It all started when I — just for fun — asked Grok to edit an image to show how I would look if I were about ten kilos lighter. For several years I’ve had a fairly balanced view of my body: I follow a moderate low-carb diet, go to my yoga classes, and walk 8,000 steps per day on average. I was living healthily, but it didn’t take up too much mental space. The only problem was that I was becoming a bit too comfortable with my constant snacking, and it all culminated with me eating a whole 90% cocoa Lindt bar per day. I didn’t think it mattered that much — but the Grok image clearly showed that I was starting to look a bit puffy in the chin area on the unaltered photo. It was just so obvious that I would look better if I made an effort to get back to my old weight. So I cut out all snacking and substituted it with zero-calorie drinks like tea, coffee, and diet soda.

A little over a month in, it’s been surprisingly easy. It’s as if the increased drinking keeps me full. We’ll see where I end up if I keep this up for a few more months — I’m already noticing that my clothes fit much looser and I’ve lost a few inches here and there. Although I wasn’t at an unhealthy BMI, it will also be interesting to see if my blood sugars, lipids, and hormones change in some ways as a response to this. Even within the healthy BMI range, certain metabolic markers tend to improve with weight loss. But it is also good to keep in mind that this is not an encouragement to get too skinny: at a BMI of 19, all-cause mortality increases.

The perfect time to start a new diet, by the way, is in late summer — late August or early September, when you’re back to school or the office and therefore back to your old routines. In Sweden this period is in some circles jokingly called “Women’s New Year” (Swedish: tjejnyår) because that’s when a lot of girls and women start new projects in anticipation of the fall. If you’ve ever attempted to survive January and February in Stockholm, you also know that real New Year’s is just depressing, so a September variant can be more inspiring.

This time of year is incredibly busy for us: I’m going back to the office after a long vacation. My daughter started preschool. We immediately caught pneumonia. I’m — hopefully, if I get over the pneumonia — going to Gothenburg for a short visit. There’s an election. We’re also moving.

But despite all this, I found my drinks diet surprisingly easy to fit in. In my head, however, I’ve still felt a bit burnt out. And so I didn’t have the energy for a dense book about society or an excessively detailed classic. I wanted something lighter — and so for some reason I found the 2018 bestseller My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh recommended on a book YouTuber’s channel. One reviewer compared it to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and I could really see why. The novel has a really dark pull that makes it hard to put down.

The narrator has what looks like a perfect life. She lives on the Upper East Side in New York, went to Columbia, works at an art gallery, and is thin and blonde — which she mentions very often, in some strange and detached self-promotional way. But when her parents die she slips into a depression and decides to have a “year of rest and relaxation.” In practice that means lying to a psychiatrist and getting a dangerously strong mix of medications so she can sleep the whole day in and out except for a few hours, for a whole year.

The main plot is really the pill-induced hibernation, the old memories, the sleepwalking, but what I found more interesting is the friendship dynamic with Reva, a friend from college. She has less money, isn’t as thin or as blonde — in fact, she’s bulimic and exercises a lot — and she still can’t get as thin as the narrator. Under the concerned visits to her melancholic friend, there is comparison when it comes to looks. This underlying competition that exists in some female friendships is interesting, and I don’t think men compete with each other in quite this way.

The book keeps pointing at thinness as a kind of status, and I see a version of that in Stockholm.

I live in Vasastan, in the inner city, which is expensive and mostly upper middle class. You rarely see someone obese. Overweight people exist, but they’re less common on the street. The one clearly obese person I can recall from an old housing association was an adoptee who was also very unwell mentally. In Östermalm, the most upper-class part of the city, the women are thinner still. On Karlavägen they’re out exercising among the trees when I’m on my way to meet a friend. They look like gazelles: very thin, and often flat-chested unless they’ve had work done.

There seems to be a strong negative relationship between socioeconomic status and BMI. When I googled this, it said that it is probably mostly to do with education: wealthier people know more about nutrition and exercise and are therefore better at watching their weight. That probably has some truth to it, but I also think that people of higher socioeconomic status are more motivated to stay thin as a status symbol.

My office is more mixed by income and background. There, it’s more common to see people who are clearly overweight. Interestingly, after this summer, it seems like half of my office are on GLP-1 inhibitors, and it’s become quite noticeable. So perhaps this new era of weight-loss drugs will break this BMI and SES relationship to some extent?

On the other hand, there is the current Hollywood trend of Ozempic abuse — so maybe this will more likely lead to a race to the bottom? A lot of famous women are getting very thin, past slim and into frail — Ariana Grande, Demi Moore, Olivia Wilde, etc. It doesn’t look youthful to me. Past a point it looks worse, not better, but women still push each other toward a look I don’t even think most heterosexual men find that attractive? Body dysmorphia and insecurity is part of it. Intra-sexual competition is an even bigger part.

So those are basically the thoughts I had in my head when I looked at this AI-edited photo of a lighter edition of me. It has felt quite good that the current weight loss hasn’t felt psychologically damaging compared to previous attempts. Before in my life, it was one extreme or the other. Either I didn’t care how I looked, didn’t mind gaining weight, and avoided the scale, or I became obsessed. So it was quite a win that my primary focus after having a baby hasn’t been ”to get back in shape immediately”, and that I just haven’t thought that much about how I look to be honest until now.

Simon Webb is a historian and writer who runs the popular YouTube channel History Debunked and writes on Substack. I first stumbled across his work on YouTube some years ago and personally enjoy the short clips that dive straight into pressing topics without hesitation. Simon’s historical knowledge helps put the oftentimes confusing contemporary trends into perspective.

A fun fact is that he is also making quite a splash outside the echo chamber: there are no fewer than 12 YouTube channels dedicated to debunking History Debunked, more often through personal attacks than reasoned arguments.

Simon lived abroad for many years, traveled extensively, and wrote for magazines during that time. This led to a contract to write a book on the history of London in Prehistoric London: The Capital Before the Romans, after which his writing career took off. He focuses particularly on topics like London, the slave trade, terrorism, and Irish and Middle Eastern conflicts — subjects drawn from his direct experiences on the fringes of these events. In addition, he has written fiction, with 70 or 80 Western novels published under pseudonyms (what he calls “pulp fiction”) for financial reasons.

I contacted Simon because I wanted to interview him about nationhood, democracy, and the political situations in Sweden compared to the UK. Here is the resulting interview.

Free speech and controversy

I asked Simon what drives him to constantly wade into controversial territory. “I’ve always had a big mouth, and now that I’m an old man, I care even less what people think of me.” He wants people to be allowed to speak their minds and says it doesn’t bother him if some may think that he’s an ”idiot”, simply admitting that “I could be wrong.”

We agreed that free speech is crucial and that attracting controversy shouldn’t stop people from pursuing the truth. He draws a firm line at incitement to violence, however: “If someone says that we should kill women, or black people, or trans people, then that is clearly against the law and immoral.”

Nationhood and citizenship in the era of cheap global transport

Given the low cost of global travel and technology that allows large diasporas to maintain close cultural ties to their ancestral homelands, I asked Simon whether he thinks our traditional definitions of nationhood and citizenship are outdated. Is this model of organizing societies really stable in the long term if you view it through a historical lens? I can’t help but think that we are making an error by handing out citizenships freely to people from all around the world with little shared ancestry, history, or culture.

“Multiculturalism is bound to fail,” he replied, “It has been tried many times and always fails.” He pointed to many comparable historical examples, such as Cyprus, Lebanon, and Yugoslavia. In all of these examples, the tribalism in our human nature eventually overrode any pretensions that it didn’t matter, and serious conflict ensued.

“A stable society requires common language, culture, religion, and values,” says Simon.

I shared my concerns about the potential for conflict in Sweden, my home country, when large immigrant groups with different backgrounds follow instructions from abroad. In 2022, we saw the “Ramadan riots” in Swedish towns in response to Rasmus Paludan’s Quran burning tour, which injured many police officers. There is also the radicalizing influence of foreign media and imams on the diaspora, and we’ve seen instances where lies have been spread that social services are “kidnapping” Muslim children.

Simon explains that this situation gives rise to a “fifth column” issue in Sweden, where individuals with allegiance to foreign entities — particularly among recent immigrants — influence the country’s political landscape. This might also create a very dangerous situation in critical moments. I told Simon that we are already in this situation, given the hybridization of gang criminality and Islamic extremism, where gang criminals have taken orders from the mullahs in Iran during Iran’s war with Israel and attacked targets in Sweden, for example.

We discussed the upcoming election and the potential impact of Islamic immigration in particular on political outcomes. This may even be the deciding force that tips the election in a left-wing direction. “It is really a terrifying situation,” says Simon. “It will turn bad.”

He explained that, when he lived in Sweden back in the days, it was relaxed and laid back. There was never any trouble, the most peaceful and lovely society.

How did we end up in this mess?

“The intelligentsia and academics come up with ideas like multiculturalism. It is not ordinary working people. This is not a grassroots movement,” Simon explained. Our elites live in their ivory towers — they are not impacted by their own bad policies. This insulation allows them to hold strange beliefs and ideologies that are never tested against reality.

I also brought up that I think feminization is a major contributor to our problems, citing the work of Erik Olsson and Catharina Grönqvist Olsson. I described a male equivalent to “white flight”: when an organization reaches a tipping point in the share of women, the culture shifts (an “HR-ification,” so to speak) in ways that make men uncomfortable, prompting them to leave. This allows feminized thinking to gradually dominate institutions. Women are often more pro-social and less capable of dealing firmly with transgressors. Simon agreed but added that part of the process is perhaps also that some men cannot stand being ordered around by women — “It feels unnatural to them,“ Simon explained.

Simon added that, although he personally prefers the company of women because they tend to be more empathetic and cooperative, “Men will argue to get to a position of power, and this is oftentimes how new ideas emerge. Women are seeking consensus by looking for similarities instead.” This dynamic causes progress to stall and issues not being dealt with when women hold positions of power.

Is a dog born in a stable a horse?

There is much discussion in Sweden about what it means to be Swedish. Some find it offensive — or even inaccurate — to say that someone born here isn’t truly Swedish if they lack ancestral ties to the land. What are Simon’s thoughts on national identity and belonging?

“Your cultural identity is primarily absorbed through osmosis from family rather than your surroundings,” he explained. In other words, it comes through the stories, culture, and language absorbed from one’s parents. This process is absent for those with foreign parents.

I also mentioned studies showing heritable traits influencing outcomes — not just cultural absorption but genetics as well. For example, differences persist among Euro-Americans with origins in different countries in the US, hundreds of years after immigration, in economic productivity, criminality, and cultural tendencies that mirror their countries of origin.

Assimilation, in some ways, is a myth; it is more like a cultural transplant, as economist Garett Jones has argued. Simon cautioned about the sensitivity of the topic due to historical associations with Holocaust-era racism: “This is tricky territory. It is really sensitive because of the war.” I explained that the reason why I often bring this up in my writing — despite the controversial nature — is that I believe there can be bad consequences down the line to not speaking the truth with regards to these issues as we’ve seen relatively successful groups (like Jews and whites) demonized in recent days. Simon agreed.

The issue with our democracy

I asked whether Simon believes our current form of democracy is struggling as a result of immigration and has turned into a form of clientelism that serves various groups with little historical connection to or contribution toward the host society. Is it fair or sustainable for people with no real ties to the country to influence elections and policy through their votes?

“Our democratic system has been corrupted by immigration. I see that our politicians are now behaving like ones from Africa and Asia,” Simon said. This means offering benefits to client groups in exchange for votes. Simon’s solution is to suspend democracy temporarily — with the intention of restoring it later. I explained my view that democracy’s key benefit is the ability to vote out a bad leader, and that I fear an authoritarian leader might suspend it indefinitely. Simon acknowledged the risk but countered that doing nothing carries an equal danger of continued decline.

Are we heading for civil unrest?

Some intellectuals warn that Western societies are heading toward civil war — or at least civil unrest — if we don’t change course. As a historian, does Simon see truth in that assessment?

He sees it quite easily. Ordinary people are not being listened to; violence becomes the only way to get noticed. As a Swede, I must add that I think the current Swedish government is much better at listening to people than is the case in comparable nations — but there is still a long way to go.

There are rising tensions between native and immigrant communities all across Europe, including violent incidents involving far-right groups. Potential solutions include deporting immigrants and redirecting welfare funds to their home countries, but the reversal of immigration should be done systematically and humanely.

