Author: edwinsetiadi

“The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty” by G. J. Meyer

There were only 5 Tudors who ever occupied the English throne: 1. Henry VII (reigning between 1485-1509) 2. Henry VIII (1509-1547) 3. Edward VI (1547-1553) 4. Mary I (1553-1558) 5. Elizabeth I (1558-1603).

That is, 3 kings followed by 2 queens. As the author G. J. Meyer describes them, “one was an epically tragic figure in the fullest Aristotelian sense, two reigned only briefly and came to miserable ends, and the last and longest-lived devoted her life and her reign and the resources of her kingdom to no loftier objective than her own survival. Theirs was, by most measures, a melancholy story.”

In short, England was arguably in its most crazy interesting chaotic era during the reign of the Tudors.

As Meyer further remark, “[i]t matters also that both Henry and his daughter Elizabeth were not just rulers but consummate performers, masters of political propaganda and political theater. They created, and spent their lives hiding inside, fictional versions of themselves that never bore more than a severely limited relation to reality but were nevertheless successfully imprinted on the collective imagination of their own time. These invented personas have endured into the modern world not only because of their inherent appeal—it is hard to resist the image of bluff King Hal, of Gloriana the Virgin Queen—but even more because of their political usefulness across the generations.”

This is the premise that the book is being set up. It covers the entire Tudor dynasty in an attempt to paint the big picture of these 5 Tudors into 1 readable volume. It tells their tales right from the beginning, where Henry Tudor emerged out of the ruins of the Battle of the Flowers and became the unlikeliest person to rise up to the throne, then covering many imaginable things from the backstory of all Henry VIII’s 6 wives, to the sexual adventures of Elizabeth I.

Along the way, the book intermittently provides the background context in between chapters, painting a picture of the environment in which the Tudors’ stories are being told. Including the crucial behind-the-scene politics that often ignored by history books, the truly deep schism between Catholics and Protestants, and the disastrous finances during their reigns (especially during Henry VIII and Elizabeth I).

It is a perfect way to show the overall big picture of what those days looked like, including the complicated web of European monarchy that is more complicated than the plot of the Game of Thrones, and of course the Tudors’ (and England’s) roles within this web of power.

“Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There” by Rutger Bregman

This book is an interesting deep dive on the many utopian ideas from the past, and the impressive theories behind them. It is an analysis about what actually worked and what were utter disasters.

The book begins by showing how things were truly dark and gloomy in the past, where even the poorest today live better than those living during the Dutch Golden Age. As the author, Rutger Bregman, remarks “In the country where I live, the Netherlands, a homeless person receiving public assistance today has more to spend than the average Dutch person in 1950, and four times more than people in Holland’s glorious Golden Age, when the country still ruled the seven seas.”

That’s the everyday reality for common people even during one of the most prosperous eras in history.

“But in the last 200 years, all of that has changed”, Bregman continues, where “In just a fraction of the time that our species has clocked on this planet, billions of us are suddenly rich, well nourished, clean, safe, smart, healthy, and occasionally even beautiful. Where 84% of the world’s population still lived in extreme poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44%, and now, just a few decades later, it is under 10%.”

Indeed, despite all the problems, things are actually getting much better for humanity as a whole today compared with any point in history. And it’s not only in the number of people coming out of extreme poverty but also reflected in explosive growth in both population and prosperity, especially in the past 2 centuries. Today, per capita income is 10 times what it was in 1850, while the global economy is now 250 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, “when nearly everyone, everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.”

And it doesn’t stop in prosperity. In terms of health the statistics have shown massive improvements. For instance, 50 years ago 1 in 5 children died before the age of 50, but today the number improved to 1 in 20 children. History’s number 1 mass-murderer (the smallpox) has also been completely wiped out, while Polio has nearly disappear where it claims 99% fewer victims in 2013 than in 1988. And today more and more children are now geting immunized against common diseases.

And then we have education. In 1962 as many as 41% of children didn’t go to school, while the figure is only 10% today. In most countries, the average IQ has risen for 3 to 5 points every 10 years, mainly thanks to improved nutrition and education. Perhaps this is also why we’ve become so much more civilized, with the past 1 decade rated as relatively the most peaceful throughout history.

