Why I Am No Longer a Democrat

 

Torch carrying Nazis at the Unite the Right Rally

In 2017, torch-carrying neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.” It was open, unapologetic antisemitism. No decoding required.

Protesters in NYC chanting "We support Hamas here."

Recently, protesters have stood outside American synagogues chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and “We support Hamas here.” Different slogans. Different political tribe. Same moral rot.

Which is worse?

Neither. Both.

Both are expressions of political extremism that normalize hostility toward Jews. Both use intimidation. Both test whether the broader political movements around them have the courage to draw lines.

When Charlottesville happened, mainstream conservatives were forced to confront the ugliness on their fringe. Many failed. Some succeeded. But the hatred was unmistakable and widely condemned.

What I have watched in recent months unsettled me more deeply: the hesitation — and in some quarters the open tolerance — within segments of the progressive left when antisemitic rhetoric shows up wrapped in activist language.

If you chant outside a synagogue in America and echo slogans of a terrorist organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, you don’t get to hide behind moral nuance. That’s intimidation. That's hate. Period.

The final break for me wasn’t just about Gaza. It was about selective outrage.

We are told constantly that Gaza is a genocide. That word is used with moral thunder. But where is the sustained outrage over Iran’s repression of its own people? Where is the relentless campus mobilization over Kurdish persecution? Over Boko Haram’s violence? Over the industrial-scale destruction of Ukraine by Russia?

When human-rights language becomes selective — deployed ferociously in one case and cautiously in others — it stops looking universal. It's tribal.

Civilian suffering in Gaza is tragic. So is civilian suffering in Tehran. So is civilian suffering in Kyiv. If you want to invoke genocide, liberation, colonialism, or resistance, then apply those principles consistently.

Instead, in too many progressive spaces, denunciations of Israel have become a loyalty test. In some local Democratic politics, candidates are pressured to declare Israel guilty of genocide or face political exile. That isn’t debate. That’s hate.

And yes — I know the rebuttal. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitism. Of course it isn’t. Governments are not immune from criticism.

But when protests target synagogues instead of embassies, when chants mirror the language of groups committed to Jewish eradication, and when Jewish students are told they must renounce Zionism to feel safe on campus, something has gone very wrong.

That is why I left the Democratic Party.

Not because I drifted right. Not because I have forgotten January 6th. Not because I am blind to extremism on the Republican side.

I left because I refuse to belong to a coalition that cannot decisively confront antisemitism when it appears inside its own ranks.

At the same time, I am not a Republican. The nationalist right has its own flirtations with illiberalism, its own conspiracies, its own moral evasions.

Which leaves me politically homeless.

The greatest threats to global stability today are militant Islamist extremism and Vladimir Putin’s effort to rebuild Russian imperial power. Any movement that clearly and consistently opposes both — without apologies, without selective outrage — would have my loyalty.

Until then, I will stand outside party lines.

I will support Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

I will support the people of Iran fighting a regime that brutalizes them.

I will oppose antisemitism whether it wears a swastika or waves a Hamas flag.

I do not belong to either party.

I belong to consistency in fighting hate.

Musée Marmottan Monet: History, Collection, and Serene Beauty

 Tucked away in Paris's 16th arrondissement, the Musée Marmottan Monet is one of city's quietly beautiful museums. It lacks the crowds and theatricality of the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, but what it offers instead is intimacy—an experience that feels less like visiting a museum than like being welcomed into the private world of Impressionism.

The museum began not as a shrine to Monet, but as the private residence of Paul Marmottan, a late-19th-century historian and collector with a passion for the Napoleonic era. His home housed an exceptional collection of First Empire furniture, paintings, and decorative arts. When Marmottan died in 1932, he bequeathed the house and his collections to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, transforming it into a museum. Over time, however, its identity shifted dramatically—thanks to a series of transformative donations.

