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Not sure the intent of the author was to cover operational-level commanders. Even if Gulf War I did count, coalition forces outnumbered the Iraqis in sum total, so Schwarzkopf's WAR probably wouldn't be very good.

War Games with Mathew Brodrick had a fairly accurate portrayal of how hacking is done. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AByemfK_qD4

Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?

War And Conquest: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/war-and-conquest/id140...

Our Fake History: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/our-fake-history/id102...

The History of Byzantium: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-history-of-byzanti...

>>> If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3 seconds, I've already moved on.

You should try to to qualify that with the kind of writing you mean, because taken literally, that's a weird way to read anything. For instance, what is "the most important part" in War and Peace, or Song of Ice and Fire, that the reader should be able to find in 3 seconds?

War is Boring has some really great writing both on current military journalism and historical. If those interest you at all the blog is a must read.

I'd read a story written as a dataflow diagram if it made good use of the format.

War and Peace has been made into a movie at least half a dozen times.

If anyone is interested in digging further in the subject, I highly recommend this documentary[1].

[1] War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex) -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=864268000924014458&#...</a>

At least one of the NI authors whose articles I read this morning also writes for War is Boring. Not sure if it's this one and no time to double check, but I think it might be.

> First, what you have just read is a very abbreviated version of the actual plan. In the interests of not turning this story into War And Peace I have left out a lot of detail.

You've written five thousand words thus far...

Apologies for the digression, but this subject matters to me. The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the greatest example of writing that's stunning without being difficult to interpret. For that matter of War & Peace is clear and generally free of embellishment.

I agree with scott_s that the whole article is written more in the style of linkbait than a challenging poem.

I think a better way for him to make the argument is that we should all try and push ourselves a little bit. I share your sentiment. I use enough mental energy during the day that often it's hard to choose something that isn't passive.

There have been a couple times where I've pushed myself to read a great work of literature. Something within the canon. My preference is to read cheap, dime store crime novels from authors like Kendra Elliot. I decided to tackle War and Peace (had I been less ambitious, I could have chosen an easier and shorter Tolstoy novel, or something from mid-20th century). I hacked away at it for months on end, and I will forever be grateful for that. There are things I learned about myself, descriptions of people and places, and ideas about the world that will stay with me till I die. There is an order-of-magnitude difference between the novels I read to relax and ones like War and Peace.

People should absolutely fill their time with the things they find dear and refreshing. This is compatible with the idea that we should try and push ourselves a bit too, if only for our own sake.

I've seen this figure before, and read that they changed firing range practices after the war to make killing more automatic. This was in Gwynne Dyer's "War", and he's normally reliable.

However, the original statistic is apparently from a not so credible source, a study by SLA Marshall in WWII that's not so well regarded. This thread goes into some depth:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/ubb/get_t...

Not sure what the truth of it is.

I agree that paged layout are both cool and terrifying. Scrolled layout are much simpler for the formatter as there always is more space to use. Splitting content into pages, known as pagination, can be hard when there are unbreakable chunks in the content. In most cases you can split tables nicely (if they are real tables and not typographical devices), but images should never be split.

Still, I think it's worth it. A nicely laid out page is a pleasure to read, and I've never heard of only who have scrolled through "War and Peace" -- the act of turning a page seems more graceful. And when you are reading for child on your lap, turning the page to see if there's an interesting drawing of a rabbit becomes an event.

Surely, scrollbars will not go away, but we should be able to support pages one the web, too. Web pages, for real.

There's a great book called War by Sebastian Junger, the author of the perfect storm. It follows soldiers fighting in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan.

I wrote a post quoting some of my favorite sections but the one I remember most is this:

These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most _alive_ - that you can get skydiving - but most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can't.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons. His early music was used in cartoons some time later because it turned out to be an excellent fit, but at the time I believe his stated intention was to 'improve jazz'.

Great music regardless. There's a cool version of War Dance for Wooden Indians with indian dancers on YouTube.

> I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel.