Hence, us humans have really evolved a lot for the better. It shows that humanity can indeed progress into something much closer to an ideal state, and that is thanks to our effort to realize an utopian dream.

Because, many utopia dreams are rooted from the very thing that we are lacking in our respective societies. As Bregman explains, “Simple desires beget simple utopias. If you’re hungry, you dream of a lavish banquet. If you’re cold, you dream of a toasty fire. Faced with mounting infirmities, you dream of eternal youth. All of these desires are reflected in the old utopias, conceived when life was still nasty, brutish, and short.”

Of course, not all utopian dreams have nobel goals. If we look at the dark chapters of history we can also find horrifying forms of utopianism, such as fascism, communism, Nazism, just as every religion has produced fanatical sects with a utopian dream.

There is also the case of overshooting or failure to keep up, which turn utopian dream into dystopian. As Bregman remarks, “It’s a vicious circle. Never before have so many young adults been seeing a psychiatrist. Never before have there been so many early career burnouts. And we’re popping antidepressants like never before. Time and again, we blame collective problems like unemployment, dissatisfaction, and depression on the individual. If success is a choice, then so is failure. Lost your job? You should have worked harder. Sick? You must not be leading a healthy lifestyle. Unhappy? Take a pill.”

So, what’s the solution? Quite a lot of people are dismissing utopian dream as a road to more disaster than good, and opt to abandoning it altogether. Just like blaming the entire religion for the conduct of few minority extremists. But Bregman has a different idea.

This is what the book is ultimately all about, Bregman’s own argument for utopia, based on his top notch understanding of economics and the wealth of examples from history. His utopia is based on 4 main premises: Universal basic income, shorter work week, open borders, and redefining progress.

Universal basic income

In universal basic income Bregman argues that the solution to many people’s money problem is to directly give them money. And he has the statistics to prove why it works: “Already, research has correlated unconditional cash disbursements with reductions in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and truancy, and with improved school performance, economic growth, and gender equality. “The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.””

Now, I know what you’re thinking, wouldn’t they just use up the money for drugs, or gambling, all that leisures, etc and burn all the money? Bregman illustrate his points using several real-life cases across the world, from an experiment with 13 homeless people in London to villagers in Kenya and Uganda, all of whom were given money and can turn their life around for the better.

As Bregman explains, “The researchers summed up these programs’ benefits: (1) households put the money to good use, (2) poverty declines, (3) there can be diverse long-term benefits for income, health, and tax revenues, and (4) the programs cost less than the alternatives.” The alternatives in the case of 13 homeless people is a bill estimated £400,000 ($650,000) a year to fund police expenses, court costs, and social services due to their presence, and compare it with the cost of giving them all £3000 free money for them to jump-start their lives: which amounted to £50,000 a year (including the social worker wages).

After all, “Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) promises that, one day, it will come. A universal basic income. And not merely for a few years, or in developing countries alone, or only for the poor, but just what it says on the box: free money for everyone. Not as a favor, but as a right. Call it the “capitalist road to communism.””

That last sentence is probably the most amusing take for me in this book, the realization that “communism” is not necessarily the anti-thesis of capitalism, but – as Karl Marx have mentioned before – communism is the next stage of capitalism, although Marx argued that communism rise after capitalism failed. But this book has a different take, where it is only after capitalism has succeeded, when all possible wealth have been generated, that we get to distribute all the wealth equally to the community.

As Bergman elaborate, “Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is a fantastic engine for prosperity. “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto. Yet it’s precisely because we’re richer than ever that it is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of a basic income. It’s what capitalism ought to have been striving for all along. See it as a dividend on progress, made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of past generations.”

Shorter work week

In shorter work week, Bregman took the idea of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who predicted that technological advances would someday drastically reduce work hours. And Bregman then advocates for redistributing work so that we can increase leisure time, health, and well being. In short: A 15-hour work week.

Bregman argues the benefit of shorter work week includes: reduced stress, cutting CO2 emission, lesser workplace accidents, more employment as one job role can be shared with 2 or more people on a shift, emancipation of women (as proven in countries like Sweden), distributing work across generations and accommodating older population that still need to work, and even reducing inequality (as Bregman points out, “the countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest work-weeks. While the poor are working longer and longer hours just to get by, the rich are finding it ever more “expensive” to take time off as their hourly rates rise”).