The most important of these came from Michel Monet, Claude Monet’s younger son. In 1966, he donated his father’s personal collection to the museum, instantly making the Marmottan the world’s leading repository of Monet’s work. This gift included paintings Monet had kept for himself—works never intended for sale or exhibition. Among them is Impression, soleil levant, the painting that gave Impressionism its name and that now anchors the museum’s identity.

Nowhere is Monet’s presence more deeply felt than on the lower floor, where the late Nymphéas—the water lilies—are displayed. These paintings are immersive rather than declarative. Hung low and spread across walls, they invite prolonged looking rather than quick recognition. Here, Monet’s obsession with light, reflection, and time unfolds in endless variation: lilies dissolving into color, water becoming sky, form hovering at the edge of abstraction. Sitting before them, I felt one senses not spectacle but persistence—the result of decades of seeing and re-seeing the same pond as vision itself aged and changed.

Upstairs, the museum opens into a different but equally compelling chapter of Impressionism through its exceptional holdings of Berthe Morisot. Thanks largely to donations from Morisot’s descendants, the Marmottan houses the most important collection of her work anywhere. These paintings—intimate, luminous, and psychologically acute—offer a corrective to the old narrative that cast Morisot as a “minor” Impressionist. Her portraits and domestic scenes reveal an artist of extraordinary subtlety, capturing the textures of women’s lives with brushwork that is as daring as Monet’s but more inward in tone.

What makes the Musée Marmottan Monet so affecting is precisely this balance. It is not a museum of manifestos or movements, but of sustained attention. Monet’s water lilies reward stillness. Morisot’s paintings reward empathy. 

The Napoleonic rooms remind visitors of the museum’s origins as a private home, grounding the experience in lived space rather than monumental display.

Leaving the Marmottan, I was not overwhelmed. I felt peaceful, immersed in the soft landscapes that Monet and Morisot gave me. It is a museum built for lingering. I sat for a long time amid the water lilies letting myself be transported to Givenchy. 

The Unnecessary Alliance: Barbarossa Unleashed and the Moral Cost of Victory

 

In Barbarossa Unleashed, Craig Luther makes an unsettling argument: the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was doomed not because of heroic Soviet resistance or Allied assistance, but because the German army was structurally and logistically incapable of winning the war it began. Page after page, Luther piles on data—numbers of tanks, calibers of guns, fuel consumption rates, rail gauges, truck shortages, ammunition stocks, winter clothing shortfalls—until a grim picture emerges. The Wehrmacht did not merely underestimate the Soviet Union; it lacked the material capacity to defeat it. Germany invaded too far, too fast, with too little.

Luther is relentless. Rather than focusing on battlefield drama or individual commanders, he dissects the war as an industrial and logistical contest. The best German tanks often outperformed Soviet models tactically, but they broke down at catastrophic rates. The bulk of the 3,500 German tanks in the invasion force were no match for the Soviet T-34 entering the fight at a rate of hundreds per month. 

German supply lines stretched hundreds of miles over incompatible rail systems. Fuel shortages crippled mechanized units long before Soviet resistance did. Winter arrived not as an act of fate but as an entirely foreseeable consequence of German planning failures. The German army, Luther shows, was optimized for short campaigns against weaker opponents—not for a continental war against a state with vast manpower reserves and a deep industrial base.

From this analysis flows Luther’s most provocative conclusion: Germany could not have defeated the Soviet Union, even without Western aid. By December 1941, the campaign had already failed. Moscow had not fallen. Soviet industry had been relocated east of the Urals. German losses in men and matériel were irreplaceable. Whatever the later heroism of Soviet soldiers, the structural imbalance was decisive. Nazi defeat on the Eastern Front was not merely possible—it was inevitable.

That conclusion carries a deeply troubling implication. If Germany was doomed in the East regardless, then the wartime alliance between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union appears not only morally compromised, but strategically unnecessary. The United States and Britain allied themselves with a regime whose ideology, methods, and ambitions were fundamentally hostile to democratic values. Stalin’s Soviet Union was not a temporary partner of convenience that later “went bad.” It was a totalitarian empire before, during, and after the war.

