffering is visceral, yet the book never becomes mere spectacle. It remains humane, intimate, and psychologically sharp.

A powerful historical and spiritual novel. 4/5 stars.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (2017)

This is the best book I have read this year. Rovelli compresses physics, philosophy, and human reflection into a short, lucid work. Without mathematics or technical formalism, he explains how modern science has unsettled the common idea of time as a single universal flow.

The book sketches several major concepts with rare clarity: relativity’s rejection of one shared clock, thermodynamics and entropy as sources of time’s direction, quantum theory’s challenge to fixed sequences of events, and quantum gravity’s suggestion that time may not be fundamental at all. Rovelli also explores memory, perception, and consciousness as parts of how humans experience temporal order.

The achievement is not simplification but precision. Complex ideas remain concise, clear, and free of jargon. Rovelli joins scientific rigor with philosophical depth, showing how fragile and contingent our ordinary sense of past, present, and future may be.

It is a profound and elegant book. 5/5 stars.

Never Flinch by Stephen King (2024)

Like most fans of Stephen King's writing style, I was pleased to see another Holly Gibney story that contains very little or no supernatural horror. I dislike horror and I also avoid the Dark Tower universe entirely. This book delivers a fun thriller with enjoyable characters and some solid comic relief.

The protagonists come across as a little too goody-goody while the antagonists and their networks feel similarly one-sided and purely evil with no redeeming qualities. It is by no means Stephen King's best work. I felt sad to read about the author's health issues in the afterword, which perhaps explains some of the political dogma and shrill indignation sprinkled throughout the story.

3/5 stars.

The Dual-Use Instrument: AI's Golden Age of Breakthroughs and the Erosion of Human Cognition

Sam Kriss wrote that in 1931, Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria trekked to the remote foothills of the Alai Mountains and discovered something profound: basic literacy didn't just teach people to read. Literacy rewired how they thought. Illiterate peasants grouped shapes by lived experience (a circle was the moon, a square a drinking bowl). A few years of Soviet schooling flipped the switch.  These same people grouped by abstract geometry and solved hypothetical syllogisms about white bears in the Far North. Literacy birthed a new mind, one capable of abstractions, counterfactuals, and the kind of imaginative leap that fuels revolutionary politics and scientific progress.

Fast-forward to 2026. We're living through the mirror image of Luria's observation, but in reverse. AI chatbots, transformer models, and large language models (LLMs) are delivering superhuman feats of synthesis, prediction, and creation. Yet they're quietly undoing the cognitive habits that literacy once instilled. The same tools that are saving doctors time and accelerating Nobel-worthy science are fostering what one researcher calls "cognitive surrender" - the outsourcing of reasoning itself.

An interesting case is this Substack post, about a general practitioner (GP) medical doctor and digital health leader. The author dove headfirst into ambient AI scribing for 18 months. The promise was intoxicating: walk into a 10-minute consultation, maintain eye contact, speak naturally, and emerge with a complete, structured note. Burnout dropped. Documentation time plummeted by ~26%. It felt like getting the consultation back.

Then the second-order effects hit. Consultations stretched because he stopped curating in real time—why steer when the machine records everything? Follow-up notes were accurate but ailien: comprehensive transcripts lacked his clinical voice, synthesis, or "illness scripts" (those experiential mental models GPs build through thousands of encounters). The act of writing the note had been doing invisible cognitive work, prioritizing, reflecting, & reasoning. Offloading those thought processes broke the feedback loop. The doctor stopped using the tool not because it failed, but because it succeeded too well, causing subtle, deleterious side-effects.

We're not returning to pre-literate sensory immediacy. We're entering something stranger: a world of infinite generated content where direct experience is mediated by AI, and where abstract, counterfactual thinking is disappearing.

The Golden Age: What AI Has Already Delivered

AI breakthroughs are breathtaking.

Transformer models and LLMs have supercharged science in ways that were science fiction five years ago. AlphaFold and its 2024 Nobel Prize-winning successors, including AlphaFold 3 solved the 50-year protein-folding problem, predicting structures for over 200 million proteins with near-experimental accuracy. It now models how proteins interact with DNA, RNA, small molecules, and ions, unlocking rational drug design at unprecedented speed. AI-powered pipelines are delivering drug candidates 75% faster than traditional methods. Autonomous AI agents like Kosmos are compressing six months of PhD-level research into a single 12-hour run.

In materials science, AI has screened millions of candidates to discover new battery chemistries, carbon-capture materials, and quantum-computing components. Weather models run with hyper-accurate long-range forecasts. Self-improving labs iterate experiments in real time, slashing waste and cost. The 2024 to Q1 2026 period alone saw AI contribute to breakthroughs in fusion plasma control, exoplanet classification, and even new mathematical insights.