Open border

Next Bregman advocates an open border, for a much greater freedom of movement for people across countries, which would “boost wealth by much more – one thousand times more. In numbers: $65,000,000,000,000. In words: sixty-five trillion dollars.” In the book he illustrate how the world was so much more open in the past (before the two world wars) and he cited studies and economic modelling on how they were beneficial.

The core argument for this evolves on the thesis that workers in poor countries are often more productive when they move to relatively richer countries. Not because they are smarter, but because the new environment in the rich country allows them to contribute better with better infrastructure, better institutions, better tools, etc.

For example, a doctor earns much less of what they’d make in a poor country compared to if they work in the US or UK despite doing the same job. By moving to a richer country, the doctor can perform the same service but earn more money that would boost total productivity.

Because, despite the common misconceptions with the anti-immigration stances, in the long run immigration doesn’t destroy jobs or depress wages, because immigrants often take jobs that locals don’t want, or start businesses, and contribute with taxes.

After all, as Bregman argues, borders are “apartheid on a global scale”, where “the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.” Hence, by dismantling borders there will be an increased chance of rising global equality.

Redefining progress

Bregman also argues to change our narrow focus using GDP as a measure of societal success. And instead, we should measure progress using more matrix such as well-being, happiness and purpose, not just through economic output.

My favourite take from this argument is how he shows that disasters are good for GDP growth, since there are problems to solve that will need investment and mobility, etc, that can stimulate the economy. As Bregman explains, “Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime – in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems.”

Moreover, “Recently, the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth.” But at the same time “Society can’t function without some degree of inequality. There still need to be incentives to work, to endeavor, and to excel, and money is a very effective stimulus.”

I mean, this is not how we want to measure and incentivise success, right?

Eradicating poverty

All of these proposals for changes are ultimate done first and foremost to eradicate poverty. It has been a subject as old as society from ancient Egypt, Babylon, and India; to the likes of contemporary economists such as Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs. But Bregman has a completely different angle to it.

As the book shows, the problem with poverty is not laziness or the relative lack of opportunity, but mental bandwidth. Poor people simply have more worries to think about and thus they are using up their mental capacity to perform a single task, producing worst results compared with those who have a little bit more financial security.

The example of the people in Vilupuram and Tiruvannamalai in rural India, are excellent. “Shafir found what he was looking for some 8,000 miles away in the districts of Vilupuram and Tiruvannamalai in rural India. The conditions were perfect; as it happened, the area’s sugarcane farmers collect 60% of their annual income all at once right after the harvest. This means they are flush one part of the year and poor the other. So how did they do in the experiment? At the time when they were comparatively poor, they scored substantially worse on the cognitive tests, not because they had become dumber people somehow – they were still the same Indian sugarcane farmers, after all – but purely and simply because their mental bandwidth was compromised.”

Bregman explains it more. “Compare it to a new computer that’s running ten heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors, and eventually it freezes – not because it’s a bad computer, but because it has to do too much at once. Poor people have an analogous problem. They’re not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.”

Indeed, if you want to understand the poor, imagine yourself with hundreds problems in your mind and not be present while doing your job. Self control will feel like a challenge, you are easily distracted and pertubed, and for poor people this happens every day. As Bregman elaborates, “This is how scarcity – whether of time or of money – leads to unwise decisions. There’s a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: You can’t take a break from poverty.”

A utopian dream

And so, Bregman proposes a universal basic income, a shorter work week, an open border, and the redefining of progress, in order for us to eradicate poverty and live in a more equal, prosperous, and happy world. Could it actually happen? I highly doubt it.

Not because of the infeasibility of the idea, since in a perfect world Bregman’s realistic proposal can be very much implemented. But because of the irrational nature of humans, especially those that have climbed the ladder to the top.

As Bregman illustrates it, “A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%. At the very top, the comparisons get even more skewed. In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people. And just eight people – the richest people on Earth – own the same as the poorest half of the whole world.”

In other words, in a world filled with ego and greed, a redistribution of income for all to share is the last thing that people at the top what. And why would they? Giving up a large chunk of your hard-earned money to people who are presumably lazy and undeserved? That is, until we find out that the richest of the rich don’t pay taxes and instead hide their stash in some tax havens as well as gaining political powers from donations to secure more access to more wealth, while the poor are taxed even higher. But that’s a topic for another book.

