Tag Archives: Michael Malice

The Success of Succession

Since Succession premiered in 2018, I repeatedly heard so many people I respect say how great the show was, but I hesitated to start watching. It wasn’t that I doubted them; I was just waiting to find the time to dive in. (Too much content.) With the final season airing this year, I thought it would be a good time to catch up before the finale. Part of the reason I hesitated to start Succession was fear of getting absorbed in yet another series that would go on indefinitely—or get canceled prematurely. Knowing there was an end in sight allowed me to begin. Long story short, it turns out all those people were right: Succession is a great show. It is highly dramatic with surprising twists and turns, but it is also extremely funny—funnier than most sitcoms, full of classic one-liners. It ranks up there with The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as one of the top television series of all time.

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2021

Note: The books from this list that aren’t available online for free are available for purchase through my Bookshop.org page.

1) Human Action: A Treatise On Economics (1940) by Ludwig von Mises

This is the bible of Austrian economics by the grandfather of Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises. Human Action is Mises’ magnum opus on economics, philosophy, and history—or more precisely, it’s about what Mises terms “praxeology”: the study of human action, which all economic activity boils down to. This is a long book (it took me half the year to get through, which is why there are fewer honorable mentions this year) but it was worth it. You will better understand the world today by reading this 82-year-old tome than by reading today’s newspapers.

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2020

According to my Goodreads stats (which I use to track every book I read), I read 95 books in 2020, which is down slightly from last year (114). Though that includes comic books, which are shorter and quicker to read, plus audiobooks, and I read less comics, so more full-books in all. My increased reading was not due to being stuck at home during quarantine as that didn’t affect my lifestyle much—it’s primarily because I severely cut down on reading Twitter and other online news. I previously wrote about the futility of following the daily news closely, but I still clung to Twitter—a little too much—sometimes a lot too much. I will expand upon how I broke my Twitter addiction in a future post, but suffice it to say, these days I check Twitter just once a day (at night after getting my work done) for only a couple minutes—if at all. This immediately reduced my stress levels and gave me much more time to read more valuable things that will stand the test of time, such as the following books.

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