The bit about 'War and Peace' was a joke. Woody Allen didn't really speed read it :)

But even if it wasn't, War and Peace is a great example of a classic most people would be happy to speed read. It's not a relaxing novel like Harry Potter but it's perhaps arguably an important novel to read.

In today's society classic novels like that are often more about absorbing the knowledge rather than enjoying the story, which is people want to speed read... Fast knowledge absorption.

You obviously like Hemingway, you must realise for most people that's odd. Just like you think it's odd a small part of the population might speed read certain novels. It's great that not everyone is the same.

No, 1984 or Animal Farm is not really fiction. It is the personal experience of Orwell when traveling to Spain as anarchist to participate in the civil war and fighting against communism.

The communist faction in Catalunia received orders from Stalin and for anarchist they were even a bigger enemy than Franco .

In fact, the communist ordered the murder of Orwell, along lots of other people. Orwell saved the life because at the time he was nobody important. Orwell was warned and he ran away of the country.

Novels like War and Peace, they are powerful because they are written in times of war.

People like Albert Einstein, watch Genius in Amazon Prime...or "the life of others" they experienced real dystopia.

It is not fictional dystopia. It is reality dystopia.

It is only that their children that are raised in peace have never experience it, and tend to repeat it.

Most wars tend to follow a cycle of 80 years. When there is no people alive that remember the war, they tend to repeat it.

I think it's more like War Machinery Porn Week, really. Never really felt fully comfortable about this stuff myself. But for whatever burred tooth in the cogs of fate got us here, we'd be reading of (and marvelling at) the derring-do of people history has taught us to despise.

Nevertheless, here we are. And here, most importantly, at least from my perspective, I am. And - or perhaps, "and so" - I enjoyed this one.

> perhaps I've just overlooked the greatness

You have. Hugo takes his time because great artists don't tell you, they take your hand and lead you somewhere so that suddenly you open your eyes and you're in a place you never expected to be.

I understand you, of course. The book is longer than War and Peace. It's huge. When he spends the entire first book just on the Bishop, you're forgiven for thinking, "Why?" That's answered immediately, however. The great scene that follows between Valjean and the Bishop feels utterly natural, rather than stilted or artificial if done another way.

The same is true with Fantine. Her story is light when it starts. Hugo spends a lot of time so that you will feel the lightness of her situation so that he can then turn the lights out, and now you're with her in the dark. She's not some loose woman who should have known better; she's you.

He does this again and again. For the entire novel he doesn't tell you anything, he doesn't even take your hand later but simply grabs you by the collar and shows you, immerses you in these characters. It's the greatest novel I've ever read and I would recommend fully reading it to anyone.

It was a wicked quote:

> In his poem “Each June I Made a Promise Sober,” Ogden Nash voiced the common cry of those who work in bookstores or libraries or live otherwise surrounded: so many books, so little time! Always the guilt-inducing pile of unread books, eyeing us like neglected pets. He lists some of the classics he hasn’t read—my own list includes, I blush to say, Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, The Faerie Queen, etc. etc. etc. etc.—and concludes:

“So every summer I truly intend /
My intellectual sloth to end /
And every summer for years and years /
I’ve read Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers.”

Sources: https://www.bookbarnniantic.com/single-post/2014/05/24/74-RE...

Nash, Ogden. "Each June I Made a Promise Sober," The New York Times Book Review (June 7, 1953), 1.

I watched the first half of War Games (1983) with my 6 and 8 year old boys tonight, and they were both totally into it. The movie holds up incredibly well, especially the back-and-forth of Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy choosing targets to attack as the officers in NORAD are running around panicked.

I can perhaps imagine showing Aliens to my sons when they're 11, but it seems overly aggressive to show their friends, without getting explicit agreement from their parents first.

The only takeaway for me is the wondering whether or not the author really thinks you can't read a book a week. I mean, yeah, you have to make time to read the books, but an average length book takes something like 6-8 hours to read, so if you allocate an hour a day (which I maintain is worth doing), you're generally going to be able to comfortably knock out a book a week.