For this book, the proposal presented by Bregman can instead serve as an ideal goal for us to pursue, a some kind of utopia dream that can make the world a better place if we can progress towards it, slowly, and cautiously.

Because, as mentioned above, humanity have progressed so rapidly in the past couple of centuries. So there’s still hope. As Bregman remarks, “The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: Things could be different. The way our world is organized is not the result of some axiomatic evolution. Our current status quo could just as easily be the result of the trivial yet critical twists and turns of history.”

“Kafka Was the Rage” by Anatole Broyard

This is a beautifully-written memoir about the intellectual and art scene in the US in the post-war 1940s, written by Anatole Broyard.

The story took place in Greenwich Village, New York City, which strikes a similar resemblance to Hemingway’s Paris in the inter-war 1920s period that he brilliantly described in his book A Movable Feast. Just like Hemingway’s Paris, Broyard’s Greenwich Village has this same coming back to life energy, a sense of endless possibilities, and destiny arises out of a very dark period of time.

The Village was charming, intimate, shabby, and accessible, with an atmosphere almost like a street fair. The social construct of the day was also changing, with movements towards sexual freedom and abstraction in art and literature. This is the environment in which a few bunch of characters live together at one time, at a very early age of their respective careers. Characters such as Sheri Donatti, Dick Gilman, Delmore Schwartz, William Gaddis, Nemecio Zanarte, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, and many other writers and artists.

They weren’t strangers, but familiar people. They lived in bars, on the benches of Washington Square, they shared the aspiration and adventure of becoming painters or writers. But ultimately, this is a story about Broyard himself, who had an extraordinary journey from fresh out of war, to opening his own book store, to eventually becoming a leading book critic for the New York Times.

And alongside his journey in expressing his voice and finding his place in the world, he gets to experience hope and heartbreak, excitements and disappointments, and sex scandals involving this one particular muse of his, Sheri Donatti (where nearly half of the book evolves around her).

And of course the memoir has passionate discussions around books that have since shaped the intellectual scene in the city. As Broyard remarks, “in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books – I’m talking about my friends and myself – went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them.”

And chief amongst them were books written by Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, Céline, and of course the one writer that everybody was raging about: Kafka.

“A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway

This is a story about life and love in the middle of World War I.

The story evolves around Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army. He meets and fall in love with a British nurse Catherine Barkley while serving on the front lines, and their relationship deepens when Henry gets injured in a mortar attack and specifically requested for Barkley to be transferred to his hospital so that she can nurse him back to health.

After returning to the battle, Henry becomes increasingly disturbed by the war’s brutality and senselessness, which leads him to eventually dessert the army after he narrowly escape execution by his own forces during one chaotic battle. Henry and Barkley then run away to Switzerland to start a life together, although unlike most love tales this one does not have a happy ending (a fitting ending, I must say, in an overall gloomy mood in times of great war).

It is a simple enough general narrative worthy of a short story. But the strength of the book lies within the conversations that the many characters have with each other.

They provide interesting angles that show there’s still life happening in the middle of a massive war, with plenty of human emotions, worry, drama, loss, and sacrifices. Even time to do leisure. It shows the political opinions of the war by ordinary people, the difficult life choices they have to accommodate within the dire situation. And of course it shows the human cost of war not just by the death toll, but also the psychological and financial impacts.

It is a book with such a powerful anti-war message, coming from a writer who, like Frederic Henry himself, served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.

“Gadis Pantai” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This is a brilliant depiction of a 14 year-old teenager from the poor side of the town, a fisherman’s daughter who is forcefully betrothed to a local rich and powerful nobleman. The story is set in a feudalistic Javanese society during the Dutch occupation era in early 20th century, where “little kings” were given by the Dutch overlord enough power to rule on behalf of the Dutch and abuse their own people.

The book describes how the unnamed Girl from the Coast gets so scared at the beginning, enduring the pain of separation from her parents and from her old life that she was perfectly content with, who now has to live in a very rigid place where she – the main lady of the house – cannot even walk into certain areas in the mansion and is constantly undermined by the people in the household (due to her status as a poor villager).

