Will's Good Idea for the Week of 7/23/23

Well, thank you Professor Reynolds, for the link to our piece yesterday, When PHDs Attack. We saw a traffic surge, a subscription surge, and even some paid subscribers. Thanks guys.

With the new traffic we feel the need to reintroduce ourselves. Our Substack is really a backup to our eight year old blog, Stroock’s Books. It’s a whacky place, stupid by design, and written like Twitter never happened. The blog has an imaginary Liverpudlian editor who won’t stop calling us ‘knobhead’ and whom we once fired over me too concerns. Stroock’s Books started out strong but over the years its audience has become….more selective.

Oh, we write ‘we’ so we don’t write a lot of ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’ like a 40ish, urbanite female English lit major with a pinot problem. Got that from the great James Taranto.

We’ve 20 novels in print. Do you like World War Three alternate history? Try the World War 1990 series, eight books (almost 9) and counting. How about all out nuclear war? Is alien invasion your thing? Or perhaps you’d like to see Israel open up a can of whoop-ass on Iran and Hezbollah.

We’ve written for current publications like 1945. We’ve 86 history articles in print, a dozen of which can be seen here. For a couple of years we colluded with Russia! (read that with an uptalked Tucker Carlson voice). We wrote our last piece for the Ruskis a few weeks before the war. ‘Maxim,’ we said to our editor, ‘If you guys haul-off and invade Ukraine we can’t write for you anymore.’ The story of our Russian collusion may be read here.

Moving on....

A fine day of cool sunny Berkshire weather here in the Stroock Northern Strategic Direction. The temp never rose above 80. It was actually too cold to really swim so we contended ourselves with the semi-ceremonial evening lake cruise. We've been enjoying a POSH Hoffman Weiss each day at 5 before dinner. 

When we return to New Jersey the girls are (of course) planning to see Barbie. Is it woke? Seems so. Oh well. Sorry, reader(s), you don't win by saying, 'No! Don't do that!' Haven't you people ever scene Footloose? Do you even Gen-X?

Sticking with film, a dear friend had this to say about Oppenheimer, 'It's a loaded cast for one, and I thought the dynamic of him making a name for himself as an academic in pre-war Europe as a Jew and also a communist sympathizer, while also being indispensable to the development of the atomic bomb, to be fascinating.'

Sticking with Oppenheimer, we flew off the handle yesterday on Twitter, 'Since this anti-bomb idiocy is starting, 100 percent comfortable with the atomic bombing of #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki. #Japan was offered a chance to surrender and refused. Japan fucked around, Japan found out. God bless President Truman.' My grandfather was going ashore with the first wave, Saving Private Ryan style. So seriously, fuck off. 

Will's Good Idea for the Week of 7/23/23. Since we're up to our neck in Soviet VDV units and info, maybe we should segue to writing World War 1990: Afghansy. Remember that one? A grand muj offensive where the Ruskis are more or less the guys you're rooting for. There'd be plenty of CIA running around, and lots of Australian special forces. We must dwell on this.