What else I've been reading (and writing) in February 2026
Late Hitchens, the philosophy of science, and my own piece on David Bowie
This is one in a series of monthly posts that will round up the (mostly non-city-related) books and essays that also figure into my reading life.
First, here’s my own essay on new books about David Bowie (Paul Morley’s Far Above the World: The Time and Space of David Bowie, Peter Ormerod’s David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God, and Alexander Larman’s Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie) published around the tenth anniversary of his death in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Books
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011): Despite an authoritative heft, it contains only columns from his final years. I'd forgotten his tendency to sound more hyperbolic than he's actually being. Reflections on the culture of his English boyhood (Wodehouse, Flashman) hold up best.
Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (2002): Its discussion of creationism's various rebrands — "creation science," "intelligent design, etc. — makes the early 2000s seem a distant time indeed. Nor can I remember when last I heard the word "scientism."
Essays
"I keep telling people that the first hundred years are the hardest, but right now the future looks unpromising. As the late musician and philosopher Thomas Wright (Fats) Waller used to say, 'One never knows, do one?'"
“He hated our confusing ‘complementary’ with ‘complimentary,’ loathed it. We were good students about to graduate from college, so he couldn’t dock our grades for the error, but he pledged to cut himself if we committed it.”
“Como buenos modernos, seguimos interesados por comprender el tiempo presente, por autoesclarecernos, sólo que esta vez extrovertimos la racionalidad en una autoridad técnico-cibernética externa a nosotros.”
“The nation-state is a creature of the unitary public, broadcast media, and consensus reality. The chaos of the internet makes it fundamentally impossible to organize on that same scale.”
"My late nights were made possible only by military-grade instant coffee and the kick I got from my own insufferable self-romanticization as a reader by night, soldier by day."
"La simplicité d’utilisation du Minitel et son design particulièrement ergonomique expliquent en grande partie sa diffusion réussie dans les foyers français. C’est d’ailleurs le tout premier dispositif écran-clavier que les Français ont dans les mains."
"There’s a growing confidence in the shape of modern Chinese life, a settling-in that’s less about the manic pursuit of material wealth that characterized the boom years and more about something harder to name. A country starting to exhale."
"It can’t be denied that Updike put all that fornication and eloquent embroidery to industrious use. His two favourite pastimes, reading Protestant theologians and periscoping other men’s wives, huddled under one roof in his breakthrough novel."
"De todas maneras, sabemos que lo extranjero nunca es completamente extranjero, como lo propio jamás es estrictamente propio: se impone siempre la contaminación, la porosidad, la pureza del contagio."
"What the post-liberals get right — and the reason they are winning — is that the end of history has been sallow, ugly and deflating."
"Silverblatt said he hoped the show combats what Hans Magnus Enzensberger called 'second-order illiteracy,' reading as a functional act for parsing restaurant menus and instruction manuals."