Worse still, the price of that alliance was paid not by Americans or Britons, but by the peoples of Eastern Europe. Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and much of the Balkans were first crushed by Nazi occupation and then absorbed into Soviet domination. Allied concessions—formalized at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam—did not merely recognize military realities; they legitimized the enslavement of entire nations. The Western powers did not simply accept Soviet control; they helped sanctify it.

Defenders of the alliance argue that without Lend-Lease aid and strategic cooperation, the Soviet Union might have collapsed, prolonging the war or allowing Germany to consolidate its gains. Luther’s work challenges that assumption. Germany’s strategy depended on a lightning victory comparable to Poland or France. When that failed in 1941, the German war effort entered a slow-motion collapse. Even without American trucks or British matériel, the structural imbalance remained. The Wehrmacht could not replace its losses. The Red Army could—and did.

If this is true, then the moral calculus of the war changes uncomfortably. The Western Allies may have won the war faster by aiding Stalin—but at the cost of enabling a second empire to impose its will on Europe. The defeat of Nazi Germany was necessary and just. The method by which it was achieved is far harder to defend. One tyranny was destroyed; another was empowered.

This is not an argument for sympathy with Germany, nor a denial of Soviet suffering. It is an argument about choices. History often frames the wartime alliance as unavoidable. Barbarossa Unleashed suggests otherwise. The United States and Britain may have mistaken expediency for necessity, confusing the urgency of victory with the wisdom of alliance. In doing so, they secured peace in the West while abandoning the East.

Luther does not write polemic. He writes accounting—of fuel, steel, men, and vast distances. Yet the moral indictment emerges naturally from the numbers. By showing that Nazi defeat in the East was already baked in by the winter of 1941, Luther forces readers to confront an unsettling possibility: the Cold War may have begun not as an accident of victory, but as the predictable consequence of choices made when victory was already assured.

History rarely offers clean alternatives. But it does demand honesty. Barbarossa Unleashed strips away comforting myths and leaves behind a harder truth: the Allied victory over Nazi Germany came bundled with a second, avoidable tragedy—one whose victims had no seat at the negotiating table and no voice in the alliance that sealed their fate.

Without Allied aid, the Soviet Union would, according to Luther, have defeated the Nazis. But it is very possible they would have stopped at the Russian frontier and sued for a separate peace, much as Russian empire had done in 1917.  How different would the world have been with Poland, the Baltic states, and the Balkan states free from the time World War II ended.  

My heart aches as I read Barbarossa Unleashed wondering if Ukraine could have extracted itself from a weakened Soviet Union and be celebrating decades of democratic peace instead of fighting off Russian invaders.  

Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, advised that alliances should be treated with extreme caution, viewing them primarily as transactional, temporary, and often dangerous, rather than binding or based on friendship. 

His key warnings regarding alliances include:

Alliances are Inherently Fragile: Machiavelli warns that states break alliances based on self-interest. Because human nature is "fickle, false, and cowardly," allies will break their bonds whenever it suits their own advantage.

Avoid Dependence: A prince must never rely on others for their own safety or power. Relying too heavily on allies leads to a loss of sovereignty, where the state is "held" by another, creating a situation where, if the ally fails, you fall with them.

Jealousy and Envy: Even if an alliance is initially successful, allies can become jealous of your success and, driven by envy, may seek to destroy you.

"First Among Equals": If an alliance is necessary, Machiavelli advises that you should always ensure you are the stronger party (i.e., primus inter pares—first among equals) and that the alliance serves your own interests. 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

With reflections on Casey Cep’s introduction and Faulkner’s racial legacy

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like tumbling down a well into someone else’s madness—brilliant, disorienting, and claustrophobic. William Faulkner’s 1929 novel is widely considered a masterwork of literary modernism, and it earns that title with its shattered chronology, fractured voices, and poetic density. Faulkner demands that the reader abandon logic and surrender to rhythm, memory, and emotion. I admire the brilliance of what he accomplished. But as the father of two Black sons, I found reading this book almost unbearable.

