The man who would be king
by Rudyard Kipling · first published 1898
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…Republic (Plato) Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke) Ringworld (Niven) The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison) The Hobbit (Tolkien) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) The Odyssey (Homer) The Man who Would be King (Kipling) The Pearl (Steinbeck) Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) A Scanner Darkly (Dick) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams) Dracula (Stoker)…
on “Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?” ↗…that sparked the announcement, I was excited to hear about it. I became interested in Afghanistan in 2001, along with everybody else. Before that, my only exposure to the country was my reading of "The Man who would be King", by Kipling. Everything that I've heard about the Afghanistan economy has had to do with opium and heroin. To have it announced that there was a very real possibility that there may be a way to grow…
on “No, The U.S. Didn’t Just ‘Discover’ a $1 Trillion Afghan Motherlode” ↗…me care what anybody else makes. So far as I am concerned, it's simply not important. I'd love to talk to somebody overpaid by three orders of magnitude but only to find out how it happened, in a "The Man Who Would Be King" sort of way. The world is far too arbitrary and random for anything like that to have too much meaning. Indeed, someone in the office next to me in a dying company went on to harvest quite a bit of…
on “A Company Copes With Backlash Against the Raise That Roared” ↗…when it was written. It was about the Philippine-American war. 2 days after publication in America, it was read in the Senate to argue for the US to end the war. One of his more famous stories, The Man Who Would Be King is about two white men who manage to convince an Afghani tribe they're gods. It becomes undone, when one tries to marry one of the women, she attacks him drawing blood, and the tribe's priest declares…
on “ProtonMail pays $6k ransom, gets taken out by DDoS anyway” ↗