Indeed, the story is a contrast between both worlds, between the poor and rich, the raw and the artificial, about how the poor people at the coast are more free than the rich people living inside the mansion with all the restrictions and societal hierarchies, with the book has this general criticism towards feodalism and injustice.

And as the story progresses, slowly but sure The Girl from the Coast begins to learn the way of life as a rich madam, mainly by befriending her old handmaiden who has tons of fascinating stories to tell. And gradually this pure innocent simpleton from the coast learns about power, about survivorship as a disposable concubine (and not a worthy wife from a fellow rich noble family), about how and why people are more afraid of his skinny and soft husband than the more muscular and rough men in her poor village. And over all we get to learn about the struggles of the common people and the cruelty of living in a local kingdom that serve the Dutch during the colonial era.

The book did not specify where the mansion is located, however, or where the fishing village is. But the author, Pramoedya, describes the Girl from the Coast as having a unique physical description of small eyes (like a Chinese descent), living near the northern coast somewhere in Java, which is unmistakenly a tale from Lasem. Lasem is a unique ancient port town from the Majapahit era (13th-16th century), a place where admiral Zheng He arrived in the archipelago and spread Islam (through 7 voyages between 1405-1433), with his men then settled and assimilated with the locals (hence the Chinese-looking offsprings in the area).

And here’s the twist: this book is a novelization of the story of Pramoedya’s own grandmother from his mother’s side. It’s supposed to be a trilogy of his family’s history, with part 1 telling the story about Pramoedya’s grandmother, part 2 telling the story of his parent’s generation within the context of nationalist uprising against the Dutch colonial ruler, and part 3 is supposed to be the story of Pramoedya’s generation alongside the struggles of Indonesia’s independence.

But only part 1 was ever published as a book (this book), with the scripts of part 2 and part 3 were confiscated by “political vandalism” and disappeared without a trace. This will forever be my grail search, the 2 lost and unpublished manuscripts.

And it shows in the way that this book (supposedly part 1) ended. It looks like the catastrophic end of the story but crucially a beginning of something bigger to come, something to build on from the ground up now everything has fallen apart. And imagine if the Girl from the Coast didn’t make that last minute life-altering decision at the very last scene in the book? Pramoedya could possibly never be born and we would never know his brilliant writings.

Now that the dust has settled, what the hell happened between Iran and Israel’s ceasefire?

After 10 days since Israel began to attack Iran on 13 June 2025, Israel was heavily beaten by Iran’s response, far more than they’ve expected, as confirmed by the panic reaction by Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and the fact that Israeli government threatened against anyone who post anything about the damages in Tel Aviv and Haifa. And they badly needed a US intervention.

But Donald Trump cannot afford to join the war – not politically, not financially – and so he did the next best thing: he had a big show off of his B-2 bomber plane and strike Iran’s nuclear facility to show presence, but with a close to none damages.

Iran received the signal, and they too had to save face by doing what they’ve threatened to do if US attacks Iran: Iran retaliated by striking US military base, BUT the one in Iran’s ally Qatar, where they informed Qatar beforehand and thus the strike was easily intercepted also with minimum damage and no casualties. Both US and Iran saved their respective faces, that’s why Trump immediately announced ceasefire on 24 June 2025 just hours after Iran’s strike.

But then Israel attacked District 7 in Tehran not long after, and Iran responded by saying they have not received any ceasefire proposal, proceeded to strike Israel back, but tell the media that they are willing to consider a ceasefire if Israel stop shooting. That’s why Trump all of a sudden got mad with Israel (a rarity for a US president), and only then Israel backed down.

And just look at what happened after the ceasefire, the EU surprisingly pressured Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza or face a sanction. Is this part of the ceasefire deal? Because there’s no way in hell that the EU suddenly develop a conscience, not with that Stockholm Syndrome in tact. It’s more plausible that they are trying to save Israel from a total Iranian destruction (as argued by former Trump propagandist Steve Bannon), in exchange for the genocide to finally stop.

The next few days will be interesting, whether Israel can commit to it (which would also mean a return to Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial IF the “war” in Gaza is over). Or will they (and by they I mean Israel, US, UK, EU, and their “allies” in the Gulf) regroup and make their next plan to face the surprisingly very strong Iran?

