“The German army in 1941 invaded the Soviet Union with somewhere between 600,000 and 750,000 horses. The horses were not for riding. They were for moving guns, ammunition and supplies. Weeks prior to the invasion, 15,000 Panje carts were issued to the infantry units that would trail behind the fast-moving Panzers. The vast majority of Germany’s soldiers marched into Russia, as they had into France, on foot.”

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction

Nice quote from Einstein describing fundamental science discovery: “highest form of musicality”

““That [the] insecure and contradictory foundation [of Bohr’s quantum hypotheses],” Einstein would say, “was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s unique instinct and perceptiveness to discover the major laws of spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atom as well as their significance for chemistry appeared to me like a miracle. . . . This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)

Started reading On Freedom, Timothy Snyder 📚

“The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”

Finished The Bell Jar last night, started on Bettering Humanomics over breakfast. 📚

Sunday reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 📚

Picked up The Problem of Democracy in Blackwell’s for a tenner.

Now reading: On the Edge, Nate Silver 📚

Sunday afternoon / end of year / mid-life reading

Sunday reading: The Dawn of Everything, Graeber & Wengrow

Cycled from Perth to Pitlochry. Sunshine to mist and rain! Lots of autumn colours though! 🍂

Sunday morning reading: Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

“A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”

David Brooks, How to Know a Person

Picked up a charity shop bargain - I’ve already read Bourgeois Dignity on Kindle, but nice to get a hard copy to leaf through.

Picked up some books from the £1 shelf at the Amnesty secondhand bookshop