Economically, the gains are compounding. Generative AI is projected to add 1.5% to U.S. GDP by 2035, rising to 3.7% by 2075 through productivity alone. Industries with high AI exposure saw 10% productivity jumps, 3.9% job growth, and 4.8% wage increases in 2024-2025. Documentation tools like the one Gooch used are slashing administrative drag across veterinary medicine, human medicine, law, and engineering. Code generation, creative ideation, and data synthesis are freeing humans for higher-order work.

Many of these concrete accomplishments are not hype cycles. They are measurable, peer-reviewed revolutions in capability.

The Regressions: Literacy, Rationality, and the Extended Mind

Just as writing once pulled minds into abstraction, AI is pulling them back toward “fake it til you make it” fluency without friction, answers without effort, and sensory immediacy without synthesis.

Literacy rates and deep reading have been sliding since 2014 and the back slide is accelerating with AI. Elite university students increasingly can't finish a novel or parse a complex sentence without AI. One Kansas study found English majors struggling with Dickens' Bleak House—treating a metaphorical Megalosaurus as a literal dinosaur in Victorian London. These students respond like Luria's illiterate peasants: tethered to immediate, concrete reality.

Cognitive science gives insight into the relationship between literacy and cognition. "Extended mind" theory shows that writing isn't just recording thoughts; writing completes these thoughts. Gooch's experience mirrors these findings: AI notes broke the loop that built clinical expertise. Broader studies show AI users exhibit "cognitive offloading," that in turn causes declines in working memory, analytic reasoning, and critical thinking. People accept faulty AI outputs 73% of the time in controlled experiments lending evidence to the deleterious effects of "cognitive surrender.” Attention, skepticism, and the scientific method itself erode when LLMs do the synthesizing.

Steven Pinker's Rationality (2021) warned that we aren't born rational; we build rationality through deliberate practice in logic, probability, Bayesian reasoning, and causal inference. AI short-circuits and prevents skill growth from practice. Why wrestle with a syllogism when the model answers instantly? Why cultivate skepticism when the output is fluent and confident? The Enlightenment ideals, including empiricism, skepticism, & evidence-based progress rely on the very cognitive muscles we're letting atrophy with AI.

Backsliding in Human Potential

This phenomenon is not only about doctors or students. It's about the quiet diminishment of what makes a life meaningful.

In the arts, AI generates poems, paintings, and music at superhuman volume. Why labor through the frustration of original creation when the machine delivers polish? Personal artistic potential, the struggle that forges voice and vision fades in our “Age of AI.”

Economically, wealth creation has always come from human ingenuity: spotting unseen opportunities, iterating through failure, building novel systems. When AI handles the ideation and execution, the incentive to cultivate deep expertise or entrepreneurial grit weakens.

Philosophically, the great explorations of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology demand solitary wrestling with ambiguity. AI offers instant summaries and counterarguments. The joy of building your own worldview erodes. We risk a generation fluent in AI outputs but starved of the internal scaffolding that once produced  Socrates, Newton, Kant, Einstein, da Vinci.

Politics itself may regress from reasoned debate over imagined futures to tribal sensory immediacy. Streamers repeat formulas rather than abstract justice.

A Realistic, Guardedly Optimistic Future

None of these cognitive declines and their effects on society are inevitable.

We stand at an inflection point with enlightenment, wisdom, and agency. The post-literate age does not inevitably mean cognitive collapse. The “Age of AI” can mean augmented humanity if we treat AI as a seductively dangerous instrument, not a prosthesis.

Imagine "AI literacy" curricula that teaches not just prompts, but deliberate cognitive preservation: handwritten notes alongside AI drafts, Socratic challenges to model outputs, mandatory "unplugged" reasoning drills. Doctors like Gooch can (and some do!) use AI for transcription while reclaiming note authorship as a sacred clinical craft. Scientists could let agents run rote experiments while humans focus on the counterfactual leaps AI can't yet replicate.

The same transformers accelerating AlphaFold could help restore rationality.  Personalized tutors that drill children in skepticism, Bayesian thinking, tools that flag our own cognitive biases in real time. Economic gains could fund equal universal infrastructure: clean air, clean water, sanitation, energy, roads, railways, & telecommunication, that could free more people wealth creation, and personal “pursuit of happiness,” including creative and philosophical pursuits.

In the end, the future will not be purely post-literate or pre-AI literacy. It will be hybrid: a new extended mind where AI handles the volume and humans reclaim the voice, the synthesis, the purpose. The kids raised by AI dolls won't inevitably lose abstraction; they will almost certainly evolve a meta-literacy we cannot yet imagine.