Sure, you're not churning through War & Peace every week, but for regular books, it's really not that hard.

I'm not going to say that Gibson's Idoru is the greatest novel ever, but no quote in War and Peace can describe the pathological number of Americans who support Trump like this quote:

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

What you say here is certainly true. Many stories are oversimplified, and stories are a good way to fool ourselves.

However, I'd like to push back gently on the idea that we should never use narratives.

It is true that _traditional story structures_ don't necessarily reflect the real structure of historical experience/occurence, but they _can_ fit, too. It really depends on the occurence. And more importantly, stories can be infinitely granular and complex (just read _War and Peace_ or _In Search of Lost Time_, for example), complex and granular enough to capture actual historical experience without distortion.

As for people not describing their lives as a mess, that's because a mess has no structure - whereas a journey or a battle has a structure; life does not necessarily have structure, sure, but those people who choose to describe their lives in structured ways do so because they are _giving_ it structure. If someone's life is structured (by them) as a pursuit of some goal or state, where everything that happens either helps that, hinders that, or acts as a side-quest, then they may well describe it as a journey. A fractally complex journey, but a journey nonetheless.

Can anyone help me understand why the writings of great authors, theorists of past are barely legible. More examples like, War and Peace[1], or Lord of the Rings[2]. I can barely comprehend a word, let alone the whole text.

[1]:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Tolstoy_-...

[2]:http://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tolkien-manus...

I found the film of Sir Arthur Harris saying that quote. It was played in the documentary series War by Gwynne Dyer. See the excerpt here:

https://youtu.be/tPnppCelvk0?t=48m56s

The book "War" by Sebastian Junger. I don't know the page but that doesn't matter, it is a good book.James Galbraith - The Predator State maybe a bit. Oh and Andrés Reséndez - A Land So Strange - The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca of course!! Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissinger - Partners in Power (2007), Epic of Gilgamesh, Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene, Niel Strauss - The Game.

That about covers it. It took me about an hour to compose the list, the main point it brings across is a very nuanced understanding of what it is to be human, described by the people that often have experienced the what they write about. since I'm the composer, I think it might help to mention that I am rated near genius (just as a rough measure - I know it has downsides - however in my case I far exceed my actual score due to some other knobs and whistles I came pre-equiped with). You're welcome. Cunt. :P

> So the President would never have to bloody his or her hands

You missed the point. The whole argument is that if POTUS had to kill someone, they wouldn’t make the decision to kill many others. “The winning move is not to play,” as Joshua said in War Games (1983). They wouldn’t actually put the president in the situation, it’s just a sanity check thought experiment. Nukes are expensive posturing- the big stick to hold as you speak softly.

Is that really true? I have often felt that the French and English have given us great Novels too, especially in 18th and 19th century.

War and Peace is great, but perhaps Les Miserables pips it scope and dramatic stakes essential covering the same period of time. Flaubert is also very cinematic. Zola's naturalism is also deeply introspective.

English given us a more comic look at life, from Fielding, to Trollope, and even later in Evelyn Waugh.

I was more comparing to early 20th century works. There seemed to be a period where pages were expensive and authors more often felt the need to get to the point. Novels were considered long if they were more than an inch thick. The Lord of the Rings was considered epic length (it is dwarfed by a Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you count the unfinished works).

When you pick up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 one thing you notice is how thin it is. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example. There are plenty of others.

Now I wonder if that wasn't an indirect response to ponderous tomes like Moby Dick and War and Peace? Maybe the authors who grew up with those books realized that brevity was a virtue and learned to tamp back their natural urges to digress into long rambling and ultimately pointless interludes?

As a matter of fact it should hold especially for novels and fiction. I hate it when I have to read 600 pages to reach the end of a book that could very well be written in 400. Most novels my dad has in his library dating back a few decades were between 250 and 350 pages. Nowadays they’re 50% bigger and the trend keeps going. War and Peace was 1.200 pages long and now the average fiction trilogy is way beyond that.