But separatism would evoke memories of the Nazi regime, so he doesn’t see enthusiasm for it in the electorate. Perhaps things will become worse before such drastic measures are implemented.

The situation in Sweden and the UK

We discussed the challenges of integration versus multiculturalism in the UK and Sweden. The UK has largely shifted away from integration toward multiculturalism, while Sweden still emphasizes integration — though with uncertain results.

In the UK, there is acceptance of multiculturalism because the failings of integration have become too obvious. In Sweden, the belief in integration persists. As Simon observed, the American “melting pot” has become a “salad bowl” because it became clear that such diverse populations do not assimilate.

When I asked Simon about cultural differences between the UK and Sweden in terms of our abilities to deal with these issues, he simply said that “When I lived in Sweden, I felt like I was among my own people, which I never felt when I lived in Arab nations, for example. We are very similar people.”

I guess we are all in the same boat, after all.

More with Simon Webb

You can subscribe to Simon Webb’s newsletter on Substack or to History Debunked, his YouTube channel.

On the taboo that is sex differences and the problem with feminization

A Billion Years of Sex Differences is, without a doubt, the 2026 book release I have been looking forward to the most — and it did not disappoint. Written by evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, it is a must-read for anyone interested in psychology, gender, and sex. Go buy it!

Sex differences remain one of the most taboo topics in our day and age, largely because they challenge the blank slate view of human nature. But ignoring reality doesn’t make us happier or wiser; it leads to misguided advice, decisions, and policies.

Stewart-Williams has faced some (often ridiculous) attempts at cancellation for his work on this “controversial” subject. Yet as he has noted in his own Substack writing, he now earns more from independent projects outside the university. It made me reflect that Substack has become something of a refuge for free inquiry — as our institutions grow increasingly intolerant (and feminized), genuine exploration and prestige simply seem to be migrating elsewhere.

The author emphasizes a balanced message: we should neither exaggerate nor underestimate sex differences. Both extremes lead to flawed conclusions and policies that fail to account for the wide range of personalities within each sex. True equality (and maximal happiness), in his view, means equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome.

That said, I’ve personally started questioning even this framework in practice. Perhaps it is easier for me to say so because I am a woman, and it should therefore be harder for people to dismiss me as a misogynist.

When women enter traditionally male-dominated organizations and institutions (and vice versa) in large numbers, these spaces often tilt in a more feminized direction — and most often this process ends up (unintentionally) undermining their original functionality. A small number of women might not shift the culture much, but there’s no reliable way to prevent them from becoming a substantial share with time.

Stewart-Williams would likely have a fascinating conversation on this topic with Swedish authors Erik J. Olsson and Catharina Grönqvist Olsson, whose books The Soft State and The New Matriarchy explore the consequences of feminization in institutions (in Sweden). This is my encouragement for them to reach out!

On A Billion Years of Sex Differences

To begin, why are the sexes different, both physically and psychologically? It comes down to human reproduction.

Females get pregnant, females give birth, and females manufacture milk for the young. In contrast, males’ contribution to the baby-making enterprise is often just a sperm donation. The asymmetry in maximum offspring number turns out to be the key to unlocking the mystery of sex differences.

That is the starting point of understanding physical and psychological sex differences, and the book offers a thorough, evidence-based deep dive. Stewart-Williams guides readers through bell curves, sex differences across the animal kingdom, and what makes humans distinctive. He tackles the nature-versus-nurture debate, seemingly aligning in many ways with Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: although there is a strong ideological tendency to downplay sex differences in innate traits, this doesn’t prevent them from being substantially influential — often more so than socialization.

Particularly illuminating sections cover differences in personality, physical and psychological vulnerabilities, the gender-equality paradox, bias favoring women, the greater-male-variability hypothesis, sex differences in sexuality, intersexual and intrasexual competition, the evolutionary mystery of homosexuality, and parenting behaviors.

The paragraph that stood out for me the most and has stayed with me ever since I read the book is this one:

For any given facial attribute–the size of the eyes, the width of the nose, the fullness and shape of the lips–the sexes don’t differ enormously, and we’d struggle to identify a person’s sex from this one piece of information alone. However, when we consider all these traits simultaneously–as we do automatically when we encounter faces in everyday life–the overall multivariate sex difference in facial appearance is huge, and we can almost always tell a man’s face from a woman’s. According to evolutionary psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the same is true of psychological sex differences.

Stewart-Williams does not venture into the (arguably even more) taboo territory of population differences, but it seems quite obvious that many of the same principles regarding sex differences also apply to population differences in traits and distributions.

And perhaps, as the paragraph above illustrates, this could mean that two people from different populations may not differ much if you look at one psychological trait at a time — but when you consider all the psychological dimensions that make up a personality (and national character on the group level), the differences may be much more obvious.

An interesting thought, anyway!

Overall, A Billion Years of Sex Differences is an engaging read that cuts through ideology with data and evolutionary insight. Highly recommended for anyone interested in understanding human nature more deeply.

More with Stewart-Williams

You can subscribe to Stewart-Williams’s Substack here.

More about sex differences

One of the writers I enjoy reading most on Substack is Peter Frost, an anthropologist who researches and writes about human evolution. Since most of us are not used to thinking about our own species as undergoing natural selection, his articles are very thought-provoking. He weaves together deep insights into human behaviour with sharp societal observations, which makes his writing both interesting and relevant.

Since both Sweden and Canada – our respective home countries – have undergone major demographic changes due to immigration, I wanted to hear his views on this shift and what he thinks the future holds. He kindly agreed, and here is the resulting interview.

His beginnings: Curiosity about sex differences in skin pigmentation

Peter Frost was introduced to anthropology during his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, where he earned a B.Sc. in computer science with a minor in zoology, particularly human genetics and evolutionary theory. While living in Toronto, he became interested in ethnic relations through extensive reading outside his courses. He says he learned more from his own reading at the university library than from his classes.

For his graduate studies, he went to Université Laval in Quebec City because its anthropology department was considered to be the best in Canada. The intellectual environment in Quebec was completely different—closer to the European intellectual tradition—whereas mainstream North American academic culture struck him as very monocultural. “People in North America often don’t realize that others can hold fundamentally different perspectives. Quebec is in some ways a completely different society.”

His first area of research focused on sex and age differences in skin pigmentation. At the University of Toronto, he came across an article by sociologist Hiroshi Wagatsuma, “The Social Perception of Skin Color in Japan.” In that country, skin color is primarily perceived as gendered: lighter skin is female-coded, while darker skin is male-coded. This fascinated him, and he read through the physical anthropology literature on skin color differences, including sex and age-related differences. In addition to the difference between men and women, babies are noticeably lighter-skinned, especially in dark-skinned populations. Lighter skin tends to trigger a child-like response in observers: it signals “not dangerous, needs protection” and can thus reduce aggression.

For his Master’s degree, he worked with Pierre van den Berghe, at the University of Washington, on two reviews of the literature: a survey of physical anthropology on sex differences in skin pigmentation and a survey of cultural anthropology on the preferred skin colors of men and women. All humans seem to be sexually dimorphic for skin pigmentation, with men being darker and ruddier and women paler. These differences emerge at puberty, when testosterone causes men’s skin to become darker, ruddier, rougher, and hairier. Parallel to this sexual dimorphism, there is a cross-cultural tendency to prefer lighter skin in women and darker skin in men.

For his Ph.D., he conducted two studies to see whether the sex hormones influence our perception of skin color differences. In the first study, young children between the ages of 2 and 5 were presented with two dolls, which differed slightly in skin color. He found that the darker doll was chosen by children who had, on average, more body fat, which is the major source of estrogen in the human body before puberty. In the second study, young women were presented with pairs of facial photos, which differed slightly in skin color. Women in the early, estrogenic phase of their menstrual cycle were more likely to choose darker male faces than women in the later, progesterone-dominanted phase. This cyclical effect was absent in those women who were choosing between female faces or who were taking oral contraceptives. He published his study in 1994: Preference for darker faces in photographs at different phases of the menstrual cycle: preliminary assessment of evidence for a hormonal relationship. Another researcher later confirmed this cyclical effect through brain imaging of women while they observed facial images.

“Feeling the heat” drew him into the field of population differences

A few professors in his department were unhappy with Peter’s research and put pressure on his supervisor to withdraw the approval of his research proposal. A modified proposal was later approved by another professor, but in the meantime his bursary had been cancelled under pressure from the same professors. The doors were also closed to him for TA and research positions.

Previously, he had not been particularly interested in population differences in IQ and other psychological traits. At the University of Toronto, he had worked as a lab assistant for the geneticist Thomas E. Reed, who had done much work on this subject. But he became interested only at Laval, when he wished to escape the harassment in his department and meet behavioral scientists from other universities. He took part in the founding meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in 1988 at the University of Michigan. The annual meetings would connect him with a network of scholars—including prominent researchers like J. Philippe Rushton, Vincent Sarich, Philippe Gouillou, and Henry Harpending—who have explored taboo subjects such as genetic influences on behavior, race differences, and sex differences. He also connected with Steve Sailer, a popular journalist whom he describes as a middleman who translates dense academic ideas into accessible language for the lay public.

The WEIRD psychology

I asked Peter how Western (or WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people differ psychologically from others. He answered that northwest Europeans are a behavioral outlier. They have weaker kinship ties, they spend at least part of their adulthood non-married, and when they do marry they form nuclear families instead of clans. They see morality in terms of absolute and universal rules that can extend even to strangers. This is a rare exception globally, because in most of the world morality is kinship-based: you treat your kin differently from non-kin.

“In most other countries, morality is about kinship. You can do things to strangers that you would never do to your own clan.”

I asked him to elaborate on what makes us different. “When you think of WEIRD people you think of the Hajnal line, but in reality, it is more like a transition zone,” Peter says.

He was referring to an imaginary line running from Trieste in Italy to St. Petersburg in Russia, which can be considered a rough divide across Europe in shaping the Western mind. Marriage patterns differed historically on either side of this line, giving rise to different gene-culture evolutionary trajectories. This marriage pattern selected for a more rules-based culture, where rules were expressed in universal and absolute terms. This culture in turn selected for guilt proneness and empathy to discourage people from breaking the rules. In a guilt culture, unlike the shame cultures elsewhere in the world, people feel emotional distress if they break a rule — even if there are no other witnesses to the rule breaking. This is why Western Christianity places so much emphasis on confession, absolution, and penance. These are ways of managing the burden of guilt, which would otherwise become unmanageable.

Scandinavians are probably the most WEIRD of all, and as you go south and east, people become less individualistic, more collectivistic, and less prone to impersonal pro-sociality.

Do population differences prevent assimilation of immigrants?

I wanted to hear Peter’s views on our ability—given how different our mentality is from other populations—to successfully integrate or assimilate immigrants.

“In practice, the word ‘assimilation’ has become a euphemism for ‘replacement.’ Some people are naive, but most people who talk about assimilation know what is happening ... and what will happen. It’s a form of marketing: if you are having trouble selling a product, you give it a new name and rebrand it. But it’s still the same product.”

He continued: “In a world with a different demographic reality, we could discuss the pros and cons of assimilation. But I don’t see the point. We are condemned to live in the real world.”

I told him that in Sweden we have seen a rise in disturbing phenomena linked to immigration, including clan infiltration of the public sector, “degradation robberies” targeting native youth, and rapes of elderly women in care homes. We are now seeing white boys respond by joining “Active Clubs” to prepare for what they see as an impending race war. As an anthropologist, how does he make sense of these developments?

He answered by explaining that in Western societies the State was highly successful in imposing a monopoly on violence. Previously, adult males used violence proactively to show strength and attract women. From the 1300s onward in much of Europe, murder was prosecuted by the state instead of handled through family vendettas and cycles of revenge.

About 1% of men were executed per generation from the late Middle Ages to modern times. This “genetic pacification” removed violent men from the gene pool and shifted the European population toward lower aggression. By the 1900s, murder mostly happened in the heat of the moment or under the influence of alcohol.

We WEIRD people no longer understand that proactive violence was once normal for men in our societies—and is still considered normal in most societies, where it is a way to show strength and establish dominance. Here, you go to prison.

“When we let in populations without this long history of pacification, they use violence proactively. And then we’re surprised because we assume everyone thinks like us, when we are really the global minority. We shouldn’t assume that other populations will think or act like us.”

Noticing population differences is seen as the ultimate sin

I explained to Peter that, in Sweden, native victims were often dismissed as racists by authorities. Is there something about the Western mind that leads to this self-destruction?