My edition included a powerful introduction by New Yorker critic Casey Cep. She writes:

“Faulkner loved Mississippi in the way that only someone who has given his whole life to a place can love it—without irony, without detachment, and without apology. That love gives his novels their power and also their poison.”

That passage stayed with me more than anything in the novel itself. Because Faulkner’s love for Mississippi is everywhere in this book—not just its trees and rivers, but its hierarchies, its violence, its unspoken rules. He does not celebrate racism, but he lives inside it, unchallenged. The Black characters in The Sound and the Fury—Dilsey most of all—are relegated to the edges, mute supports for the crumbling white Compson family. Faulkner offers them no interiority, no freedom, no choice. And yet he mourns the Compsons like a tragic fall from grace.

What grace?

Faulkner once said, “If it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Later, he tried to walk that back, but the damage was done. That loyalty—to a world built on subjugation—makes it impossible for me to embrace him, no matter how intricate his prose or how inventive his narrative structure.

There are moments of undeniable power. Benjy’s disordered narration captures the chaos of loss with brutal immediacy. Quentin’s suicide unspools in a voice haunted by honor and failure. Jason, the bitter misogynist and racist, is Faulkner’s clearest indictment of the postbellum Southern man—mean, empty, desperate. And Dilsey, the Black servant, is portrayed with dignity, even if she is denied agency.

But dignity is not justice.

Reading Faulkner, I could never shake the feeling that I was inside a eulogy for a world I would never want my sons to live in. A world where their safety, their futures, and their very humanity would be conditional—if acknowledged at all.

I’m glad I read The Sound and the Fury. I understand why it is studied and revered. But Faulkner’s genius walks hand in hand with his blind spots. As Casey Cep notes, his love for Mississippi was both his strength and his undoing. For me, that’s too steep a price.

Brilliance, when rooted in a poisoned soil, can still grow thorns.

Twelve Windows into History: A Year of Reading History Books in 2025

 

In 2025, twelve of the fifty books I read were histories. Together they spanned continents, centuries, ideologies, and genres. Some were sweeping narratives of empires and revolutions, others intimate studies of lives, cities, and ideas. The authors ranged from Renaissance philosophers to contemporary journalists. Looking back on this collection now, I’m struck by both its variety and a quiet cohesion: these books are not just about the past, but about how societies contend with power, trauma, and the contested meanings of freedom.

Power and Its Discontents

John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics serves as a perfect starting point. It’s a clear-eyed survey of the evolution of economic thought and the ideological clashes that surround capitalism. Cassidy isn’t polemical; he’s analytical, tracing how thinkers from Keynes to Hayek shaped (and responded to) the 20th-century world. His book provides essential context for understanding how capitalist democracies weather crises, and how criticism from both the left and the right forms an inevitable—sometimes healthy—part of the system.

Cassidy’s exploration finds a natural companion in Civilization and Colossus, both by Niall Ferguson. In Civilization, Ferguson argues that the West’s dominance was no accident: it emerged from what he calls “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Colossus extends the conversation to American power specifically, casting the U.S. as an “empire in denial”—reluctant to assume the burdens of imperial responsibility, yet deeply embedded in global dominance. Taken together, Ferguson’s books present a provocative, often contrarian account of empire and modernization.

This theme—how power is structured, sustained, and eventually strained—runs through many of the books I read. Winston Churchill’s The Great Democracies, the final volume in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, revisits the rise of Britain and America with an unmistakable mid-20th-century tone of civilizational pride. Though his prose is magisterial, the world he writes about—the Anglo-American ascension—is already under siege by the time he sets his pen down.

War, Destruction, and the Edge of Civilization

Where Churchill evokes the glory of democratic power, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction is a quiet but devastating meditation on the moral toll of war. Focused on the Allied bombings of German cities during World War II, Sebald probes the silence in postwar German literature about civilian suffering. His prose, full of melancholic restraint, contrasts sharply with Ferguson’s triumphalism or Churchill’s rhetorical grandeur. If Ferguson describes the machinery of empire, Sebald offers a view from the ruins.

