Free Republic

Researchers at Aalto University, together with international partners, have developed the most accurate model yet of how humans read. The new model uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI used in robotics, to explain -- and recreate -- the choices readers make as they move through text... Earlier models learned from large data sets pairing text snippets with eye-tracking data, then mimicked human behavior, but they lacked true understanding of the content and didn't generalize well across languages or contexts, Oulasvirta explains. In contrast, the new model follows the psychological mechanisms readers use to direct attention, revealing how understanding is...

The Naked Communist by W. Cleon SkousenI have spent the last several months working intensively on completing the dictation of an audiobook that is available as a free down on the reputable site Librivox.org, which is partnered with Gutenberg.org, a global repository for books that are not covered under international copyright laws (whether those books were printed before copyright law as we know it existed, or if a sufficient time has passed, and the copyright has expired.) This important and relevant work may be downloaded at this link: LINK TO: “The Naked Communist” It was first published in 1958 by...

The ruling does change the fundamental nature of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity. ============================================================== AI companies are buying old books, scanning them, then destroying them. Anthropic has been buying the books to feed the machine with human knowledge and ideas written down before the AI era, so only books with publication dates before 2022 will do. Once they have the books, they rip off the spines, feed them through a scanner, and then on into the gaping maw...

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Former First Lady Jill Biden has found herself in a pickle after her recent book, View from the East Wing, was #1 on The New York Times bestseller list upon release. But weeks after its release, the book didn't simply fall in the rankings, but completely disappeared from the list itself. The sudden drop caught the eyes of the critics, which fueled speculation that bulk purchases may have boosted its debut. The theory motivated the netizens to mock her, calling the book a scam. Last month, Jill Biden’s book View from the East Wing debuted on The New York Times...

For over a century, post-modern critics have insisted that literature must be liberated from the stifling realm of moralism in order to become truly authentic in its artistic approach. The various platitudes in this vein have been prolific: “Morality ruins creativity,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or the proposition of “art for art’s sake,” which all seem less as genuine insights into the faculty of human creativity and more as rhetorical shields against difficult questions relating to the nature of truth. In our own contemporary age, the argument has at least partially mutated, but it has never...

What if one of the Constitution’s most important safeguards has been quietly ignored, not through open defiance, but through misunderstanding, neglect, and the slow erosion of historical memory? For more than eighteen years, independent researcher Tracy Fair (writing under the pen name Lexi Fehr) has investigated the historical, legal, and constitutional foundations of presidential eligibility and the true meaning of the Constitution’s “natural-born Citizen” requirement. We the Sheeple takes readers back to the intellectual roots of the American Republic, exploring how the Founding Fathers relied on Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations to define citizenship, domicile, and political allegiance....

n his many articles for Tablet and other outlets, Jacob Siegel, a journalist and war veteran, has focused on how rulers and elites use digital tools to calibrate information and control people. His new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, traces the evolution—from 9/11 to the advent of AI—of a mammoth alliance between government and Big Tech that subverts our constitutional republic and enslaves Americans. According to Siegel, the foundation of the information state is a “whole-of-society” approach to governance that aligns “the most powerful institutions behind the dictates of the state.” Tech platforms, NGOs,...

Audiobook industry sales revenue grew 9% in 2025, hitting $2.43 billion, according to the Audio Publishers Association's annual sales survey, conducted by Toluna. Publishers reported more than 750,000 active titles last year, a 43% increase from 2024. General fiction accounted for the largest share of audiobook revenue at 27%, with science fiction/fantasy, romance, and mysteries/thrillers/suspense rounding out the top genres. The fastest-growing genres in 2025 were humor, general fiction, and children's, including YA. ... AI-narrated audiobooks remain a marginal interest, representing just 0.03% of sales in 2025. Curiosity about AI-narrated books also appears to be in decline, as those expressing...

“Hardly anybody is still alive today who has personal memories of the Hollywood blacklist of the immediate post-World War II period, let alone of the rabid Communist agitation that took place in the film colony before and during the war,” notes Bruce Bawer in his review of my book, Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry, adding “don’t expect this terrific, truth-telling tome to be made into a major-studio movie anytime soon.” Bawer is right, but as they say in Hollywood there’s more to the story.