From his point of view, this stems from racism becoming the ultimate sin after World War II. The term “racism” began as a synonym for Nazism; after 1945, the struggle against Nazism continued as if the war had not ended. I cannot help but think that this is something Renaud Camus, the French philosopher, would probably agree with, given that he coined the expression “Hitler’s second career”, referring to the strong postwar taboos surrounding ethnicity and race that Nazism left in its wake.

If you are suspected of holding a dissenting view on population differences, you are immediately labeled as psychologically abnormal. Yet all populations differ in mental and behavioral characteristics, and culture itself acts as a force of natural selection.

Peter believes that once enough people realize that the current paradigm of no population differences is unrealistic and thus push back against it, the pressure of group conformity will eventually reverse and even support the idea that population differences in mind and behavior are ubiquitous and expectable.

Immigration policy and societal breakdown

I asked Dr. Frost about mass immigration into Canada. We always hear that Canada has a better selection process for skilled immigrants.

He explained that Canada opened up to global immigration in the 1960s. It introduced a point system that awarded points to potential immigrants for having postsecondary education, valuable skills, knowledge of English or French, no criminal background, and a stable family life. So Canadians were pleasantly surprised to discover that Third World immigrants were very similar and perhaps even better than the average Canadian. Unfortunately, the first wave then brought in their relatives, who brought in their relatives until eventually the immigrant population regressed to the mean of its home countries.

”These days, there is much dysfunction in immigrant communities, parts of Canada look like the third world,” Peter says, and continues: “People think that I’m crazy when I say this, but I fear Canada could collapse in five to ten years.”

He sees similarities in how people talk about this to how things were before the Berlin Wall fell. Most thought that nothing would happen, but others saw it coming. The system is an empty shell, no one believes in it anymore. He fears what will happen.

Quebec is reacting strongly to mass immigration and demographic change, and he believes this will lead to secession. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and other provinces would then likely follow by separating or becoming U.S. states. Canada today lacks a strong national identity and could fragment like the former Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. The federal government in Ottawa may continue but only as a powerless entity that everyone ignores.

A few years ago there was a widespread movement to destroy Canada’s history and identity. People were toppling statues of Sir John A. Macdonald and setting churches on fire. Some politicians even egged them on, saying it was great and that they should burn more churches. That made Peter think Canada is over. Destruction of national symbols creates an emotional wound and paves the way for physical violence. “When you destroy a statue, the next step is to destroy a living person.”

“Most people in Canada and the West want to follow the rules, but when the rules no longer exist, you either make your own, or you have to follow the strongmen who make the rules.”

Low-trust and high-trust populations can’t integrate

Our politicians in Sweden often claim that better integration between natives and immigrants will solve our problems. My personal gut instinct tells me this will not work.

“As researchers, we are used to starting small, with mice. And if the results are promising, we go on to a larger pool of subjects. So if you want to experiment with immigration, you should do it on a small scale. But immigration on a large scale is problematic, especially if the experiment doesn’t work out. What do you do then? Mass immigration is irreversible, except in the most tragic way.”

High-trust societies like ours get exploited by lower-trust groups willing to use violence or nepotism. Social trust is in some ways more important than other traits like intelligence. Multiculturalism only works in societies that are already low-trust. In the Western world, the native and migrant populations really adhere to different rule books, which leads to the high-trust natives being taken advantage of. Eventually, low-trust behavior overwhelms high-trust behavior, and that is when things fall apart.

I told Peter about the Swedish Social Democrats’ plans to build cheap housing in middle-class areas for migrants to live in if they win the election, as a means to achieve integration. He says that if you believe in the blank slate and that genetics have no influence on behavior, this may be a good idea. But in Canada, similar experiments have destroyed middle-class neighborhoods. The original residents left, and there was a sharp rise in crime and assaults. These middle-class areas in Sweden will also be destroyed.

What about skilled immigration?

Some countries with large-scale non-Western immigration select for skills. This often leads to a significant influx of people from different places in Asia. Is this process largely unproblematic?

People talk as if high intelligence and human capital are everything, but Western societies are wealthy mainly because of their high level of social trust, Peter says. In other societies, intelligence has been shaped by different selection pressures. For example, if you are a merchant from a high Hindu caste, you may have very high intelligence, but you look out primarily for your family, not for society as a whole. This oftentimes comes with egotistical and nepotistic tendencies. As a result of such immigration, Canada now struggles with extortion, which is overwhelmingly driven by the South Asian population against other South Asians. Litter is also a problem, because there is less concern for people outside one’s family, and this has an impact on common spaces.

Despite all of this, he is cautiously optimistic. In the U.S., the fertility rate of Euro-Americans now exceeds that of all other groups except Hispanics and Pacific Islanders, mainly due to the growing importance of fertile subcultures like the Amish, the Mormons, the Hassidim and, to some extent, conservative Protestants and Catholics.

If we extrapolate into the future, he believes fertility will collapse in most of the world, especially in East Asia and Southern Europe. This is tragic, and the problem is worse in advanced economies because the focus on optimizing GDP means sacrificing other values, like having families.

But whereas he believes that countries like Italy and Spain in Southern Europe face ethnic replacement, North America will likely see sub-cultural replacement by Euro-American religious communities like the Amish. This is better, because people from these sub-cultures can defect to the majority secular culture, whereas ethnic replacement will mean the end of Western peoples both within and outside Europe.

Do we make things worse by discussing population differences?

Critics claim that discussing population differences and similar taboos reinforces prejudice and exacerbates tensions, so they ask us to stop talking about this. Does Peter think that we make the situation worse by talking about this?

“People will talk because it’s in our nature to talk. We are talkative creatures. Even in authoritarian societies, people talk at great risk to their lives. So why not talk in places that, historically, were designed for intellectual debate, like universities? If free discussion is as socially dangerous as some people think, then maybe our societal model is seriously flawed.”

He continues: “It all comes down to ‘Hitler’s revenge.’ Many people are still fighting the Second World War. It has become a psychosis for them. In that kind of situation, the appropriate response is not to go along with the psychosis. We have been doing that for some time, with predictable results.”

More with Peter Frost

You can subscribe to Peter Frost’s Newsletter and also read his articles in Aporia Magazine, where he is a contributing writer.

Although I don’t particularly consider myself a competitive person, I must admit that I’ve felt a thorn in my ego as I watched review after review of Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, A Better Life, appear while I was busy with the chores of family life. I simply didn’t have time to write mine before now, so I’m a bit late to the party — even though I thought I would be faster. Instead, I enviously watched others publish their thoughts before me. (You should take that as encouragement to read the book — I’m clearly not alone in recognizing Shriver’s genius.)

Shriver is an author who always has her finger on the zeitgeist, and she does it in an entertaining but politically incorrect way. This time, she raises one of the most pressing questions of our era: What about the effects of mass immigration on the native population?

We almost always hear the migrants’ stories — their hardships and their search for “a better life.” Rarely do we hear from the other side: the host population that pays for everything, while losing their civilizational inheritance.

The novel centers on a fractured New York family. Gloria, a hopelessly progressive mother, signs up for a city program that connects families with asylum seekers in need of shelter and ends up taking in Martine, a Honduran migrant. Living with them is Gloria’s 20-something son Nico — unemployed, living off his mother’s money, watching far-right commentary on the Internet all day, and seemingly having given up on any real ambition in life.

Martine, the migrant, does everything “right” — she is helpful, grateful, and hardworking. And still, she ends up bringing into the family the very problems that she supposedly fled from her homeland. The image of the innocent asylum seeker crumbles with every page.

Here Shriver creates an awkward yet revealing conflict. Nico is strongly against immigration. He sees the migrants flooding New York as stealing resources from American taxpayers. Yet he himself is doing exactly the same thing to his own mother — freeloading without contributing one iota.

This personal hypocrisy cuts to the heart of something much larger about immigration itself. A country is not merely a land of opportunity. It is something you inherit — a possession built by generations before you. Through both legal and illegal immigration, Shriver shows how newcomers can claim, in an unfair way, a civilization that was not intended for them.

And, as the French philosopher Renaud Camus has observed, their very presence in large numbers begins to abolish the very thing they came seeking. If the numbers are high enough, the newcomers’ presence eventually erases the stability, trust, and prosperity that drew them in the first place. You could liken it to stealing another person’s insurance: it requires a certain audacity to just walk in and grab benefits you never paid into.

This is exactly what the Bonaventuras experience when they take in a migrant.

Anyone interested in the issue of immigration should really read A Better Life. The novel is entertaining, ideologically interesting, offers surprising personal intrigues — and gets to the sharpest points of the main problem facing the West today (immigration, that is).

Some spicy quotes from the book that I’ll leave you with:

“Much less did he propose that maybe the babies in those hotel lines were most deserving of hostility, because it was with babies more than bazookas that you enduringly appropriated someone else’s territory.”

“Like most impoverished refugees fleeing political persecution, Domingo had an Apple MacBook Pro.”

“Truth is, the whole asylum system should be shit-canned. It was designed for a handful of legitimate World War Two–type refugees, not several billion job seekers and welfare shoppers in an age of cheap transportation and smartphones.”

“You could plausibly argue that the descendants of the Africans who were dragged here against their will have still not fully assimilated into the United States a hundred and fifty years after emancipation.”

“No less so than if the Nazis had billeted in their farmhouse in France, the Bonaventuras were under occupation.”

More with Shriver

On the Pendulum Swing

As a woman of the respectable age of 30+, I look back and think of the 2010s as revolutionary for various left-wing causes. Just think of the migrant crisis, Greta Thunberg, #metoo, BLM, the climate hysteria… But now that we’ve also passed the midpoint of the 2020s, it is appropriate to reflect on how different the decades feel. We may not believe in pivotal moments right when we are in the middle of things…

But they do exist.

Like a force of nature, the pendulum inevitably swings in the other direction; it is the yin and yang in action.

The contrast between the late 2010s and the early 2020s could hardly have been starker; I conclude that we have lived through the pendulum swing. Historically, it must have felt the same way when the carefree and roaring 1920s gave way to the ragged and grim 1930s, or when the defeatism of the crises-stricken 1970s with its bland wallpaper and ugly glasses turned into the power-suit wearing, Reagan-voting 1980s.

What marked the transition from the woke ‘10s to the ‘20s strongman era? Covid? The war in Ukraine? The (re-)election of Donald Trump?

On The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds, a book I read recently by the author H.G. Wells, made me think about precisely this, because — other than the obvious critique of colonialism — the work can be interpreted as a metaphor for when the unknown crashes into your day-to-day comfort and turns your life upside down — in a dark way. As human beings, the closest that we may get to an apocalyptic invasion from Mars are sudden, devastating events like a cancer diagnosis, being caught in a war, or losing your most loved ones — an event that yanks the rug from under your feet.

I first encountered Wells at a classical literature course at university (The Sleeper Awakes), then followed by The Time Machine and The Invisible Man that I read voluntarily. This is now my fourth Wells title, a testament to his brilliance since I do not particularly consider myself a sci-fi fan.

The story begins when humans observe unusual activity on Mars. Unsuspectingly, they think that it’s some interesting astronomical phenomena. But within short, a cylinder crashes into the ground, signaling that the apocalypse is starting.

At first, the authorities and newspapers insist that everything is under control. Then London collapses and the worst traits of humanity emerge from the chaos. Overall, that is the creeping atmosphere that Wells wants to paint in The War of the Worlds: panic, despair, and unrecognizability.

But the abandonment of all hope is perhaps most poignantly captured by a priest who turns out to be the least equipped for catastrophe. His faith evaporates and this illustrates how even religion may not be a savior when disaster knocks on the door.

Wells paints a landscape of devastation where fleeing and panic-stricken humans are scorched by flames from the metallic machines that contain the macabre Martians.

The Martians’ ruthless annihilation of humans is likened to how we — without a second thought — stamp on ants, frogs, or “inferior races” (the offensive wording is perhaps excused by the fact that the book was written in the late 1800s).

Human subordination and the futility of resistance is illustrated in multiple ways. The way humans view the unscrupulous cylinders is compared to how an intelligent animal would have watched the approach of a tank; the artillery fire of the brave soldiers is likened to shooting arrows at lightning.

Wells’ scientific background shines through throughout the work. He observes the Martians like a biologist; their reproduction, anatomy, feeding…

And ultimately, their death:

And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

Nature has a way of reasserting itself; the pendulum swings, as it has throughout history and in our own lives. Even the apocalyptically emptied London returns to normal when the English come back. So in the end, The War of the Worlds ends well, but the survivors continue to nervously look for shooting stars in the sky.