Sebastian Junger’s War and A Death in Belmont continue this investigation into conflict, though from very different vantage points. War is immersive and immediate—a journalistic account of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings of the post-9/11 era. Junger, embedded with the troops, captures not only combat but the paradoxical camaraderie that war breeds. In A Death in Belmont, he shifts to the domestic front, using a murder case from the 1960s to explore race, violence, and the lingering legacy of fear during the Boston Strangler era. The unspoken thread linking these two books is trauma—how it is felt, interpreted, and often mythologized.

William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid is another account of war—this time from the shadows. The biography of William Stephenson, the Canadian spymaster who ran British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere during WWII, reads like a spy thriller. But it also documents how information, disinformation, and covert alliances shaped the outcome of global war. It’s hard to read this without seeing the roots of today’s surveillance state.

Democracy, Dissent, and Collapse

Two books on this list—Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy—couldn’t be more different in tone, yet both are preoccupied with the fragility of republics. Murray critiques contemporary Western democracies for what he sees as cultural self-sabotage. His essays burn with polemical urgency, questioning whether liberal societies can survive their own internal contradictions. Machiavelli, writing five centuries earlier, is colder, more analytical. His Discourses praise the Roman Republic for its civic virtues, while warning that corruption, inertia, and factionalism inevitably bring down even the best regimes.

If Machiavelli diagnoses decline as a structural reality, Murray sees it as a moral collapse. Together, they ask hard questions about whether democracy is a stable end state or a fragile experiment that must be constantly renewed—and defended.

Lives in Context: Biography and Human Resilience

Several books focus less on systems and more on individuals. Dava Sobel’s The Elements of Marie Curie offers a lucid, engaging portrait of the pioneering scientist. What makes this book memorable isn’t just the science—it’s the clarity with which Sobel evokes Curie’s grit, intelligence, and solitude. In a world dominated by male institutions and fragile egos, Curie carved out a space not only to survive, but to transform science itself.

Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness is similarly intimate, though more philosophical. Drawing on American legal and political history, Rosen traces how the idea of “happiness” evolved from classical virtue to individual fulfillment. His book acts as a bridge between past and present, asking how the Founders’ conception of liberty and purpose translates into modern life.

Finally, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem and Titans of History offer sweeping panoramas of world history. Jerusalem is particularly compelling—a biography of a city that has witnessed more religious passion, conquest, and tragedy than perhaps any other. Montefiore manages to narrate this without reducing it to caricature. In Titans of History, he zooms out even further, offering biographical sketches of major historical figures from Hammurabi to Mandela. While more breezy and episodic, it reminds the reader that history is always the product of human choices—often flawed, sometimes visionary.

A Common Thread: Civilization Under Pressure

So what ties these twelve books together? At first glance, they range widely in subject and style. But read as a group, they seem to revolve around a core tension: how civilizations are built, how they are sustained, and how they fracture—through war, ideology, apathy, or internal contradiction.

Whether the topic is Machiavelli’s Ancient Rome, Churchill’s Britain, Sebald’s Germany, or Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the recurring question is this: how do societies balance power with principle, stability with freedom, and tradition with change? These books don’t offer easy answers. Some, like Ferguson or Murray, offer prescriptive warnings. Others, like Sebald or Junger, linger in the ambiguity and pain of aftermath.

Yet taken together, they offer something else: perspective. They show that history isn’t a neat progression or a morality tale. It’s a living, breathing record of decisions made under pressure. And reading these works in 2025—a time of rising authoritarianism, cultural anxiety, and digital fragmentation—I was reminded that history’s greatest lesson may be its refusal to simplify.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: A Great and Complex Founder of America

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is one of those rare biographies that does two things at once: it resurrects a historical figure in full human complexity, and it makes a persuasive case that this figure mattered more than most readers were ever taught. Hamilton emerges not merely as a Founding Father, but as the engine of the early American republic—brilliant, abrasive, indispensable, and ultimately self-destructive.