You feel it, most days in Santa Cruz, some more than others, a kind of vibe, a kind of magic in the air, like that feeling just as the fog is burning off and the chill salt air comes alive with an extra tingling energy in the fresh late-morning sunlight. If you take THAT feeling, that giddy energy suffused with possibility, and try to find the living human embodiment, the avatar if you will of Santa Cruz creative energy at its potent and playful best, that avatar has a name, and it’s Wallace Baine. Talk about energy. The man spent...

In “Communion,” Vance weaves his faith journey, beginning in his childhood, through his recent life changes and with his own policy and cultural views... His account of his faith journey, at times, seems to focus on his return to Christianity more broadly, with Catholicism presented as the variety he chose. “I’m not a particularly sectarian person, and this is not a particularly sectarian book,” Vance said in the book’s opening chapter. Although he said he became Catholic for “what I believe are good reasons,” he credited his Protestant spiritual foundation as a key factor in his journey back to God...

John Staddon, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, brings unusual precision to a subject that has long been governed more by social convention than by rigorous inquiry in his work, Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation (Academica Press, 2026). His background in experimental psychology and quantitative methods equips him to examine the empirical literature on group differences with a dispassion rarely found in this field. The result is a book that challenges, on both philosophical and empirical grounds, the dominant egalitarian framework shaping contemporary debates on race and inequality.That framework rests substantially on John Rawls, whose...

We updated this list as part of the the Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge! Join the challenge now! Very short novels have a special magic—not least because, not to be morbid, you can simply read more of them before the inevitable heat death of the planet (or similar). I previously wrote about great contemporary novels under 200 pages, but now it is time to turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.” A few notes: Because the “contemporary” list surveyed novels...

A prose tract or polemic by John Milton, published November 23, 1644, at the height of the English Civil War... Milton, though a supporter of the Parliament, argued forcefully against the Licensing Order of 1643, noting that such censorship had never been a part of classical Greek and Roman society. The tract is full of biblical and classical references which Milton uses to strengthen his argument. The issue was personal for Milton as he had suffered censorship himself in his efforts to publish several tracts defending divorce (a radical stance at the time and one which met with no favor...

New audiobook release: Mourt's Relation; or Journal of the plantation at Plymouth, by Edward Winslow Because American culture is important to celebrate and remember. In this instance, the first Thanksgiving. Mourt's Relation; or Journal of the plantation at PlymouthMourt's Relation is an account of the first year of the Plymouth Colony who arrived in Massachusetts, and is one of two books used as primary sources about the first Thanksgiving. The other is William Bradford's "Of Plimoth Plantation". - Summary by progressingamerica"Of Plimoth Plantation": Bradford's History of the Plymouth Settlement, 1608-1650

As a professor of the classical liberal arts, I began reading Bob Pepperman Taylor’s new book, Liberal Education and Democracy, with interest. Taylor, who teaches law and politics at the University of Vermont, surveys a wide range of thought leaders, describing their foundational ideas in detail. One notable example is Taylor’s paraphrasing of Michael Oakeshott: “Liberal learning is learning to understand and perhaps even participate in a conversation that transcends a particular moment, a conversation that reflects on the human condition from a wide variety of times, places, and perspectives.” That’s well said. Taylor’s thesis begins with liberal-arts authors and...

There are things that I am definitely aware of even though I don't often or ever bring them up. One of those things is the de-humanization campaign that progressives have engaged in (in varying degrees) ever since our first progressive President, Theodore Roosevelt, and it puts us in the position to ask the question. How can we re-humanize our Founding Fathers? What tools can we rely on or use or else, what tools can we build to have an effect against the problem? First, let's recognize something. There is a lot of power in the spoken word. It is very,...

Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke was originally published in 1689. Its initial publication was in Latin, though it was immediately translated into other languages. In this "letter" addressed to an anonymous "Honored Sir" (actually Locke's close friend Philip von Limborch, who published it without Locke's knowledge) Locke argues for a new understanding of the relationship between religion and government. One of the founders of Empiricism, Locke develops a philosophy that is contrary to the one expressed by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, primarily because it supports toleration for various Christian denominations. Locke's work appeared amidst a fear that Catholicism might...

DEAD MEN'S DUST. You don't buy poetry. (Neither do I.) Why? You cannot afford it? Bosh! you spend Editions de luxe on a thirsty friend. You can buy any one of the poetry bunch For the price you pay for a business lunch. Don't you suppose that a hungry head, Like an empty stomach, ought to be fed? Looking into myself, I find this true, So I hardly can figure it false in you.