And just like that, the world stepped into a more peaceful century…

On Kindle

Happy New Year, readers—a few days late!

I want to start with one of my major takeaways from 2025—in terms of my reading, that is—which is that the Kindle is a great friend when you’re stuck on the couch with an infant. Its lightness makes all those books accessible and has truly saved my reading life, as well as preventing quite a bit of mindless scrolling. It also syncs with the phone app, so you can just continue reading even if you left the Kindle in another room—and this is especially helpful when you’re not particularly mobile.

In December 2025, Amazon also released an AI feature that lets you ask the Kindle anything about the book you’re reading. It has been an intriguing addition and immensely helpful when I’m reading non-fiction works that I want to learn deeply from and perhaps go back to check if I understood things correctly.

On the Books that Stood Out in 2025

The final number of books I read in 2025 is 53 (if you count the ones I read twice, which I do). Admittedly, that’s almost half of last year’s record of 92 books. Naturally, my mind has been more scattered this year as a new mom, and we’ll see how things go now that my maternity leave is ending and I’ll have to juggle childcare and work. But I digress…

It strikes me that my 2025 reading list balanced fiction and non-fiction fairly well. The books sent to me by Bakhåll, the small Swedish publishing house, dominate a bit—but that’s no problem, because they currently have two “product lines” I particularly enjoy: H.G. Wells (of which The Invisible Man has been one of the most entertaining reads by the author so far, so I’m looking forward to more in 2026) and the medieval tales (Tristan and Isolde last year, Le Morte d’Arthur this year—both great indulgences in knightly escapism).

Given that I always ruminate about the state of my country, The People’s Hero by Jens Ganman and Last Night in Sweden by Paulina Neuding (the former fiction, the latter non-fiction) were books I had been looking forward to reading. Relatedly, my dive into civil-war literature this spring introduced me to Brave New War by John Robb, which takes you through the issue of global guerrillas and how system disruption will likely be the dominant feature of future conflicts.

In the summer months I spend on the Swedish west coast, I re-read Bodil Malmsten and Michel Houellebecq. Her writing is a true mood-lifter when you have a hard time concentrating; his is simply entertainingly provocative (just the way I like it!).

Apart from those, three other books stood out in one way or another this year, and I want to introduce them in more depth below:

1. Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai

For some years now, I’ve tried to stay updated with literary Nobel Prize winners, so this year I picked up Herscht 07769 by the impossibly named Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai.

The book is written in an “experimental format,” which in this case means it lacks all periods and substitutes them with commas. This creates a speedy, stream-of-consciousness-like experience while reading. And to be honest, I think it was this—and not my brain fog or the time of day—that made the plot hard to follow.

The book was nevertheless entertaining. The setting is a post-industrial town in Germany, and the main character, Florian, is a cognitively challenged man who writes letters to Chancellor Merkel urging her to urgently address his idée fixe: that antimatter eating matter will soon usher in the apocalypse. There’s also a Bach-loving Nazi boss playing Deutschland über alles, graffiti cleaning, murders and gore, wolves… I think I’ll try to re-read the book to see if it sticks better next time.

2. Fractured France by Andrew Hussey

A couple of years ago, I read (and reviewed) The French Intifada by Andrew Hussey, which is about the history of ethnic conflict between the French and Arabs. Mr. Hussey has now returned with another strikingly great read: Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation.

If you’re interested in the social and political situation (or, shall we say, ticking time bomb) in France, I highly recommend picking up a copy! The book reads like a travel account of a state fragmenting into micro-states, and you can sense the tension as you’re taken on a journey, interacting with diverse peoples, exploring French cuisine, and traveling through the landscape.

Each chapter starts with a French town or city the journalist visits. This paints a pretty bleak picture of the country—from the far-left Black Bloc in Paris and young fascists in Lyon to the gang criminals of Marseille.

3. The Total Understanding by Peter Glas

The book I—maybe—loved reading the most this year was a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and I think it was because it offers such a beautiful portrait of da Vinci’s striking personality, where his insatiable curiosity and ability to truly see are the most prominent features (this also stands in stark contrast to the ubiquitous navel-gazing narcissism of today).

The full title is The Total Understanding: A Book About Leonardo da Vinci (Swedish: Den totala förståelsen: En bok om Leonardo da Vinci). In the biography, the life of the universal genius is sorted into his different areas of endeavour: understanding humans, understanding nature, improving conditions for humans through inventions, and painting. But we learn that da Vinci simply preferred to call himself a pittore and inventore.

We follow in da Vinci’s footsteps—his dissections of human corpses, his attempts at flying, his incredible artwork… The book ends with an interesting critique of certain biography writers. Apparently, previous biographies of da Vinci have been inaccurate, according to Peter Glas, the da Vinci expert.

The Full List

Below, you’ll find a list of my 2025 reading categorized into classics, fiction, horror & crime, biographies & non-fiction, history, society & politics, self-help & spirituality, business, and parenting & childcare. The ones I’ve reviewed this year are linked.

Classics

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn

• Notes from Underground by Fjodor Dostojevskij

• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

• The People of Hemsö (Swedish: Hemsöborna) by August Strindberg

• The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

• Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory

• The Polar Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan

• The Blue Anchor (Swedish: Det blå ankaret) by Hjalmar Söderberg

• Guest of Reality (Swedish: Gäst hos verkligheten) by Pär Lagerkvist

• A Time on Earth (Swedish: Din stund på jorden) by Vilhelm Moberg

• A Thousand Years with God (Swedish: Tusen år hos Gud) by Stig Dagerman

Fiction

• Butcher by Joyce Carol Oates

• Good Enough by Birgit Vanderbeke

• Drøbak 1947 by Oline Stig

• Damn Men (Swedish: Jävla karlar) by Andrev Walden

• Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes

• The Women by Kristin Hannah

• The Triangle of Sadness (Swedish: Triangeln) by Ruben Östlund

• Platform by Michel Houellebecq

• The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

• Rosarita by Anita Desai

• The Waiting Room in the Atlantic by Mona Høvring

• Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai

• The Idiots’ Paradise (Swedish: Dumskallarnas paradis) by Dekius Lack

• I Can Just Hear Your Heart Beating in Me (Swedish: Hör bara hur ditt hjärta bultar I mig) by Bodil Malmsten

• I Still Don't Have My Papers in Order (Swedish: Det är fortfarande ingen ordning på mina papper) by Bodil Malmsten

• The People’s Hero (Swedish: Folkets hjälte) by Jens Ganman

• The Secret Integration by Thomas Pynchon

Horror & Crime

• None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

Biographies & Non-Fiction

• The Total Understanding (Swedish: Den totala förståelsen) by Peter Glas

History

• Argentina’s Dirty War by Donald C. Hodges

• The Birth of the Parents (Swedish: Föräldrarnas födelse) by Maja Larsson

Society & Politics

• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

• Fractured France by Andrew Hussey

• The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

• On Death Cults and Democracies by Douglas Murray

• End Times by Peter Turchin

• Feminism for Women by Julie Bindel

• Brave New War by John Robb

• What Is the Great Replacement? by Renaud Camus

• Last Night in Sweden (Swedish: Igår kväll I Sverige) by Paulina Neuding

• Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan

Self-Help & Spirituality

• Yoga Nidra by Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Business

• Digital CRM by Marco Bardicchia

• The Little Book of Big PR by Jennefer Witter

• The Corporate Myth by Lipton Matthews

• Get to the Top of Google by Tim Cameron-Kitchen

Parenting & Childcare

• Wonder Weeks by Frans X. Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt

• The Taste Adventure (Swedish: Smakäventyret) by Ann Fernholm

• Finger Food (Swedish: Knatteplock) by Elin Oresten

• Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubief

What were your most interesting reads in 2025 and what are you going to read in 2026? I’d be more than happy if you would share below!

Since my last post about a possible Swedish civil war gained significant attention, I’ve decided to delve deeper into why I believe my home country is a powder keg on the verge of explosion. You could also describe this process as South Africanization, Balkanization, or Lebanonization—there are many historical parallels.

The core issue is that the multiculturalism underpinning our society is arguably based on falsehoods about human nature that are as significant as, if not greater than, those underlying communism. Whereas communism overlooks hierarchism, multiculturalism turns a blind eye to tribalism. As a result, Sweden—like much of the Western world—is likely to fracture, much like the Soviet Union did in the 1990s.

What causes societies to disintegrate? Few can answer this question better than Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist who uses mathematics and statistics to analyze past and present societies. He is the author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which I recently read. As Turchin explains, “A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science: complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes.”

Turchin’s main argument is that popular immiseration, a “wealth pump,” and elite overproduction are the primary drivers of societal destabilization, particularly when combined with ethnic diversity. All these factors are currently at play in Sweden.

How do these destabilizing factors interact? When inequality grows and wealth concentrates at the top (i.e., the wealth pump), more people strive for elite status (i.e., elite overproduction). This happens both because increased prosperity at the top enables more people to obtain the wealth and education needed to aspire to elite positions and because declining living standards (i.e., popular immiseration) make life less comfortable for the average person. Eventually, the class hierarchy becomes unsustainable when there aren’t enough working-class people to exploit to support the elites. This is when counter-elites emerge. Political turmoil arises when these counter-elites ally with the discontented masses, capitalizing on their immiseration to climb the hierarchy.

I aim to demonstrate that Sweden’s political middle ground is fracturing, and new counter-elites—who use ethnic and religious grievances to their advantage—are emerging. Consequently, Sweden’s inhabitants will align with the counter-elites (or ethnocentric agitators, if you prefer) who best represent their identity.

The Ethnification of Swedish Politics

For decades, mass immigration has shifted Swedish politics toward identity-based issues. The most obvious evidence is the rise of the populist Sweden Democrats, polling at around 20%. Since the last election, we’ve also seen the emergence of Muslim parties such as Nuance, the Vision Party, and the Unity Party. Nuance arguably handed the right-wing bloc their 2022 electoral victory by taking votes from the Social Democrats and the Left Party in notorious no-go zones like Rosengård, Bergsjön, and Rinkeby. This trend will likely continue, with traditional left-wing parties losing votes to these new Muslim parties that more explicitly advocate for ethnic interests. As a result, ethnic factionalization in Sweden will become increasingly stark and undeniable.

To illustrate the harmful ethnification of Swedish politics—the root cause of Sweden’s powder keg—here are some recent developments:

• Jamal El-Haj, a former Social Democrat member of the Swedish Riksdag, left the party after a Hamas-linked scandal. He has since formed the Unity Party and is networking with imams nationwide, presumably to attract the Muslim vote.

• The son of a Swedish minister from the Moderate Party was caught training with far-right “Active Clubs” and spreading propaganda. Consider why the popularity of exercise clubs exclusively for “white boys” is surging in a country increasingly marked by inter-ethnic violence and what this foreshadows for the future.

• To address the disintegration crisis among ethnic groups, the Social Democrats have proposed forcibly mixing ethnic Swedes and inhabitants with foreign backgrounds by building attractive housing in no-go zones (intended for Swedes to move into) and affordable housing for new arrivals in wealthier, predominantly Swedish areas.

• Sara Kukka-Salam, a leading Social Democrat from Solna in the Stockholm region, recently stated in an interview that Swedes whose friend groups include fewer than 20% of people with foreign backgrounds are “the problem.” This reflects growing desperation and authoritarian tendencies within the Social Democrats, Sweden’s largest party (polling at about 30%).

The Wealth Pump, Elite Overproduction, and Popular Immiseration in an Era of Mass Immigration

Are Turchin’s factors—wealth pump, elite overproduction, and popular immiseration—present in Sweden? Yes.

The wealth pump and popular immiseration are evident in Sweden’s growing inequality. Once one of the most equal countries, Sweden is now a “paradise for the super-rich,” as financial journalist Andreas Cervenka describes it. For the wealthy, Sweden offers favorable taxation on equity, inheritance, and residential property. This stems from the capital flight of the 1970s, which taught us that excessive taxation drives the wealthy abroad, taking their tax contributions with them. However, rising inequality and conspicuous consumption are increasingly difficult for most Swedes to stomach.

While elites float on yachts or renovate villas in Djursholm, Långedrag, or Ljunghusen, some of them also engage in unethical wealth extraction from public funds. The failed Northvolt project, a publicly funded battery factory, exemplifies this: elites essentially plundered Swedish pension funds for a risk-free entrepreneurial venture.

