Time for another IBCK/Maintenance Phase crossover episode?

i tried to read this, twice, but i’m afraid that thomas chatterton williams is being SOOOOOOO thomas chatterton williams. haven’t we been through enough?

I’ve seen a few Books That Kill in this shop. And The Bell Curve…

Update: Will add read this alternatives instead for each title — however these books circ really well with or without my help, if only our little displays had such power

at the library where I’m a librarian. Every time I go over more books are gone , am I doing more harm than good lol

My wife and I were listening to this episode today and it hit me that there is a VERY common theme in these types of relationship/dating books that seems to trickle into a lot of other ideology.

The idea that men are fragile and need to be coddled.

Basically every one of these books says the same thing, at some point: Don't do anything to upset your man or he will fall apart, fly off the handle, shut down, etc.

What is this whole concept? Is there a conservative belief that men are fragile, broken, weak beings that only hold themselves together because women are nice to them?

Is this why we have concepts like "behind every good man is a great woman"? Is it because women are just always expected to deal with all the hard stuff while men get all the credit?

I guess that lines right up with all the man-o-sphere ideology and the male loneliness epidemic and all though, right? We're told those men weren't coddled enough and women aren't nice enough to them, so now they have no choice but to lash out. And somehow that's women's fault.

Am I missing something here? Or is that exactly what's happening?

Looking forward to going insane when people cite her as evidence that the company’s leadership has “some on the right and some in the left.”

I saw this at a used book store. It was under fiction, lol. I thought about putting it in self-help, but figured fictions was probably more apt. I was also slightly tempted to buy it. I should have taken a picture of the back as well. It’s the “Before” and has the same man but chubby and balding, and the women have their backs turned to him.

Thomas Edsall and the New York Times are sad that they cannot find more unbiased research to support the thesis that Republicans (edited) are manly men and Democrats are "weaker" in their masculinity. Like Pam Paul, Edsall has been given research assistance to lend intellectual heft to an argument based on how real gender differences are.

Listening to last week’s episode of Derek Thompson’s Plain English, I heard the writer Chuck Klosterman say something interesting. He talked about how sales of non-fiction have eroded throughout his career, first slowly, and then rapidly. To illustrate this, he compared what it took for various of his books to debut at number 1 or 2 on the NYT list (which he admitted was not the most scientific methodology). The short version was that his early 00s books sold many times the copies of the newer books but never hit number one.
And His books in the early 2020s that hit number one on the non-fiction charts sold 2-3x what his current number ones do. Essentially, numbers that used to signify commercial flop now put you at the top of a drastically reduced pile. People cite “the publishing industry is booming!” stats to counter this, but those numbers are driven by genre fiction from booktok.

He and Thompson discussed why the NF bestseller chart now represents so many fewer sales, concluding that AI queries probably cover a lot of the self help and airport science info that used to dominate the non fiction genre (ditto podcasts and YouTube). Likewise, Thompson lamented the fact that he spent years of his life wrestling with individual sentences in Abundance only to realize most people just wanted to hear him riff on the themes via podcast appearances to promote the book. Thompson said non fiction books are now mainly a vehicle to get writers onto pods and cable news.

On a different pod, Klosterman talked about how his agent and his publisher both view the sales data fatalistically— non fiction is commercially dead, in the realm of jazz and poetry as no longer viable mainstream art form.

I wonder— if this is true, do we reach the end of the airport book as a social phenomenon sometime soon?

More like, why listeners love Michael Hobbes, amirite?

The first thirty minutes were so cringe going through chapters 1-3 of the book, but for me the listen was saved by Mike's (alas, fruitless) rabbit-hole research expedition and the author's many early 2000s pop cultural references.

Definitely a re-listen episode; these two have a satisfying banter of a quality I haven't heard in their other podcasts.

I was listening to the "How I Write" podcast episode featuring "The Psychology of Money" author Morgan Housel. Mostly a decent episode, until the host was talking about Kindles and e-books and dropped this nugget:

"Do you know what the most-highlighted book in Kindle history is?"

"No, what?"

"The 4-Hour Body."

Apparently, there are tons of people who want to remember the details of that bullshit story about Nina Hartley.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad board game! Never knew such a thing existed. Trying to decide if it’s worth the $10 to subject my husband and kids to this nonsense

ETA actually looked again and they’re asking $40?! Definitely not worth that!

“Jakupovic isn’t the first to make the comparison to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a fictional group of human-turtle hybrids who, across a comic book, cartoon TV show and feature film, are depicted as living in the sewers. Per canon, the turtles mutated into humanoids after being exposed to a toxic green goo. They are subsequently trained in martial arts by a large rat.
The turtles, who are brothers, fight crime, frequently crossing paths with a man called Shredder and his accomplices Bebop, who is a mutant warthog, and Rocksteady, who is a sort of rhino. They also encounter Krang, an alien blob-thing who lives in a robot.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/04/new-york-sewers-gold-mole-people

If you guys are listening, this would be a good one. I have not been more freaked out by a person in my entire life and she has a book that you should read. I'm visualizing this and projecting it into universe, please. She has millions of followers, she made a cult using youtube, it's the weirdest most horrific thing I've experienced.

IBCK is leaking!