Chernow begins with Hamilton’s astonishing rise from obscurity. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, orphaned young, and educated through sheer force of talent, Hamilton arrives in North America already sharpened by hardship. Chernow is unsparing here—Hamilton’s hunger for order, status, and permanence is rooted in chaos. This psychological grounding matters, because it explains everything that follows. Hamilton’s obsession with structure, credit, and authority was not abstract theory; it was survival instinct elevated into national policy.

Hamilton’s Revolutionary War service is one of the book’s great strengths. As aide-de-camp to George Washington, Hamilton becomes indispensable—drafting correspondence, managing logistics, and acting as Washington’s intellectual lieutenant. Chernow makes clear that Washington recognized Hamilton’s genius early and trusted him deeply, even when he found him exasperating. The relationship is portrayed as mutually formative: Washington gave Hamilton legitimacy and restraint; Hamilton gave Washington a mind capable of thinking several steps ahead. Without Hamilton, Washington’s presidency would have been weaker. Without Washington, Hamilton would likely have burned himself out even faster.

The heart of the book—and the reason it has had such a long cultural afterlife—is Chernow’s treatment of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. Here, Hamilton is not just a theorist but a relentless operator. His financial program—assumption of state debts, establishment of public credit, the Bank of the United States—was radical, controversial, and foundational. Chernow argues convincingly that Hamilton understood something his rivals did not: nations survive on confidence, not purity. Jefferson wanted a virtuous agrarian republic; Hamilton wanted a functioning one. History has largely sided with Hamilton, and Chernow does not pretend otherwise.

But this is not hagiography. Chernow is clear-eyed about Hamilton’s flaws, especially his inability to stop fighting. The political infighting with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is presented as both ideological and personal. Hamilton’s pen was lethal, and he used it constantly. He could not resist humiliating opponents or escalating conflicts, even when discretion would have served him better. His feud with John Adams is particularly telling: Hamilton undermined a president from his own party out of intellectual contempt and strategic impatience, a move that all but guaranteed his political isolation.

The most devastating section of the book is Hamilton’s self-immolation in the Reynolds affair. Chernow treats this episode not as a scandal for its own sake but as a study in catastrophic judgment. Hamilton, obsessed with his reputation for probity, chose public confession over political survival. The result was moral clarity paired with total ruin. It is one of the strangest episodes in American political history, and Chernow narrates it with restraint and disbelief in equal measure.

The book’s final act—the rivalry with Aaron Burr and the fatal duel—is tragic precisely because it feels avoidable. Chernow resists easy moralizing. Burr is not a cartoon villain, and Hamilton is not a martyr. Instead, Chernow shows two men trapped by honor culture, pride, and accumulated grievance. Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot, so to speak, reads less like noble sacrifice and more like exhaustion. He had been fighting all his life; the fight finally killed him.

What makes Chernow’s biography exceptional is its balance. Hamilton is neither sanitized nor dismissed. He is brilliant and reckless, visionary and intolerable. Chernow’s prose is clear, propulsive, and confident without being flashy. At nearly 800 pages, the book earns its length; there is very little padding. Every feud, memo, and policy debate builds toward a coherent portrait of a man who helped create the United States and then made himself impossible within it.

If there is a final judgment here, it is this: Hamilton was the Founder most attuned to modernity, and therefore the least comfortable in his own time. Chernow makes that case decisively. You finish the book convinced not only that Hamilton mattered, but that the country still runs—financially, bureaucratically, institutionally—on tracks he laid down. Loving this book is not surprising. It is serious history written with narrative force, and it leaves you thinking hard about power, ambition, and the costs of being right too soon.