Meanwhile, those at the bottom—often unemployed and of foreign descent—face severe challenges. Sweden has one of Europe’s highest unemployment rates, largely attributed to low-skilled, non-Western immigration. Their immiseration is currently mitigated by extensive welfare benefits.

When this ticking time bomb explodes—i.e. when we can no longer afford to pay their welfare benefits due to its unsustainable financial trajectory—popular immiseration will become glaringly apparent. Moreover, many of these unemployed individuals likely overlap with Sweden’s 800,000 adult illiterates in a country of 10 million, which historically boasted a close to 100% literacy rate for centuries. This means that efforts to integrate these individuals into the workforce are likely to fail.

When examining popular immiseration, we shouldn’t focus solely on GDP growth—even per capita—but also on median salaries relative to living costs, which better reflect the average person’s reality. Housing and food prices have surged in recent years, casting doubt on whether Swedes are wealthier in real terms today. Notably, there is now a positive correlation between economic status and fertility rates in Sweden, suggesting that those at the bottom feel they cannot afford children. Combined with Sweden’s immigration-fueled crime crisis, the average Swede feels they are paying more, receiving less, and facing growing insecurity in their towns and cities. These expectation gaps will likely become more pronounced and intolerable in the coming years.

Additionally, a growing divide exists between the asset-owning class and those without property. Turchin asks, “Why should most workers be excluded from equitably sharing in the fruits of economic growth? People in low-paying jobs perform critical tasks for society.” He adds, “When large swaths of the population experience falling living standards, this undermines the legitimacy of our institutions and thus weakens the state. Popular immiseration increases mass mobilization potential.”

Does Sweden overproduce elites? Approximately 50% of the population now pursues post-secondary education, carrying the status expectations that come with it. The supply of elites exceeds demand. Many are absorbed by Sweden’s vast public sector, which provides so-called “bullshit jobs” (jobs with little productive value). This resource reshuffling likely tempers societal tensions by keeping these elites content.

However, growing inequality means more of these oversupplied elites aspire to join the increasingly rigid economic hierarchy, despite lacking the cognitive fitness for such positions in a strict market sense. Additionally, politicians’ eagerness to import foreign elites on skilled worker visas—particularly from India and China—further fuels the powder keg, exacerbating brain drain in those countries and intensifying domestic tensions. These foreign elites will inevitably make political demands aligned with their ethnic interests.

Brace yourselves for an explosion when popular immiseration peaks, the wealth pump reaches its limit, and political failures can no longer be concealed. Sweden is now a society with little pre-political loyalty, where political life revolves around a zero-sum struggle for dwindling resources. Our descent into a diverse, low-trust society suggests the economy will falter. Our Scandinavian gold—trust—has vanished.

On the Likelihood of Civil War in Western Europe

Are Western European nations—like Sweden—standing on the precipice of civil war? That has been the speculation in prominent works of fiction, such as Submission by Michel Houellebecq and The European Spring by Kaspar Colling Nielsen. However, the message in these books can easily be…

Read more

On Unproductivity

I’ve promised myself never to apologize if I happen to write less productively for a period, because I find it awkward when other people do that. Ultimately, it is natural for our productivity to ebb and flow; life is life and things get in the way of us getting things done.

Therefore, this is more of a reflection than an apology: Lately, I’ve struggled immensely with my productivity. I’m nearing the end of my pregnancy and have discovered a whole new level of sluggishness that makes reading, let alone writing, much harder.

I thought that taking some time off before work to prepare would be great — which it is — but now I’m in this state of just relaxing, so I don’t get much done. This is probably how slackers, couch potatoes, and the elderly feel all the time. Endless procrastination… The good thing is, I’ve gotten a more mature perspective on the process of aging, because doing everything with a double-digit weight gain in kilograms and what feels like a bowling ball on your midsection naturally slows you down (and I cannot emphasize enough how frustrating this is when your mind wants you to rush). So, I promise to never again tell my grandparents — as if I knew better — to “just get on with it” when they complain about feeling limited in their bodies’ abilities.

Additionally, I must awkwardly admit that the hours I spend staring at screens have gone through the roof, and I’ve started gravitating more towards Netflix (which says a lot about the ordeal that is pregnancy brain because that just doesn’t make me feel like myself at all). But in this unproductive phase, I guess what I need to practice is acceptance, so that is what I try to do at the moment. That, and just wait and wait and wait.

On Butcher

So far this year, only one book has excited me enough to effectively take me out of my gestational slumber: Butcher, the latest novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Undoubtedly, Butcher is not the smartest pick for someone about to give birth — since one is encouraged to take in positive stories — and this novel is essentially a long list of the worst obstretic and gynecological nightmares that one can possibly conjure up, conveniently presented in about 400 pages. But that didn’t stop me, because I have been a big fan of Oates for close to two decades now.

The book tells us the story of Dr. Silas Weir, a psychopathic doctor in the 19th century who carried out gynecological experiments on female patients at an insane asylum. As is so typical of Oates’ writing, the dark psychological drives of the protagonist are presented early on and then build from there: Dr. Weir comes from a prominent New England family but is himself hopelessly mediocre. This makes Dr. Weir strongly desire success, and he grows obsessed with advancing the field of “gynopsychiatry”. Coupled with Dr. Weir’s psychopathic tendencies, the book takes us to very dark places as he gets away with conducting nightmarishly painful experiments on the most private parts of his vulnerable victims.

Although Butcher is undoubtedly one of the most — if not the most — disturbing books I’ve read in my whole life due to the grotesquely graphic descriptions of the experiments, it’s impossible to put down. I think Oates’ intention with writing the novel was to make us reflect on what women went through during life events like childbirth before the invention of modern medicine. Parallel to these horrors, another theme is the exploitation of power and how psychopathy can be connected to leaps in science. In fact, when reading Butcher I can’t help but think of the horrifying experiments by Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor also known as the Todesengel, who subjected Jews in concentration camps to in his wicked attempts to advance science.

More with Oates

It is quite dizzying to think about how time flies, and this feeling is especially pronounced when we look backwards. The future may seem far away, but when we look over our shoulders into the past it strikes us that time passes too quickly. 2024 is certainly no exception. As last year came to an end, I skimmed through some of my writings from the annum and was struck by this sentiment. It was a year that, indeed, passed in the blink of an eye.

Then I thought that, there is no better way to wrap up this extraordinary year of reading than making a list. So that is what you’ll find here.

Below, you’ll find a list of my last six months of reading categorized into classics, fiction, horror & crime, biographies & non-fiction, history, society & politics, psychology, self-help, & spirituality, and business. If you’re interested in any particular book, you’ll find the ones that I’ve reviewed with links.

I count no fewer than 48 books, which makes it something like 92 reads in total for 2024. Perhaps 2025 will be the year when I break the 100-books-a-year mark? What likely stands in my way, though, is that my daughter will arrive within short and that will probably entail less reading time. Or more, depending on whether the baby is a whirlwind or a breeze.

What you read says so much about how your thoughts evolve — sometimes on a more subtle, subconscious level — so it is always interesting to go through my own and other people’s reading lists. When it came to my reading, the two most predominant categories for the last six months of 2024 were undoubtedly society & politics and classics.

In the society & politics department, books like Treatise on Intolerance, The Right to Mess with God, Hamas: Terror From the Inside, and V13: Chronicle of a Trial convinced me even more about what a great problem Islam constitutes in our Western societies; Malin Ekman’s Twilight in America shed light on some of the baffling stupidity that you find on the American left (and the consequent damage that the delusional policies have caused); The Most Offended Wins, The New Outsidership, The Mafia Pact, Where Are We Going?, and The Girl in the Corridor were some interesting reads that brought up various aspects (like grievance culture, unemployment, corruption, the economy, our chaotic schools etc.) that relate to the situation in Sweden, my home country; Feminism Against Progress, The Soft State, and The Care Dilemma took us through the under-explored topic of the (negative) consequences of the female march through the institutions (and workforce), as well as, some unanswered questions within the feminist movement.

A few years ago, I also made it a habit to read the Nobel prize winner of the year. And so, in 2024, I picked up two titles by Han Kang. If you haven’t read her already, I strongly recommend The Vegetarian as a great start with for its twisted psychological darkness, but We Do Not Part can also be a good introduction to the author (and South Korean history, too).

There was one book that I read twice this year: The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar. The simple reason for that is that my pregnant self strongly relate to Molnar’s writing.

What will 2025 bring in terms of reading? Since I will be on parental leave, I will try to stay up-to-date by reading a few career-related books. But I’m also keen on reading more by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (particularly, his shorter books) and Joyce Carol Oates (one of my all-time favorite authors whose book Butcher became my first read of 2025). There are also the random books from the publisher Bakhåll that I’m sent every second month or so, where I never know what I’ll get but this just contributes to the excitement. We’ll see what 2025 has in store.

If you have any reading suggestions or any comment regarding the titles that I’ve read, I’d be more than happy if you would share below!

Classics

• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

• A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich

• The People of the Abyss by Jack London

• The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

• Doctor Glas (Swedish: Doktor Glas) by Hjalmar Söderberg

• The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

• Dead Poets Society by N.H. Kleinbaum

• Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville

• Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

• The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac

• Sara Videbeck and the Chapel (Swedish: Det går an) by Carl Johan Love Almqvist

Fiction

• The Nursery (Swedish: Mjölkbaren) by Szilvia Molnar

• Mania by Lionel Shriver

• Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates

• We Do Not Part by Han Kang

• The Daughter’s Verdict (Swedish: Dotterns dom) by Dekius Lack

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Horror & Crime

• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

• A Trapped Man by Per Hellgren

• Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

Biographies & Non-Fiction

• A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall

• Conversations with a Nuthatch (Swedish: Samtal med en nötväcka) by Björn von Rosen

History

• The Ottoman Empire by Dick Harrison

Society & Politics

• Twilight in America (Swedish: Skymning i Amerika) by Malin Ekman

• Treatise on Intolerance by Richard Malka

• The Right to Mess with God by Richard Malka

• The Most Offended Wins (Swedish: Mest kränkt vinner) by Lars Åberg

• Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington

• Israel and Her Enemies (Swedish: Israel och hennes fiender) by Bengt G. Nilsson

• The Soft State (Swedish: Den mjuka staten) by Erik J. Olsson, Catharina Grönqvist Olsson

• The New Outsidership (Swedish: Det nya utanförskapet) by Johan E. Eklund, Johan P. Larsson

• The Mafia Pact (Swedish: Maffiapakten) by Lasse Wierup

• Hamas: Terror From the Inside (Swedish: Hamas: Terror från insidan) by Magnus Ranstorp

• The Girl in the Corridor (Swedish: Flickan i korridoren) by Ellinor Torp

• Where Are We Going? (Swedish: Vart är vi på väg?) by Anders Borg

• V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrere

• The Care Dilemma by David Goodhart

• Jerry-Built (Swedish: Fuskbygget) by Andreas Cervenka

Psychology, Self-Help, & Spirituality

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• Cribsheet by Emily Oster

• The Little Book of Living Small by Laura Fenton

• Never Not Working by Malissa Clark

• Instructions for the Cook by Dōgen Zenji

• Daring to Rest by Karen Brody

• Six Substances That Will Change Your Life (Swedish: Sex substanser som förändrar ditt liv) by David JP Phillips

• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

Business

• Harvard Business Review 10 Must Reads 2025 by various authors

Related: What I Read in the First Half of 2024

Those of us who have lived through the 2000s have seen ever-increasing property values followed by a price rally during the pandemic and then surprising volatility resulting from the attempt to combat excessive inflation with climbing interest rates. In fact, some people argue that we may now be living through a slow-motion price crash. But the height from which we fall still looks so great from the ground that what we are experiencing is incomprehensible to us.

Admittedly, nothing engages people in Sweden in general — and Stockholm in particular — like discussing the housing market. There is an element of vain nosiness about the whole thing that can make you uncomfortable, which I think stems from the fact that where you live says so much about your social status. Are you living in old-money Östermalm, up-and-coming Aspudden, or one of the unfortunate suburbs where most bombings take place?