This whole ceasefire saga sure feel like Yevgeny Prigozhin’s advances on 23 June 2023 that was just 2 hours away from toppling Vladimir Putin in Moscow, before bizarrely Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal that curb the coup attempt. Prigozhin was only 120-200 KM away from conducting a regime change in Russia, a rare window of opportunity that we likely won’t see again for a long time, just like Iran had the chance to once and for all destroy this far-right Zionist regime in Israel (and replace it with a better one that supports the Oslo Accords).

Because, you know what happened with Prigozhin since the coup attempt? Putin regrouped after the curbed attempt, and Prigozhin was later killed in a “plane crash” on 23 August 2023.

But nevertheless, here we are now. Trump said that the US and Iran will meet next week, resuming their scheduled talk that was supposed to happen in Oman on 15 June, before Israel intervene by striking Iran 2 days before to prevent a US-Iran peace talk. And meanwhile, Trump also declared that the US will personally “save Netanyahu” from being prosecuted by the Israeli courts, which has been the number 1 reason for Netanyahu to keep prolonging and escalating the war. Is this also part of the deal?

So it appears that peace could really potentially happen, and the genocide in Gaza could finally end. But at what cost? Netanyahu could actually get away with genocide and never be held accountable for his war crimes and his domestic crimes. And the settler-colonial apartheid regime will live on.

Ceasefire is not accountability.

“Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War” by Larry Hedrick

This book can be best described as 70% paraphrasing Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and 30% business book.

The editor, Larry Hedrick, switched Xenophon’s depiction of Cyrus the Great from the original third person’s vantage point in Cyropaedia into a first person cringy narrative that makes Cyrus sounds like a douche bragging about himself. Hedrick also “extended the narrative at few points” and “tied up some loose ends in the plot structure” along the way, which he then blend into the whole thing and never set the distinction between the altered original text and his addition.

Hence, the finished book is in no form or shape Xenophon’s classic anymore. But instead, it is a largely edited “modern” remake that take ancient wisdom and organize it with business focused sub-headings. Oh yes, we’re talking about those buzzwords like leadership, middle management, vision, seizing opportunity, inspiring your people, and all that crap.

Which is fine, actually, if this premise is executed properly. Because the sub-headings are actually making the book easier to navigate, and even the grossly violated contents – that pays little or no respect to the original book – are still pretty good.

But as I read on, I keep on finding inconsistencies in the editing, like the one that irritate me the most: the way Cyrus (supposed to be in first-person narrative) often call his “father” as “Cambyses” (in a third-person way). And everytime I’m reading the book, I can’t help but being curious what the original text is saying in Cyropaedia.

After all, the original biography by Xenophon is often praised to be at par with The Art of War by Sun Tzu or The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli, exactly why I purchased this book in the first place (by mistake, as it turns out). Will try to find and read the original book instead.

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein

This is a thesis that dives deep into the argument between specializing in a rigid structure vs. being a generalist that can creatively perform in many different contexts. With the author, David Epstein, is making the case for the latter.

In the book Epstein shows that switching career early on is actually beneficial, that quitting is not for losers but to quit fast and early means that you identify that you’re not a good fit, and can find something else you feel much suited to thrive.

And it is supported by the data. He reveals, among many others, that the fastest-growing startups are not only founded by teenage hot shots (those 20 under 20) but statistically the average age of the founders are actually 45. Indeed, this entire book is making the case for a late bloomer who has accumulate years of general experiences in multiple discipline, and only then can apply them into a specialized force.

To back up his thesis Epstein uses so many great studies from diverse experts from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, to economist Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), to marketing guru Seth Godin, among many other experts.

And to illustrate his points Epstein uses incredible range of stories such as the chess prodigy family, Socialist revolution in Kyrgyzstan, Baroque musicians from middle age Venice, classical vs jazz musicians, class math problems, 16th century astronomy, a surgeon’s dilemma, Fed fund rate and the economy, the long journey of Nintendo, statistical correlations between Brexit voters and anti gun control crowds, and the famous Carter Racing case study (and the plot twist in the end!).

Moreover, Epstein also uses the history of plenty of famous names, such as the long vocational path of Vincent van Gogh, J. K. Rowling’s failure in life before made it big, Charles Darwin who initially wanted to become a clergyman, a psychiatrist who became a Buddhist monk, the story of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami who at 29 was running a jazz bar before shifting vocation to a novelist, and of course the contrast upbringing between Tiger Woods (specialized) and Roger Federer (generalist) that became the anchoring point right from the beginning.