We know that society shapes thought. Now you and I get to shape this society. The instrument is in our hands. We must use it carefully to cut away drudgery while sharpening the blade of the human mind. The breakthroughs and progress are themselves accelerating.  

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other Stories by Leo Tolstoy (1886)

I never read any Russian authors while growing up because of the Cold War, so Russian literature was completely new territory for me when I retired. We had read a translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in school, but that was framed more as Cold War history than literature. After finishing Anna Karenina (which disappointed me; see my review here: https://mitchwyle.blogspot.com/2024/11/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy-1875-1878.html) I complained about it over dinner with friends. One of them suggested I try Tolstoy’s short stories instead, so I picked up this collection.

The stories are technically excellent. The plots are tight and strong, the characters are painted in rich three-dimensional detail, and there are moments of sharp humor that I genuinely enjoyed. This volume includes the famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich along with several other shorter pieces that showcase Tolstoy’s skill at concise storytelling.

What wore me down, however, was the relentless moralizing. Every story hammers the same theme: oppressed Russian peasants suffer under the weight of blind, self-serving oligarchs and bureaucrats, while the powerful remain oblivious to the obvious immorality and unsustainability of the system. The Christian theological preaching and sense of outrage felt heavy-handed and repetitive. Unlike Anna Karenina, these stories do not linger on the neurotic inner lives of the elites, but the sermon-like tone still grated on me.

I am glad I read the collection for the craftsmanship and the characters, but it has put me off Tolstoy entirely. I will not be moving on to War and Peace or his other major works. I may explore Pushkin next, though I worry I lack enough historical context to appreciate him fully.

3/5 stars.

First Command by Michael Simon (2025)

I picked up the first volume because the series has been getting press as a fun, accessible space opera. Unfortunately readers' complaints about the weak science turned out to be much worse than readers said. Spaceships list and roll like sailing vessels, belch smoke and flames in hard vacuum, and crash into asteroids that are packed so closely they might as well be in a traffic jam. The sheer volume of basic physics violations made it impossible to stay immersed.
The story itself is also relatively weak. The antagonists are cartoonishly one-dimensional — evil simply because they are evil — while the protagonists are much better drawn: heroic, self-doubting, and colorful. The core space-opera premise could have been enjoyable if the science had not been so distractingly awful, but the writing never rises above serviceable.
2/5 stars. Disrecommend

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929)

This book was my first Thomas Wolfe novel, which feels embarrassing to admit because he was my mother’s favorite author. I still have her copy of You Can’t Go Home Again sitting on my shelf, untouched. In high school American Literature we read only excerpts, but we did learn the colorful details: Wolfe was a giant of a man (6'6", 2m), used a refrigerator as a writing desk, filled yellow legal pads with a Cross pen, writing just 3–4 words per line, every third line, and shipped entire orange crates of manuscript pages to his editor, who would eventually telegram him to stop so they could carve a book out of the mountain of prose.

Look Homeward, Angel is a classic “roman à clef” — essentially Wolfe’s own life turned into fiction. The protagonist Eugene Gant is a thinly veiled version of Wolfe himself, and the large, chaotic family, the small Southern town (based on his native Asheville, North Carolina), and many of the events are drawn directly from his upbringing, though heavily exaggerated and melo-dramatized.

The novel is driven by Eugene’s intense longing for meaning, his obsession with time, memory, and mortality, and a soaring, almost mystical romanticism. Wolfe’s prose is dense, lyrical, and richly descriptive — it frequently reminded me of Proust in its lush detail and of Thomas Hardy in its emotional weight. The writing is immersive and often beautiful, even if the book itself is very long and occasionally meandering. This book is a powerful, passionate, and deeply personal coming-of-age novel. It is worth reading for the sheer force of the language alone.

4/5 stars.

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2026)

This fourth volume in Tchaikovsky’s wildly inventive Children of Time space opera series continues the story with a universe overflowing with grotesque, wildly imaginative biology. This time we encounter planetary-scale living systems, distributed intelligences, and growth rates 50 million times faster than physics would allow. The rapidly growing and morphing biology strongly reminds me of Neal Asher and his vivid, vivisection-like obsession rapid transformation.

Getting past the hard-to-swallow science, the story and character arcs remain strong. Tchaikovsky writes compelling characters you end up genuinely caring about, even when the overall tone stays bleak and pessimistic. I do not enjoy dystopian stories as a rule, but the quality of the writing and the depth of the personalities kept me invested in what happened to them.

That said, the heavy pessimism and the particular brand of biological horror on display this time made this my least favourite entry in the series so far. It is still well-crafted and thought-provoking, but it did not click with my taste.Skip this one unless you are a committed fan of the series and do not mind dark, visceral, and deeply strange far-future biology.

3/5 stars.