For anyone who is not Swedish, a curious fact is that it is also ridiculously easy to look up where people live and the estimated value of their property in Sweden through a simple Google search. This, too, contributes to unhealthy social comparison. But, hopefully, the new government will stop allowing this soft stalking that has become quite dangerous in an era marked by escalating gang criminality, home invasions, and burglary. But I digress…

Andreas Cervenka is a Swedish financial journalist who has written for many of the largest newspapers in the country and won many awards for his work. His latest title Jerry-Built: How the Housing Market Wreaked Havoc on Sweden and the World (Swedish: Fuskbygget: så knäckte bostadsmarknaden Sverige och världen) was released earlier this fall and I quickly added it to my wish list since I, too, take great interest in the housing market.

The thesis of the book is that the drivers of sky-rocketing housing prices — particularly in the larger towns and cities — have been the toxic combination of unnaturally low interest rates and an increased willingness of banks to lend out money. The effects are ever-increasing barriers of entry to the housing ladder in the form of deposits. The consequences are greater inequality (where you live — now more than ever — determines the future of your children), stagnating growth and curtailed dynamism (as more money goes to pay off mortgages than consumption and as older people simply “sit” on their property without contributing to any entrepreneurial endeavors and all the while keeping younger people who productively partake in the economy out), lower birth rates (as people feel that they cannot afford a home), and systemic financial risk from the massive debt.

Jerry-Built is interesting to read even for those who do not generally agree with Cervenka’s left-leaning, fairly anti-market conclusions. As with all other financial bubbles, at some point, people start tricking themselves into believing that the laws of the market no longer apply and that the prices will continue to go up and up and up. But inevitably, at some point, people can no longer afford the prices and that’s about the time when the bubble starts bursting.

Nevertheless, some experts claim that the housing prices are not crazier than one would expect given the macroeconomic situation (meaning that it shouldn’t be described as a bubble). For example, Magnus Henrekson, Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, argues that the monthly cost of housing — before the interest rate hikes — have mostly remained stable since the 1970s (a low interest rate is, in other words, the only factor that has contributed to inflated asset prices). The only problem with this is that the massive debt now concerns us all since it has become systemically dangerous in an era of high interest rates.

But a sign that the housing prices are in a bubble is that timing suddenly makes all the difference when buying and selling property, and this means that we are experiencing a slow-motion crash; the prices are undeniably more volatile compared to the steady upwards trajectory that we saw before the covid pandemic. Sadly, this means that some people may have lost all the money that they had saved up in the race to enter the housing market.

Jerry-Built takes us through the housing market and property bubbles around the world, but with a particular emphasis on Sweden since we happen to be one of the most extreme examples in terms of disproportionately high housing prices (partly resulting from a Swedish national character that is quite willing to take risks). We learn about the American housing crash — the one that lead to the financial crisis of 2008 — and that, apparently, China today has even more extraordinary debt. So it is not unlikely that the root of the next financial crisis will be Chinese. It is also good to keep in mind that the crisis not only impacts residential real estate, but also commercial.

I listened to Jerry-Built as an audiobook, so I cannot remember the exact quote, but Cervenka brings up an important piece of advice. As we all dream about that special house that may not really be within our economic means (realistically), it is important to also talk about the other side of the coin: the incredible stress that comes from over-indebtedness. Living with large debt is like a prison sentence with no end in sight.

So what should be done about the issue? Jerry-Built naturally makes you draw some conclusions. We must, slowly and gradually, cool down the housing market by building more and making it harder to take on large debt (we also need to decrease demand with caps on immigration, but in Sweden, this is more of a peripheral issue at this point in time).

The only problem is that easier to talk about these solutions than to implement them. Rising interest and material costs go hand in hand with a reduced willingness to build more (unless it’s really luxurious real estate). Additionally, NIMBY politicians understandably don’t want more “cheap” housing anywhere near their own property since it often leads to the spreading of social problems and plummeting asset prices. Learning about these barriers to effective solutions has made some of the dumbest politicians — yes, most of them are found on the left — suggest that we should solve the situation by allowing people to take on even greater loans. Want to throw gasoline on the fire, anyone? That surely won’t improve the situation, but given that we now find ourselves in this conundrum perhaps the only solutions left are equally idiotic.

Emmanuel Carrère is one of the greatest journalists and authors in France whose writing focuses on contemporary issues. Last year, I first stumbled upon his writing in his book Yoga. I fell in love with the very personal storytelling that weaves together a blissful spiritual retreat that is abruptly disrupted by the Charlie Hebdo Massacre and plunges Carrère into an episode of bipolar depression with the migrant crisis and questions about the continuation of European civilization.

Carrère belongs to a small circle of French politically incorrect intellectuals. He is worth reading because he dares to take on topics that most others shy away from and covers them in a strikingly insightful manner. V13: Chronicle of a Trial takes us back to one of the darkest chapters in modern European history: the surge of Jihadist terror attacks culminating around 2015. Indeed, the mid-2010s were particularly barbaric years if you consider the many massacres that took place. The V13 trial refers to the coordinated massacres and suicide bombings that left 130 people dead and many more wounded at the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France, and several cafés in Eastern Paris. Carrère covered the full nine-month-long trial of the jihadists as a journalist for the magazine L’Obs and this book summarizes the horrors that unfolded through the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators.

What strikes you about the terror attacks is the disturbing element of randomness that exposes the vulnerability of our existence; the attacks could just as well have taken place in the Paris subway, Schiphol airport, or elsewhere. There is also something particularly grotesque about striking at sites of enjoyment; an overt stabbing in the back against the innocence of the civilization that once welcomed the perpetrators against its better knowing; a predatory betrayal of the youth who were simply dancing to the sounds of Eagles of Death Metal, watching a soccer game, or meeting up with friends for a glass of wine.

It is also painful to think about what the last moments of life were like for the victims, but there is not much room for imagination since the bloodshed and the agony of death become palpable in Carrère’s description of the testimonies. We really shouldn’t make the mistake of viewing Jihadism as something abstract, because people with these views walk among us. We share space at shopping streets, in the public transport, at hospitals and schools. The icing on the cake is that we subsidize their hate with our lax laws and common citizenship (while they laugh all the way to the bank or wherever they go to collect their welfare payments). It is hard to imagine that this would have been tolerated at any other point in history.

Carrère focuses in particular on the ethical question of parental culpability. In the West, we generally do not view parents as responsible for the acts of their adult children. This puts us in a tough spot when it comes to dealing with Muslim migration. Muslims are — on average — becoming more radicalized with each generation (or maybe they simply do not feel like they have to hide their views anymore given how large a proportion of the European population they make up these days). It is therefore reasonable to argue that all Muslim migration into Europe must stop, even of moderate and secular individuals, because there is far from a guarantee that their offspring won’t cause trouble down the line.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial also brings up the topic of what radicalizes Muslims to the extent that they end up joining jihadist groups and how they even justify their attacks (like you guessed, it’s mostly viewed as retribution for the suffering of their brothers in faith, although they tend to ignore that the greatest suffering is brought upon them by their fellow Muslims in their own lands). But the disaffected youth in Europe also join the Islamic State out of simple ethnocentrism and resentment against the native Europeans. The jihadists want to bring pride to the lands of Arabia; a pride that they can never have as lower-class inhabitants in the suburbs. But most of them end up dead on the battlefields, struck by drones, or detained with their many wives and children in the hellish conditions that make up the Syrian prison camps.

How do you quantify the suffering of victims of terrorism? And how do you compensate them? Money is often set aside by European states to victims of terrorism. But the anguish suffered is indescribable and it is therefore impossible to compensate monetarily. Some people who survive can never forgive themselves. They are haunted by the memories of how they saved themselves in a moment of panic, trampling or using others as human shields.

We must never forget the victims of one of the largest terror attacks in Europe, and in a way, V13: Chronicle of a Trial can be viewed as a tribute to them. We must also never forget that past and present perpetrators walk amongst us. This is especially important now when we are likely standing on the precipice of another jihadist tidal wave given the occurrences in the Levant.

I am drawn to the heart of Jesus and the mind of Buddha, spiritually speaking. Jesus needs no introduction in our culture. But fewer people are genuinely familiar with the teachings of the Buddha, ”the awakened”. He broke free from his ego and the worldly dissatisfaction — wrongly translated as suffering — that living in a state of un-enlightenment entails.

It is my belief that Christianity offers the best teachings on how to ”do unto others”, but Buddhism is a wise complement. Although it is fair to say that the societies where most people prefer to live have a Christian foundation, there is much to learn from the East Asian traditions that are rooted in Buddhism.

With that said, I was excited when a book on Zen Buddhism — the Chinese branch of the religion with Indian roots — arrived in my mailbox. The book in question was Instructions for the Cook by Dōgen Zenji, a 13th century Japanese Zen master and founder of the Soto school.

It is quite dizzying to read a book that was written in the 13th century, especially considering that its insights are still relatable today. Although Instructions for the Cook explains how monks should go about the cooking in monasteries, the book offers great wisdom on how to conduct life the Zen way: reverently and gratefully at every moment. The ancient text is then followed by an impossibly long afterword written by Sten Barnekow, an anthropologist and apprentice of the contemporary Zen master Okumura Shohaku. This afterword is a deep dive into Zen Buddhism from the perspective of a person who has practiced it for decades.

So what are the core teachings of Zen Buddhism? Instructions for the Cook is a great summary for those who are curious.

To adopt a Zen way of life, we must first become the witness of our own minds and we achieve this with a regular meditative practice. When we start observing our thoughts, it can be painful to realize how petty — and sometimes even disturbing — they are, but it’s the first step that we need to take if we no longer want to be enslaved by our most selfish selves (which is a purpose of Zen Buddhism). I experienced this when I made a serious attempt to return to my meditative practices earlier this year to calm my nervous system. Since I’ve been more sleep deprived than I usually am, I’ve noticed that my mind is loudly re-playing old mistakes and grievances all day long. Thankfully, the more I practice, the less seriously I take these thoughts and the longer the gap between them and my actions become. That makes a world of difference. But I try to remember that I should never strive to stop my thoughts (then lobotomization would be a better option, as Barnekow put it). Observing them is enough.

As we start taking our thoughts less seriously, we also start letting go of our most selfish parts. A common consequence of this is that we start treating others with greater respect and naturally start following the Buddhist practice of doing no harm. Being generous towards others instead of focusing on our petty selves is a key to happiness and we may start to experience that our wellbeing increases.

It is also common to have a sort of spiritual awakening as we realize that we are less in control of things than we think we are; we realize that we are not the one who makes things happen. This insight allows us to start letting the flow of life guide us to where we are supposed to be, at exactly the right time and this also leads to greater peace.

To walk the path of Zen, we follow the golden middle path; we live a simple life and neither indulge excessively nor live ascetically. We do our best to live gratefully and with acceptance, we recognize the impermanence of everything in our world (“This, too, shall pass”), we serve others, try to be less self-centered and less enslaved to our desires.

On Fall

Fall is my favorite season and it is also the horror season. Admittedly, they are related. It is always a relief for me when the looming darkness of winter forces me to slow down; twilight arrives earlier and earlier with each passing day as the solstice beckons and I allow myself to cuddle up on my couch reading books under dimmed lights.

I love being struck by the mysterious beauty of fall. At first, I find it in the fiery leaves that surround my old leather boots that clack loudly on the street as I rush to work in the morning. But the moment when the trees — especially the maple trees — turn their leaves orange, yellow, and red is betrayingly brief. First, they don’t all turn colorful at the same time (which makes you curiously ask why some trees “age” faster than others). Second, they often shed their leaves faster than you anticipate. More than once I’ve gone into the park with the intention of photographing a tree that was stunningly bright a couple of days ago, only to discover that it is now dryly brown or bare.

When the trees go — almost — completely naked, but there is still no sight of snow or sweet cinnamon treats served randomly at your workplace or even a single Saint Lucia yet, it can look quite depressing for the untrained eye. But that’s when the experienced lover of fall looks out for the candlelight.

There are few combinations that are as atmospheric as leafless trees and candlelights in the hours of twilight. This year — like every other year — the scouts arranged a light march to celebrate All Saints’ Day (Allhelgonadagen) in the park close to where I live. It was quite moving to just sit there and watch. As always, the picture on my phone doesn’t do the moment justice.

On Poe

To honor this season of horror, I picked up my old short story collection by Edgar Allan Poe, the master of horror himself. My love for Poe goes way back. When I was in middle school, the library in my home town arranged a challenge where you could pick one book if you had read ten books over the summer. After careful consideration, I decided to take home The Masque of the Red Death and Other Short Stories by Poe. Re-reading his writing two decades later evokes the same mysterious familiarity that I always long for in the fall.