One surprising area that came up in the book is a glimpse of a world where humans and AI can possibly coexist, with AI focus more on the small tactics and humans have more on the big-picture strategy. Which could prompt us to think that probably the answer to the worry of the rise of AI is being a big-picture generalist and lead the robots to do the tactical moves within the corridor of our strategy.

Here are some of the most impactful quotes from the book:

1. Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
2. The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande pointed out that when doctors joke about left ear surgeons, “we have to check to be sure they don’t exist.”
3. An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.
4. The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.
5. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
6. Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
7. One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.
8. I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators.
9. I delved further and encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their range of experiences and interests, but because of it: a CEO who took her first job around the time her peers were getting ready to retire; an artist who cycled through five careers before he discovered his vocation and changed the world; an inventor who stuck to a self-made antispecialization philosophy and turned a small company founded in the nineteenth century into one of the most widely resonant names in the world today.
10. When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.
11. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
12. Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.
13. The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear. We all rely on chunking every day in skills in which we are expert.
14. But the game’s strategic complexity provides a lesson: the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
15. “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
16. But tennis is still very much on the kind end of the spectrum compared to, say, a hospital emergency room, where doctors and nurses do not automatically find out what happens to a patient after their encounter. They have to find ways to learn beyond practice, and to assimilate lessons that might even contradict their direct experience.
17. The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.
18. We have been using the wrong stories. Tiger’s story and the Polgar story give the false impression that human skill is always developed in an extremely kind learning environment. If that were the case, specialization that is both narrow and technical and that begins as soon as possible would usually work. But it doesn’t even work in most sports.
19. There are domains beyond chess in which massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition. Like golfers, surgeons improve with repetition of the same procedure. Accountants and bridge and poker players develop accurate intuition through repetitive experience. But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill.
20. When experienced accountants were asked in a study to use a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one, they did worse than novices. Erik Dane, a Rice University professor who studies organizational behavior, calls this phenomenon “cognitive entrenchment.”
21. The most successful experts also belong to the wider world.
22. The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests.
23. Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
24. The Handbook simply notes that, in contrast to classical players, jazz and folk and modern popular musicians and singers do not follow a simple, narrow trajectory of technical training, and they “start much later.”
25. “It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
26. Human intuition, it appears, is not very well engineered to make use of the best tools when faced with what the researchers called “ill-defined” problems. Our experience-based instincts are set up well for Tiger domains, the kind world Gentner described, where problems and solutions repeat.
27. They all appear to have excelled in spite of their late starts. It would be easy enough to cherry-pick stories of exceptional late developers overcoming the odds. But they aren’t exceptions by virtue of their late starts, and those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.
28. Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
29. In England and Wales, students were expected to pick a path with knowledge only of the limited menu they had been exposed to early in high school. That is sort of like being forced to choose at sixteen whether you want to marry your high school sweetheart. At the time it might seem like a great idea, but the more you experience, the less great that idea looks in hindsight.
30. Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.
31. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.
32. Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential reward is extremely high. Thanks to constant feedback and an unforgiving weed-out process, those who try will learn quickly if they might be a match, at least compared to jobs with less constant feedback. If they aren’t, they go test something else, and continue to gain information about their options and themselves.
33. The more skilled the Army thought a prospective officer could become, the more likely it was to offer a scholarship. And as those hardworking and talented scholarship recipients blossomed into young professionals, they tended to realize that they had a lot of career options outside the military. Eventually, they decided to go try something else. In other words, they learned things about themselves in their twenties and responded by making match quality decisions.
34. She never did graduate from college, but her office is festooned with twenty-three honorary doctorates, plus a glistening saber given to her by the U.S. Military Academy for teaching leadership courses—as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
35. “I feel sorry for the people who know exactly what they’re going to do from the time they’re sophomores in high school,” he said. In his memoir, [Nike founder Phil] Knight wrote that he “wasn’t much for setting goals,” and that his main goal for his nascent shoe company was to fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture. He made one short-term pivot after another, applying the lessons as he went.
36. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with getting a law or medical degree or PhD. But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed. People realize things about themselves halfway through medical school.
37. Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end of history illusion.” From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.
38. Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.
39. “Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry,” Pegau said. “I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.” Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
40. Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.
41. In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed.
42. “Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.
43. I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.

