We should engage with these texts. I disagree with them, and I argue back against them, but I don’t think that means they shouldn’t be read and thought about.

I chose this book because it’s written by a physicist, very elderly now, who has spent all his life working in controlled fusion. The title is a take on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . The first part of the book is Chen claiming that fusion is indispensable for our future, and why. He has a very readable section on climate change, a section on fossil fueled energy and a section on renewables—in which I disagree with him strongly, because he denigrates solar energy—and then goes on to say that we need fusion.

This is an odd choice because I disagree with almost all his conclusions. He argues that the reign of Augustus sees the Roman élite finally dealing with the problems of the Greek culture that they love and the nasty Greeks they rule. He’s just wrong. They don’t. They carry on loving the culture and despising Greeks. I don’t agree with his methods. He doesn’t argue things. He just tells you stuff.

I read the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Don’t always agree with his opinions on movies but he’s always deadly funny.

I question everything. This is also my greatest intellectual habit.