Poe’s life was as dark as his poetry and short stories. Both his parents and his wife succumbed to tuberculosis — a hovering danger in the 19th century — and his life was marked by foster care, poverty, and alcoholism before it all ended in a final nightmarish hallucination at the age of 40.

His poem The Raven is probably what he’s most known for and also a beautiful classic. The iconic opening — “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” — marks the beginning of a perfected rhythmic composition. The Raven is the story of a man who has lost the love of his life and who is visited by an eerie raven that comes knocking on his door. Certainly, there is something uniquely dark about this bird species that contributes to the unmatched atmosphere of the poem.

I read The Raven with the Swedish translation by the side of the original English text. This is very helpful to a non-native speaker; if you are reading poetry in a language that is not your mother tongue, it can be hard to fully feel what you’re reading. It’s like the meaning of words is shallower and does not strike you as hard. The short story collection also includes The Philosophy of Composition, an essay about how The Raven was created, where Poe explains how he created the masterpiece by thought-out artistry.

What strikes you about Poe’s tales of horror is both the versatility and mastery found in his most known ones. The Cask of Amontillado brings up the eternal topic of revenge; William Wilson is about the horrors of a copy cat; The Premature Burial introduces us to one of the most horrifying — and slow — deaths imaginable; The Tell-Tale Heart gives you an almost karmic caution since the main character ends up not getting away with his carefully planned murder; The Masque of the Red Death (my favorite short story by Poe) shows how no wealth and comfort can help you escape the plagues of the world; The Black Cat tells you how a nearly demonic alcoholism comes back to haunt one man who hurt his cat and wife; The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery; The Fall of the House of Usher presents a haunted house-like atmosphere and an encounter with a friend from an old lineage of high esteem.

My recommendation for you this fall — although it is soon over — is to bring a short-story collection by Poe on your commute to work. It doesn’t matter if it is a slightly too thick collection (yes, Poe was indeed a productive writer). Although it might be inconvenient and look a bit odd to bring a collection as thick as a lexicon on public transport, it will get you in the mood for the best season. That, and candlelight.

Related

These days, I think a lot about pregnancy and what life will be like with kids. Perhaps that is not so strange because I actually happen to be pregnant.

Most of my pregnancy has passed while I — more or less — have gone about my life as usual; the time until childbirth has felt way too far into the future (and honestly, a bit unreal) and I haven’t had too much to worry about since I’ve been feeling fairly comfortable. Apart from suffering from the infamous pregnancy brain, that is, which has made me do confused things like frying food with the potholder below the pan (thank God I have an induction stove) and losing my most precious gold bracelet that my mother gave me and that she, in turn, had been given by my grandmother.

But becoming a parent is starting to feel more real as the baby movements become stronger and occur more frequently. Consequently, I’ve started planning and prepping. The only issue that new parents like myself run into is that there is so much information to take in, and it is quite hard to figure out where to start and what you need to know.

Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool came to my rescue. The book is written by Emily Oster, a statistics wiz and Professor of Economics at Brown University. The book is a great complement to my midwife’s recommendations. Since it is considered unethical to experiment on pregnant ladies and children with proper randomized controlled trials to find out causations (and not just correlations), many of the recommendations are based on large association studies where much nuance should be — but isn’t always — taken into account in the interpretation of the results. Arguably, economists are thus better equipped to give more balanced answers to all the questions relating to parenthood than healthcare workers, who often reason in more black-and-white terms.

Other than Cribsheet, which is about a child’s early years of life, I also bought Oster’s book Expecting Better, which is about pregnancy. I didn’t read the full book, but rather flipped between the chapters because there were some specific pregnancy-related questions that I wanted to read more about, e.g. what the data says about different classifications of medications, how much coffee you can drink, how much should you eat, how much weight should you gain, what the costs and benefits are of different pain-relief options during birth and so on.

Both of these books belong to the same ParentData series and come with handy summaries at the end of each chapter. So if you don’t want to dig into all the details, you can still get a great overview by just skimming through the summaries.

Since I also happen to have a degree in economics, I appreciate that Oster reasons in terms that I am familiar with from my university classes, like cost-benefit analysis (e.g. of going back to work, drinking coffee, or taking a medication), alternative costs (e.g. of working more or less), comparative advantage (e.g. of division of household work), and the marginal benefit (e.g. of spending time with your kids at home).

Cribsheet basically covers everything you ever wanted to know — as well as, everything you didn’t know that you wanted to know — as a new parent. Oster also backs up all of her findings with data. You’ll learn about what the studies and statistics say about recovery after birth, post-partum disorders, breastfeeding, sleep and sleep training, vaccination, career-related decisions, daycare, food introduction, milestones in child development, screens, potty training, child discipline, education, birth spacing (if you want more than one kid), etc.

There are some really interesting findings in Cribsheet. Some of the things that I enjoyed learning about were breastfeeding (as it turns out, it has clear benefits but some are exaggerated according to the data) and whether the use of pacifiers can disrupt it; how the baby should sleep (i.e. on the back, alone in the crib with nothing but a sleeping bag, or co-sleeping with a parent); whether being a stay-at-home parent, sending your kid to daycare, or hiring a nanny is best for child outcomes; what the most important factors in deciding what daycare center to choose are (unsurprisingly, the quality of interactions with the children are the most important, so as a parent, you don’t need to bother much about whether the kindergarten serves organic food and teaches your child to play Mozart on the piano); how to discipline a child (and what seems to matter here is a clear system of reward and punishment, as well as, consistency since you cannot really reason with a kid whose brain isn’t fully developed).

Cribsheet is also liberating to read because Oster is neither conservative nor progressive, but simply passionate about data. I would recommend any parents to-be to read both Cribsheet and Expecting Better. Both books are chill pills that help reduce anxieties about pregnancy and parenting. As Oster so clearly shows in her analyses, the choices relating to child rearing do not have simple yes and no answers. Rather, much depends on who you are as a parent and who your child is: There is not a one-size-fits-all. So, although the title of this book review is “Raising Kids the Statistically Optimal Way”, ultimately, a child is not just a data point and should be seen as an individual (but what the statistics say can still be immensely helpful when making decisions).

I’ll probably re-read Cribsheet again. If not the full book, then at least the summaries at the end of the chapters. But if you’re more of a podcast enthusiast than a book reader, I can also recommend you to check out Emily Oster’s podcast show Raising Parents that she’s hosting at The Free Press.

What are the consequences — good and bad — of the increasing female institutional domination? Is the female march through governmental, educational, and legal professions an unbridled good (as most feminists would like to have us believe)? In The Soft State: The Feminization of Society and Its Consequences, Professor Erik J. Olsson and Catharina Grönqvist Olsson tread the path that few dare walk (unless you want to be accused of sexism before you can say Jack Robinson) in their controversial — but excellent — exploration of this topic.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that The Soft State is the most enlightening book that I’ve read this year and that I warmly recommend it. In fact, it is so great that I lended it out to a friend before writing this book review. So if you wonder why there is a lack of quotes, the answer is that my notes and highlights are now on my friend’s nightstand.

The increasing female edge in educational and professional attainment in the Western world is a much debated topic. Simultaneously, we find ourselves in a series of severe institutional crises that demand our attention every time that we open a newspaper. But not many reporters dare to point to the obvious: The institutions that are now in a precarious state are the very same ones that have become female dominated. What The Soft State does is connect these dots.

The main thesis of the book is that the increased female domination in these fields is the — full or partial — cause of these crises. Olsson and Grönqvist Olsson draw on evolutionary theory, psychology (mainly the OCEAN model of personality), and sociology (like Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory) in their convincing argumentation.

Let me make an attempt to summarize the main point of the book: The demographic makeup of an institution inevitably shapes its values and modus operandi. Studies show that women — on average — are more caring and cooperative, less hierarchical and competitive, more orderly (but less industrious), and more neurotic than men. The main reason for these psychological differences is evolution; we have been shaped by thousands of years of sex differentiation. So when women come to dominate organizations that were previously dominated by men, they predictably end up changing the original constitution.

This brings us to the argument of sex realism: Demographic change — such as a change in the sex makeup of a population — has a predictable effect on the functioning of organizations, institutions, and society. The changes are inevitable for the very same biological reasons mentioned above. That also means that it is futile to argue that women should just learn to “think like men” by adopting a masculine outlook. It simply isn’t compatible with their nature. However, stating this unapologetically may — to some ears — sound as offensive as swearing in church. And, without a doubt, it goes straight against the zeitgeist and its tabula rasa beliefs.

But what is the problem exactly if society and its institutions become more feminized? There must be some optimum between masculine and feminine values, which may vary from field to field. Surely, not everything was better in our old male-dominated society?

is a Professor of Law at the elite University of Pennsylvania who has had her own run-ins with feminized institutions like academia. As a conservative, she has always had a target on her back, and this became especially obvious after she spoke out on issues like affirmative action and the feminization of academia. It is ironic since the raison d’être of universities is to reach the scientific truth, which cannot be done without free expression. But now we find ourselves in a situation where the feminization of academia has derailed this mission, mainly due to the female tendency to prioritize DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) over freedom of speech. As Professor Wax recently explained in a The Spectator podcast episode: “The values and priorities that women favor are antithetical to the proper function of the university.”

What is true about the state of academia is also true for other organizations in a precarious condition. In The Soft State, Olsson and Grönqvist Olsson particularly focus on three examples of Swedish crises that are the result of feminized thinking: the lack of institutional responsibility among public officials (tjästemannaansvar in Swedish), the inability — and perhaps even unwillingness — to deal with violent criminals, and the undisciplined school system that has spiraled out of control due to a complete lack of focus on student performance and accountability.

What is the consequence of this feminization? A gradual decline of Western states, institutions, and organizations. And unfortunately, this process of deterioration is likely to go on, both because it is unlikely that men will catch up with women professionally and academically anytime soon and because it is unlikely that women will adopt a masculine outlook for the very same biological reasons outlined above.

Whereas the public sector has become increasingly female dominated in Sweden and other Western nations, the private sectors still remain majority male. Olsson and Grönqvist Olsson predict that this will continue to cause political tension. A good example of incompatibility is the left-wing political decision to shut down nuclear power plants “for the sake of the environment”, which upset the private sector as it was glass clear from the beginning that it would cause production problems.

And although masculine women are happy with the opportunities presented to them in our feminized world, feminine women and masculine men will lose out and feel increasingly uncomfortable with the state of things.

The conflict in the Levant is escalating with each day, and we may well be on the precipice of a wider regional — and even global — war in the Middle East as the second Israeli front has now opened up in the north. Unless it turns out that this does, in fact, have a de-escalatory effect as some suggest it will. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly clear how relevant the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict is.

Additionally, we’re just about a week from it being a year since the devastating October 7 terror attacks, showing how time flies at a dizzying speed. The weekly pro-Palestine protests that pass by the subway station when I get off from work and in the weekends never seem to die out. The participants are an odd mixture of Muslims from the suburbs and Swedes deluded by their idealism, enthusiastically banded together by drum beats and slogans like “intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea”.

One pro-Palestine protest that has been particularly memorable, in my opinion, is the one that took place before Israel had retaliated. On a bus ride, I saw Hizb ut-Tahrir (the islamist organization that has been banned in many countries) intimidatingly wave flags (the same black ones with white Arabic script that ISIS flied when they ravaged the Levant) and placards where the bottom line was essentially something like “death to Israel” (and likely also death to the other Western countries that enable their existence in modernity in the first place).

Anyway, few topics are as radioactive politically as this conflict. Perhaps that is because your opinion on it reveals so much about your foundational worldview, and not just whether you lean left or right. Although you cannot truly understand the conflict unless you’ve been there, I’ve attempted to learn about it instead of falling into the trap of being too opinionated without being adequately informed. So I read two books with very different perspectives on the conflict: Israel and Her Enemies by Bengt G. Nilsson and A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall. My intention behind these two picks was to combine the factual of Israel and Her Enemies (it’s been on my reading list since forever) with the more personal of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. Although I never expected to change my opinion dramatically, the books did reveal new nuances so that I could see the conflict in a slightly new light.

On Israel and Her Enemies

Bengt G. Nilsson is a Swedish journalist and quite an interesting character (the fact that he lived in an Israeli kibbutz in the ‘70s suggests to me that he is somewhat of a retired hippie) whose writing centers mostly around Africa and the Middle East. He has switched perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict many times, and I do think that his view is as balanced as possible. No atrocities committed by either side — there are numerous which just adds to the depth of the conflict — are swept under the rug in Nilsson’s writing.