It is soothing to learn that the road to success is not only the survivorship bias tales from the billionaires, great musicians, or the pro athletes, etc where a child prodigy has been amassing 10,000 hours worth of experience before the age of 7.

But instead, there’s another pathway that is actually used by the majority of people. One that is more grounded in the trial-and-error environment, where people organically learn about themselves as they grow up, one that can provide career-changing inspiration only after decades of doing many other things, or one that can prepare us to survive the rise of AI: by being the jack of all trades and master of one, but one that could come later in life after collecting an abundance of experiences in many different fields.

“Drama Mangir” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This is an incredible story about the fall of Majapahit in 1527, and the proceeding game of thrones in the vacuum of power for decades.

In the middle of this utter chaos, Penembahan Senopati, the king of Mataram in 1575-1607, became the main vocal point of the story. He was the descendant of the last Majapahit king Brawijaya V and a vicious man who employed some of the nasties strategies to conquer the villages, including an attempt to capture a small area called Mangir.

It is in this village that he eventually met his match, their ruler named Wanabaya (or more commonly known as Ki Ageng Mangir or the leader of Mangir) who possessed a powerful mystical spear called Klinting. Wanabaya was also the descendant of Brawijaya V (making him and Senopati distant cousins), hence he felt entitled to control Mangir independently and not to succumbed to the rule of Mataram, which Senopati did not take very well. And the resulting mind games and battle tactics are what this book is all about, the drama that happened in Mangir.

The introduction of the book is especially exquisite, providing the grand context of the historical event. It covers all the mysticisms and local beliefs, the prophecies, the political propaganda, the origins of words (that last until today), the impressive contextual background for the weaponry, disproving false narratives in history books (like what ended up happen with Wanabaya – no spoiler), the analysis of war tactics, and describing the background story of various different kind of people such as Tumenggung Mandaraka whom Pramoedya dubbed as a Machiavellian before Niccolo Machiavelli was known to the world.

Different from the rest of Pramoedya’s books, however, is the format of the story where Pramoedya decided not to use the usual novel format, but instead use a stage play format in order to tell the story more authentically. And this is where the book stands out, the gripping conversations and stage drama that incredibly told in detail that can be a minute-by-minute guide to actually perform the play live in theatre.

I sincerely hope that one day I can get to see it performed live.

“How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” by Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg is a math PhD graduate from Harvard whom later become the professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the mathematics consultant for the 2017 movie “Gifted”, a story about a math prodigy.

These two contrasting facts about him are pretty much what this book represents, the serious and the amusing. And it is such an intelligent book, that teaches us advanced logical reasoning of math using everyday examples and the wider current affairs.

I initially got lost when Ellenberg lays out the grown up formulas or even the math tutorials that brings back fond, fond memories from school. But I soon realized that the math itself can be treated as the blueprint on the background, just like we don’t need to fully understand the blueprint or the engineering part of a car in order to drive it.

But still, it helps to know the inner workings, so that we can be fully aware of what’s going on and have lesser probability to be wrong about things. This is what the book is all about.

“Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world” Ellenberg remarks. “Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder, and more meaningful way.”

And to illustrate his points, he uses some of the most interesting stories from a wide range of history and complement them with a playful demonstration of statistics. Stories from the mathematics to figure out how to upgrade fighter jet during WW2, to calculating a missile projection, a story about a stockbroker’s scam, the math of lottery, casino gambling, how to find missing planes, and many more, all the way to the mathematics of God.

Indeed, such a wide range of topics, hence no wonder the book is often dubbed as the Freakonomics of math. But is it really? Despite the occasionally funny and the overall friendly tone of the book, make no mistake, this is still a serious book about math. So, it is nothing like the wacky and fun Freakonomics (for economics) or the even wackier Why Do Men Have Nipples (for medicine).

However, as Ellenberg explains, “[w]e tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study of things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.”

Therefore, despite being a serious book, it is also a rebellious one that teaches math from an unorthodox approach: from the vantage point of the practical user rather than just the theories. No wonder that math lovers absolutely adore this book.