While the focus of “Trapped in Silk Slippers” is not the NSS, and I do not think the failure to reference the new NSS drastically affects the post’s central arguments, I do want to take a moment to examine the 2025 NSS, partially in the context of my previous post, but also as an interesting document in its own right.
Blog
Wind and Truth Review
Entire subplots of the book read like anachronistic polemics on mental health, and the result is a robbing of depth from most of the characters who powered the series’ earlier installments.
Some Thoughts on Character Death (And Resurrection)
We can all agree there are fates worse than death, but death can still be considered the “ultimate” consequence because it is, at least under normal circumstances, final.
Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia
Reading Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia is most interesting for its comparisons: to Chinese Buddhism, of course, but also to Christian, European monastic traditions, and to the tenets, rules, and commandments of other religions.
International Law and Moral Relativism
International law is increasingly twisted by moral relativism to protect dictators, terrorists, and other euphemistically-named “bad actors,” while constraining, censoring, and punishing democratic, law-abiding nations.
Samuel Review
In reading these texts as books, rather than as selected vignettes and parables, we experience a rather different, more historical, more complex story than the excerpts which exist in the popular understanding convey.
A Historically Adjacent “Adaptation”
I was intrigued by how well the riddle’s tone and contents, read through the lens of referring to a travelling minstrel increasingly unneeded by his society, could map into the world of Impressions, and especially the druids’ fate.
The Book of Memory Review
Medieval scholars had a wiser perspective not just on memory, but on what we might today call “knowledge work” as a whole. In their view, simply reading a book was a useless exercise.
Sides of History
Legacy says more about the people doing the remembering than it does about the people or events being remembered, which is also true of things on the right or wrong side of history – such judgements say more about the people doing the judging than about what they are judging.
Worn Review
This is not a history of clothing, of fabric, its manufacturing, its properties, or its evolution. It is an unnuanced screed incoherently stitching together fragments of grievance politics and pet causes into a disjointed fabric that reads like a collection of opinion pieces written for a socialist periodical.
IGC Publishing 