June Links

What I'm Reading

Author

Riley Haas
July 01, 2025

This is a monthly post in which I share everything serious I’ve been reading for the last month, the podcasts I’ve been listening to and online videos that I’ve watched. I include the books I am reading, even though they are not links, because where else would I tell you about them?

What I’m Reading:

What I’m Listening to:

  • NBA trade deadline and Masai Ujiri firing podcasts:

    • Hello and Welcome: If you want to know why Raptors fans (who were fans before 2015) are so upset about Masai’s firing, listen to this. Also checked out their live CMB reaction and a follow up film “podcast” (video).

    • Locked on Raptors: Masai firing reaction

    • The Lowe Post The Zach Lowe Show: I listen to all his episodes.

    • The Rapcast: Both draft pick instant reactions and the Masai reaction.

    • The Raptors Show: CMB pick reaction.

    • The Bill Simmons Show: Just episodes with Zach. I thought about listening to the draft reaction but I’d much rather listen to their re-draft in 5 years.

  • Behind the Bastards:

  • Canadland Commons:

  • Darknet Diaries:

  • In the Dark: “The Runaway Princesses”: So this is a mini-season in between 2 and 3 that is about a story a read about a few years ago in The New Yorker. But the audio version is pretty compelling and it’s short so I’m listening to it. However, it’s been hard to find the time given all the basketball podcasts.

  • Reply All:

    • “"An Ad for the Worst Day of Your Life"“: This actually has a positive resolution.

    • "The QAnon Code": Back when some people didn’t know what it was.

  • Science Vs.:

    • “Ghosts: The Science of Spooky Encounters”: Apparently this is a partial rebroadcast but I had no memory of the earlier episode so I listened. I have lots of thoughts:

      • Apparently most of the 8% of people who see figures in the room when they are waking up think those are ghosts and not just a trick of their brain. I used to see these - maybe I still do occasionally - and, at least as an adult, it never occurred to me that it wasn’t my brain being weird. Because they go away when I fully wake up!

      • Apparently mold could be causing “haunted houses,” which is really interesting.

      • A woman who believes she lives in a haunted house says “No evidence is ever enough” for us skeptics. Meanwhile, there is literally no evidence of ghosts beyond “witness” claims, which are, of course, extraordinarily unreliable. What evidence of ghosts is not enough for us? There isn’t any.

    • “The Climate Crisis: We’re Solving It?!”: A follow up to a previous episode I shared, interviewing two people involved in climate science and solutions.

    • “Menopause: The Myths and the Madness”: It’s insane how little I know about this. Something that happens to many women monthly for all of human history and society and science are like “well, it’s gross so let’s not learn about it or tell anyone else it happens.”

What I’m Watching:

What I’m Writing:

Stuff about the NBA and the Raptors:

Bonus: Riley’s Abandoned Strategic Bombing Post

I am watching the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary about the Vietnam War and I can’t help be reminded that the use of strategic or tactical bombing to achieve political or social goals is not only an awful thing to do, but it is spectacularly stupid, based on the history.

What are Strategic and Tactical Bombing?

Strategic bombing is the strategy of using aerial bombardment to break a country — to render the enemy of incapable of continuing the war due to the devastation wreaked on their industrial capacity, their transportation networks, their population and overall morale.

Tactical bombing is more precise: going after targets of military value only while ostensibly ignoring non-combatants.

The Use of Strategic and Tactical Bombing

I am not a military historian nor have I ever flown a plane. This is meant as a layperson summary only.

Since the invention of the airplane, any military with planes has attempted to realize the seemingly endless possibilities of planes to defeat an enemy. Though initially just used for reconnaissance, planes were soon used for bombing and shooting down other planes. Shortly thereafter, bombers, those planes tasked with bombing military targets, started being used in combination with each other to take on bigger targets, which was the birth of strategic bombing.

Tactical bombing evolved somewhat differently. Arguably the first bombers were tactical bombers. But sighting bomb drops properly was so difficult in the early age of aviation that tactical bombing was a riskier strategy. However, over the last hundred years, bomb sighting have gotten so sophisticated that it is theoretically possible to drop a bomb into a drainpipe, as the cliché goes. So, as tactical bombing has improved (and as other outside conditions have changed), it is tactical bombing that has replaced strategic as the go-to air strategy in conflicts involving air forces.

Strategic Bombing Through History

Unfortunately this is where I stopped. I believe my process was going to be

  • List out every major strategic bombing campaign and

  • The results of the war for the people running that campaign (did they win? how long did it take?)

But in reviewing this today and seeing that Foreign Affairs article, I realize that this criticism actually applies to tactical bombing on its own, as well.

Mostly, this stuff doesn’t work.

What bombing does instead is:

  • Kills lots of innocent people

  • Makes entire countries hate you for generations

  • (Presumably) causes future terrorism.

So bombing campaigns are ineffective in two ways:

  • They rarely, if ever, achieve their aims

  • They perpetuate the cycle of war and violence in the future.

And then, in addition, they just kill way more people than conventional warfare.