If we take so few examples, we can easily make the opposite argument. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Bartleby the Scrivener are quite a bit shorter than Gravity's Rainbow or For Whom the Bell Tolls.

War and Peace and Moby Dick are both exceptionally compelling, by the way, and the latter was actually much more appreciated in the early 20th Century than when it was written.

I was surprised by how much war footage and gut-wrenching videos I could find online. More people should be exposed to those documents as a form of shock therapy. It gives weight and meaning to words so effortlessly spoken by our leaders. It might also help young people have a little more empathy for actual individuals, as opposed to abstract demographics.

The article reminds me of War against War!. It's a 1924 anti-war photobook (180 images) designed by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It's a sobering read. http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 [WARNING: 18+ NSFL]

EDIT: I added a few quotes describing the War against War! photobook.

> Outraged by the unprecedented barbarism and massive destruction of the First World War, Ernst Friedrich complied and published a collection of pictures and other visual material which attempted to illustrate not only the tragic human consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the social, political, and economic forces that produced and promoted it. Aimed at an international audience with multi-lingual supporting text and captions, it was one of the first concerted photographic expressions of protest against the barbarism of modern warfare in all its tragic folly.

> Friedrich’s strategy was to present shocking images of the atrocities of war and then juxtapose the official German patriotic and military propaganda and rhetoric of the time with graphic illustrations of what this discourse actually produced.

> The horrific imagery builds gradually, commencing with illustrations of children’s toys and propaganda posters, followed by photographs of the soldier’s march to war, the privilege of the elites orchestrating the violence, the devastated and then forgotten battlefields [...] and the graveyards of the dead.

> The most unbearable pages are in a section called ‘The Face of War’, twenty-four close-ups of military and non-military survivors with huge facial wounds.

> Never before had the people there been subjected to such horrendous images of the savagery and the senseless destruction of the First World War. During WW1, most European governments forbade the publication of war photographs and few images of the war had appeared before the publication of Friedrich’s book.

I think a given person's interest in building a wall is highly correlated with how much of a threat they see Mexican/Central American immigration. If you've ever used the phrase "caravan", then you probably think it's a severe problem that calls for drastic measures to protect America. If you've ever used the phrase "net-migration", you probably think those immigrants are not a threat, to life or economy, and you think that using violence and fortification against them is racist.

From what I understand from reading a lot of stuff (including Sebastian Junger's book War), the barriers were needed because of regular and persistent attacks with bombs and gunfire, and I haven't heard even the most alarmist pro-wall person claim that level of violence from illegal immigrants.

99% Invisible just released an episode about the tunnels used in smuggling drugs from Mexico into the US - https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-tunnel/. Basically, the tunnels cost $1-2M or more but paid off in a matter of weeks. Getting past concrete barriers in Iraq may have been strategically valuable but didn't have a business model.

I would imagine that climbing the barriers puts you in a very undefended position for at least a couple minutes.

[0] Tell Me Something I Don't Know - Trivia show with a twist, hosted by Steven Dubner of Freakonomics fame.

[1] How I built this - Interviews successful entrepreneurs on their background, motivations, challenges etc. in building their businesses.

[2] Revolutions - Podcast on some of the biggest political revolutions in history. I am going through season 2 (American Revolution against the British Empire).

[3] War Stories - "Traces the evolution of warfare through the eyes who lived it". Season 1 focused on armoured warfare (a.k.a. Tanks). Waiting on Season 2.

[4] Science Vs - Researches the fads/opinions (organic food, meditation, ghosts etc.) to figure out if they are based on science.

[0] http://tmsidk.com/
[1] http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
[2] http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/
[3] https://angrystaffofficer.com/war-stories-podcast/
[4] https://gimletmedia.com/science-vs/

Yes, and Pushkin was a francophone - most of Russian noblemen were. As were most writers of the 19th century: if you flip through War and Peace, it is easy to notice that much of the book is written plainly in French.

Hence literary Russian is very heavy with borrowings from French, which became so ingrained into the fabric of the language that native speakers don't even notice.