In this year the nation Hamilton helped to found celebrates 250 years since The Declaration of Independence was published on July 4, 1776. I recently re-read On Revolution by Hannah Arendt in which she describes why most revolutions aspire to freedom and end in tyranny. Central to the book is her explanation of why the American Revolution succeeded when nearly all others failed. 

Will America continue into a more perfect union or after a quarter-millennium fall into the tyranny that is the fate of every other revolution?  This year 2026 will say a lot about America.

  

Breath by James Nestor: We All Breathe Badly!!

As a book, Breath works because it sneaks physiology in through storytelling. Nestor uses explorers, monks, athletes, dentists, and oddball experiments to make one simple point: "how we breathe now is not how humans evolved to breathe — and it’s costing us health." He sometimes leans too hard on anecdote, but he never loses sight of the central truth: breathing is a trainable biological system, not an automatic afterthought.

What makes the book especially effective is that it doesn’t treat breathing as wellness fluff. It ties breath to:

* facial structure and crooked teeth

* sleep apnea and snoring

* anxiety and panic

* endurance and recovery

* inflammation and nitric oxide

That’s a surprisingly wide map for something most people do 20,000 times a day without thinking.

Where Nestor is strongest is in showing that "over-breathing" — fast, shallow, mouth-based breathing — is now the default in industrial societies, and that this alone can drive fatigue, nervousness, poor sleep, and reduced oxygen delivery. You don’t need to buy every historical claim he makes to see that the modern chest-breathing, mouth-open pattern is maladaptive.

The practical side of the book is what gives it staying power. You can read it as a story, but you walk away with concrete, testable habits: nasal breathing, slower exhalations, tolerance of mild air hunger, and attention to nighttime breathing. None of that is mystical. It’s nervous-system regulation and gas chemistry.

Breath doesn’t promise immortality. It promises something more believable: that "if you stop fighting your own respiratory system, a lot of things quietly get better." That’s a rare combination of entertainment and usefulness. Nestor made something most of us never think about — breathing — feel like a lost technology.

It’s not a medical textbook. It’s part history, part journalism, part self-experiment. Some of its claims get overstated, but the "core" is solid: how you breathe affects your nervous system, sleep, blood pressure, endurance, anxiety, and even how your face and jaw develop.

And most modern people breathe badly.

What he gets right:

1. Nasal breathing matters

Breathing through your nose:

* warms and filters air

* produces nitric oxide (which improves oxygen uptake)

* keeps airways open

* reduces snoring and apnea

Mouth breathing, especially at night, is linked to:

* poor sleep

* dry mouth and cavities

* higher blood pressure

* anxiety

* worse endurance

If you do "one" thing from that book, it should be: sleep with your mouth closed.

That’s why he pushes mouth tape — weird but effective.  I use it now.

2. Slow breathing calms your nervous system

Long exhales activate the vagus nerve. That shifts your body from “fight or flight” into “rest and repair.” It’s not mystical — it’s physiology.

A simple rule:

* Inhale ~4 seconds

* Exhale ~6–8 seconds

Do that for 5 minutes and your heart rate, cortisol, and blood pressure drop. 

3. Overbreathing is the modern disease

Most of us breathe too much, too fast, and too shallow. That:

* lowers CO₂

* reduces oxygen delivery to tissues

* increases anxiety and fatigue

The irony: breathing less makes you feel better.

That’s why techniques like Buteyko and “box breathing” work.

4. CO₂ tolerance = endurance and calm

Your urge to breathe is driven by CO₂, not oxygen. Training yourself to tolerate higher CO₂:

* improves athletic performance

* reduces panic

* increases breath efficiency

Simple test: how long you can hold your breath after a normal exhale. Under 20 seconds = poor. Over 40 = very good.

5. You don’t need all the crazy stuff

Some of the book’s “ancient breathing secrets” are romanticized. You don’t need Tibetan monks or Wim Hof ice baths to get the benefit.

Good things:

* nasal breathing

* slower breathing

* deeper diaphragm movement

* better sleep breathing

Breath  is a fun read with a lot of good information.