Nilsson takes us through the history, politics, and leadership of both countries, as well as, all the wars and intifadas in the region (e.g. the 1948 War when Israel was recognized by the UN and subsequently attacked by seven Arab states, the Six-Day War in 1967, the First Intifada which lead to the Oslo Accords, and the Second Intifada which arguably lead to more setbacks than progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations). He also discusses the Swedish diplomatic relationship with Israel, which can be described as quite up-and-down and dependent on which government — and which political leaders — holds power at any particular point in time.

Although Nilsson sided more with the Palestinians in his younger years, he became more sympathetic towards Israel over time (as the name of the book Israel and Her Enemies reveals). The reason for this is quite simple: At some point in his interactions with the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and leaderships, Nilsson realized that the Palestinian leadership — regardless of political affiliation — wouldn’t accept any peace settlement that didn’t include the complete eradication of Israel and the full right of return of Palestinians. The wider Arab inability to negotiate is also illustrated by the fact that Muslims can live in Israel, but no Jews can live in Muslim nations without risking their lives.

However, after reading Israel and Her Enemies, it is inevitable to be struck by a sense of hopelessness on the part of the Palestinians. Regardless of political leadership (Hamas, PLO, Fatah etc.), the incompetence, corruption, and tribalism — and sometimes also outright belligerence and terrorism — runs deep. This is another reason why Nilsson does not believe that a two-stare solution is possible, and why the misery of the Palestinian people is likely to carry on, especially evidently so after the October 7 massacres. But Nilsson still suggests another solution to the conflict (that he’s still not sure will work out but argues that there are no better options).

On A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Thrall won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and it is not hard to understand why. The book is based on real-life tragedy in 2012, and its superpower lies in the very personal storytelling that makes the constricted living conditions of the Palestinians relatable.

The book is set in the West Bank, and not the Gaza Strip (where the current conflict is taking place). Thrall shows us how the Palestinian society is changing due to ever-expanding Israeli settlements and how the Palestinians’ lives are increasingly restricted by the barriers that the Israelis have erected as a result of the violence that they are subjected to by some parts of the Palestinian population. This is partly what the left refers to when they talk about Israel being an “apartheid state”. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Thrall also illustrates how the Palestinians are sometimes unjustly imprisoned for their political engagements as a result of the paranoia that the inter-ethnic violence has sown.

The story centers around a terrible traffic accident where numerous children died in a burning school bus. The main tragedy is that many of them likely would have lived had someone come quickly to their rescue. But since the accident happened in the disputed territories, they were left to their fates without quick and adequate help. In the West Bank, it is unclear in certain situations who is responsible for the care of the population and it oftentimes ends up depending on ethnic and religious belonging. Abed Salama, the Palestinian main character, cannot find his son who went on the school trip and tries to find him in panic. The parental agony is palpable throughout the pages as the hours go by and he cannot find out what has happened to his son.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama weaves together the story of many typical characters that you find on the West Bank: the deprived Palestinians, the extremists, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Israeli soldiers etc. Thrall is Jewish, and it is interesting that there seems to be more diversity of opinion on the conflict among Jews compared to Palestinians (who tend to hold dissenting views less often). He doesn’t shy away from the dysfunctional aspects of the Palestinian society — e.g. the clans, the view on women and homosexuals, polygamy, terror sympathies — but the human touch still makes it story worth reading and brings empathy towards the Palestinians.

We — the middle class — live convenient lives because others work to exhaustion. That statement summarizes George Orwell’s argument in favor of socialism to a great extent in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.

I believe this is the fifth book by Orwell that I’ve read this year, and although his writing is always thought-provoking, this one in particular made me think of the invisible carriers of our civilization — past and present — who we owe much gratitude (and for whom we should probably also shed some tears).

The Road to Wigan Pier takes us to the industrial towns in Northern England in the 1930s, and is divided into two parts: in the first one, Orwell reports on the unbelievable plight of the coal miners, and in the second one, he philosophizes on why socialism is the solution to the societal injustices (and how come most people still don’t embrace it). Specifically, the latter part is a reflection on the similarities between class and caste systems, the differences to the colonial system (regarding the exploitation of humans), and the nature of work.

As always, Orwell’s timeless wit shines through in The Road to Wigan Pier, such as in this humorous quote about adherents to socialism (that still rings true today, especially for us right-wingers who make jokes about ”blue-haired snowflakes”):

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

Anyway, The Road to Wigan Pier is a report on the workers who carried our whole civilization forward in the early 20th century, but who were never seen or given much thought. Perhaps that is because people at the time did not dare look, as it would tell a bad story about the fortunes that they enjoyed themselves. Just like we look the other way today when we hear reports about the hazardous exploitation of African children in cobalt mines (and similar stories about the grim foundations of our societies).

At the time of Orwell’s writing, the English miners endured incredibly dire living conditions. They slaved their days away mining societal building blocks and were looked down upon by the middle class as a bonus (although the occupations of most of these people weren’t even close to being so tangibly useful as the miners’).

The coal mines were hellish and there is a feeling of suffocation in Orwell’s description of them: boiling hot and claustrophobic and dark. The workers had to crawl to get to their dangerous workplaces, and risked dying from derailed tracks or roof collapses. Not much was left after their insufficient salaries had been paid out, especially considering that they had to rent their own work equipment. After a few years of mining, their faces were covered in blue scars from the poisonous smoke.

Apart from the destructive work conditions, the workers were also deprived in their home lives. Their bad salaries entailed bad diets that made them sick and ensured that they were never properly fueled for such hard work.

Moreover, in the aftermath of World War I, the destruction of buildings created terrible housing shortages across England, and the miners had to choose between living in overcrowded (and semi-unsanitary) houses, trailer parks, or homelessness. When the government finally decided to start building new homes, they didn’t give the workers’ well-being much consideration. They omitted pubs — the social clubs of the working class — from their urban planning so that the workers ended up preferring their old inadequate homes anyway to their new sterile blocks.

In an age of convenient remote work where some jobs are mostly seen as vessels for our personal development (and where we produce things that are not so tangible), it is a good idea to think about the people who made our fortunes possible in the first place. We should all practice gratitude, and The Road to Wigan Pier reminds us of that strongly: Some things are taken for granted while we disregard the things that make the wheels of our complex societies turn.

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On Late Summer Days, Swedish Conformism, and Rediscovering the Past

My sister visited me in Stockholm some weeks ago, and we had the most perfect day together. We went for a morning yoga session, had coffee and cinnamon buns outside of a café, and then went to a lunch restaurant on Södermalm and sat at the outdoor terrace for hours before slowly strolling back home through the city.

Apart from the company, the day was memorable because the sky was sunny with only a few clouds floating past. This late summer weather is so ephemeral that you feel the urge to seize the moment before it quickly transforms into fall.

All the streets were lively because people’s paychecks had arrived just in time for the weekend. I soaked in the free air of Södermalm, the cultural island of Stockholm. Compared to other neighborhoods, Södermalm is more relaxed in a homely way. Elsewhere in the city, there is an anxious atmosphere as the inhabitants always compete to present their best selves. This oftentimes makes me feel like I have fallen behind in keeping up with the latest trends; in some Stockholm neighborhoods, I feel like the awkward cousin from the countryside on a trip to the big city.

The Stockholm women are known for their upkept looks, but in my opinion, there is something disturbingly effortful and conformist about them; you can’t help but notice that many females look like mannequins who are afraid of standing out from the crowd. They have the same ash blonde highlights, wear the same neutral outfits, put on the same sun-kissed makeup, and whiten their teeth into the same shade.

I wonder: Is social media or Swedish culture to blame for this conformism? I’m not sure. People’s uniqueness is what makes them interesting to look at, and at least there is still some left of that on Södermalm. But I digress…

On this late summer day, there was a chilly wind from the looming fall. But instead of the anticipation that you can sense in the beginning of the summer, there was more of a back-to-routines vibe. When summer turns into fall, my personal tradition is to trade linen garments and Fleetwood Mac for leather jackets and Depeche Mode. I light scented candles with earthy scents.

Our sense of time is different in the fall when we get back to the office. Suddenly the days and hours spin by fast in stark contrast to the slow days on the countryside; the pulse of the city makes time fly by and it’s easy to be struck with a sense that we’ve been here before (which we undoubtedly have). As we say goodbye to the long and carefree days of summer, there is no better companion to this bittersweet nostalgia than a few long-forgotten books from our libraries. My personal picks to set the tone for this fall were The Picture of Dorian Gray and Doctor Glas. Over a decade has passed since I first read them, and I am now a completely different person if you consider that all the cells in my body have been switched out since then. I’ve greatly enjoyed re-reading these titles with a combination of nostalgia and more mature perspectives that have allowed me to discover new details and new layers.

On The Picture of Dorian Gray

Nothing can be said about The Picture of Dorian Gray that hasn’t already been said; it has a given place in the English literary canon and has, thus, been analyzed ad infinitum. Still, it is always a delight to read and re-read since you pick up on new nuances to Wilde’s inimitable writing.

For those of you who haven’t read it, The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of the charming young man Dorian Gray, whose portrait is painted by Basil Hallward. The portrait is so exquisite that it helps Dorian, for the first time in his life, see his own stunning beauty as others see it. Unfortunately, Dorian makes a wish that the portrait will age instead of himself, and this comes true. The portrait starts reflecting his increasingly grotesque soul tainted by sinful and evil acts, whereas he himself continues to keep his outward beauty. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a story of narcissism, enticingly framed by its 19th century gothic vibes that makes it impossible to set aside.

The genius of Wilde best shines through in his charmingly contradictory quotes that give his books a mischievous air. The greatest example of this is probably one of the most famous quotes from the book:

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."

But there are many examples casually sprinkled across the pages, such as this one:

"Dorian is too wise not to do foolish things now and then."

What’s unique about the latest edition that I got is that it is the uncensored original, where Basil’s love for Dorian is explicit. Homosexuality was an immense taboo, as well as, illegal at the time when the book was written. So this was not the version that reached a wider audience in the 1800s, but it’s an honor to read the genuine (and uncensored) voice of Wilde one and a half centuries later.

On Doctor Glas

Similar to Oscar Wilde, Hjalmar Söderberg is an iconic author, but less known since the Swedish language is not the lingua franca of the world. Consequently, it has never reached a particularly wide audience beyond the borders of Sweden. But reading Söderberg in general and Doctor Glas, his most known novel, in particular is a given for most Swedish high school students.

Doctor Glas will strike a chord with those who enjoy Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, because it brings up the same philosophical question: Can you kill another person for the greater good and get away with it morally? Söderberg and Dostoevsky did not reach the same conclusion, as the divergent plots reveal.

The plot of Doctor Glas is straightforward: Doctor Glas, a physician, is secretly in love with Helga Gregorius, one of his patients. Pastor Gregorius, Helga’s husband, is a repulsive figure in Doctor Glas’ opinion. When Helga desperately asks Doctor Glas for a doctor’s note in order to abstain from sexual intercourse with her husband (because Pastor Gregorius gives her “the ick” and she also has a secret love affair with another man), Doctor Glas starts planning how he can take Pastor Gregorius’ life to set Helga free from her tormentor.

An interesting undertone of Darwinism can be found in Doctor Glas for those who read between the lines. For example, Doctor Glas regrets that he didn’t abort a fetus that later grew up to be severely impaired, and he later thinks back on his time studying at Uppsala University and how his world view was crushed when he couldn’t disprove the evolutionary theory. In one of the most known quotes from the book, we are warned that most humans simply cannot deal with truths like evolution:

"If the thinkers were allowed to hold sway, they would steer our globe straight into the sun and burn us to ashes. It is hardly surprising that their activity occasionally makes the cattle anxious, so that they cry: extinguish the sun, extinguish it, for God's sake, extinguish it! We scribblers have the task of maintaining the proper and useful distance to the truth. A truly good scribbler — there aren’t many! — understands the thinker and sympathizes with the masses. It is our duty to protect the thinkers from the rage of the masses, and the masses from doses of truth that are too strong."

If you ever plan on visiting Stockholm, I recommend you to read any of Söderberg’s works in preparation for the trip. The city landscape is presented most beautifully, and you get the sense that time hasn’t really passed since Doctor Glas. You go horseback riding in the Haga Park, and eat at traditional gems like Hasselbacken, Grand Hotel, and Stallmästaregården. If not for any other reason, read it for the sense of recognition as fall is around the corner, and that just happens to be the season when this brilliant novel is about to end.