<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> yes <a href="https://mastodon.top/tags/krokodili" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>krokodili</span></a></p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> Maybe some open secret???</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> the editor was probably too busy coming up with a title that would sound enough like &quot;Guns, Germs and Steel&quot;.</p><p>(I recently noticed how Game of Thrones (&quot;A Song of Ice and Fire&quot;) led to a deluge of fantasy books called &quot;An X of Y and Z&quot;. Perhaps the monomaniac-history-rewriting genre has a pattern of &quot;Xa, Xb and Y&quot;!)</p>

<p>I am absolutely going to be glued to watch the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight tonight (I’m already watching the undercard on Netflix in back of my Uber) and I make no apologies for it. Content is content! Fuck it! Let the assholes bash each other into more brain damage!</p>

<p>Honestly, I think a bigger thing with college is the whole competitive nature of it with AP classes, extracurriculars, and all of the other HS crap and anxiety surrounding it. I was never into any of that and my attitude tends to be &quot;shrug, do whatever kid.&quot; I&#39;m not sure this is a very productive attitude, but it is what it is.</p>

<p>9/ Overall, it&#39;s worth reading if one is at all interested in the great sweep of world history across Eurasia, in the continuity and interplay across the &quot;Silk Road&quot;, in how various empires fed into one another across time, or … in horses. The strengths overcome the weaknesses.</p>

<p>8/ Third, it&#39;s limited to Eurasia with only a glancing mention of, say, North America or even Western Europe. Finally, he is deeply steeped in horse-speak; an editor should have gotten him to introduce his terms in plain English too, and failing to do that is a real misstep. ↵</p>

<p>7/ Second, it&#39;s obsessed with military events. The horse must also have had enormous social consequences, and these are barely covered at all. It is, in the end, a history of battles and empires, and it can wear thin despite the many details that spark joy. ↵</p>

<p>6/ The book breaks down in a few ways. First, unsurprisingly, he overplays his hand; it is difficult to countenance the horse as the central force behind every single dynastic and empirical event he writes about. ↵</p>