Feb 28, 2020
This week, Scott and Karl read A Modest Proposal, a satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729.
Are human lives the sort of things you should add up like numbers? Despite suggesting that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich...
Feb 20, 2020
In the spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an ax, walked into the woods, and started cutting down trees to make a shack to live in. Walden is the result of this endeavor.
Through this process, Thoreau spells out his distinctly American project — simple living with as few compromises as possible. Karl says,...
Feb 13, 2020
Scott and Karl are back at it again, this time with Tom Wolfe and his book, The Painted Word. Wolfe is a mid-century American writer and the inventor of New Journalism. He’s known for straddling multiple genres at once, reporting back to his readers on a world we ultimately couldn't see without him.
In The Painted...
Feb 6, 2020
This week, Scott and Karl dive into The Gulag Archipelago by Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Published in 1973, the title refers to a series of disconnected prisons in the Soviet Union that, nevertheless, all shared the same culture.
The manuscript had to be hidden, originally published by the...