world war II

We might rarely get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, but logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a different kind of flurry. The one where our friends, both close and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening data dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped only represents the culmination of our listening habits on a single music platform, but every shared Wrapped post seems to come with some self-evident clarity about our personal identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and provides us the opportunity to see ourselves deconstructed via our musical inclinations. By most accounts, it’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you’ve got us pegged.

For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a year to get the Wrapped treatment. We’re still processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the federal administration’s ceaseless attacks on California. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to take that temperature check.

But listening to music can be a passive experience — one enjoyed in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a car. To really learn about ourselves and how our year has been, we might want to turn elsewhere, to a habit with more intention. I’m talking, of course, about reading.

While there’s apps for tracking our reading habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I’m devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that’s helped me churn through books faster and with more intent than ever before: the book stack.

Starting every January, whenever I finish a book, I place it sidelong atop a shelf in the corner of my living room. With each new book I conquer, the stack gets taller, eventually becoming a full tower by December. A book stack, low on analytics, can’t tell me the total number of pages I’ve read, or how many minutes I spent reading, but it’s a tangible monument to my year’s reading progress. Its mere presence prods me into reading more. It calls me a chump when the stack is low and cheers for me when it reaches toward the ceiling.

My first book stack started in 2020, a wry joke to demonstrate the extra time we could all devote to reading books during a pandemic. The joke barely worked. I ended up reading just 19 books that year, only a few more than I had the previous year (though it could’ve been more if one of those books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).

Still, the book stack model gamified my reading habits and now I give books time I didn’t feel I had before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters and the DMV. If ever I have to wait around somewhere, you better believe I’ll come armed with a book.

The pandemic may have waned, but my book stack count continued to climb, peaking in 2023 after reading 52 books, averaging one per week.

But, hey, it’s about quality, not quantity, right? If there’s a quality to be gleaned from my 2025 book stack, you’d see that I’ve been looking for hot tips on how to survive times of extreme authoritarian rule. Some were more insightful than others.

In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men,” a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who brought down the president of the United States by repeatedly bothering people at their homes for information. Fascinating as it is, it also feels like a relic from a time when doing something like that could still work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” tells the story of a Jewish New Jersey family in an alternate timeline where an “America First” Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the threat of Hitler in Europe and giving way to a rise in antisemitism at home. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that scenario could have played out, but the horrors are resolved by something of a deus ex machina rather than by any one character’s bold, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” about the converging stories of a German boy enlisted in Hitler’s army and a blind French girl during World War II. Sadly, this novel reads less like a book about living under fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to become source material for Steven Spielberg’s next movie.

Each of these titles have merit, but this year’s book stack had two gems for anyone who wants to know how best to resist tyranny. Pointedly, there was Timothy Snyder’s tidy pocket-sized handbook “On Tyranny” filled with 20 short but fortifying chapters of practical wisdom like “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions” and “Believe in truth.” Each is applicable to our current moment, informed by historical precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the past century. This book — well over a million copies sold — came out at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, so I came a little late to this party. The fact that Snyder himself moved to Canada this year should give us all pause.

Practical advice can also be found in great fiction, and on that front I found comfort and instruction in Hans Fallada’s “Alone in Berlin” (a.k.a. “Every Man Dies Alone”), based on the true story of a married couple living in Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards urging resistance against the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public places for random people to discover. Under their extreme political conditions, this small act of civil disobedience means risking death. Not only is the story riveting, there’s also great pleasure in seeing the mayhem each postcard causes and how effective they are at exposing the subordinate class of fascists for what they truly are: nitwits.

Also notable in “Alone in Berlin” is the point of view of both the author and his fictional heroes. Neither a target of persecution, nor a military adversary, Fallada nevertheless endured the amplified hardships of living under Nazi rule during World War II. His trauma was still fresh while writing this book and it’s evident in his prose. He survived just long enough to write and publish “Alone in Berlin” before dying in 1947 at the age of 53.

If I’ve learned anything from these books, it’s that it’s in our best interest to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on fear and expect it. A citizenry without fear is much harder to control. That’s why we need to raise our voices against provocations of our rights, always push back, declare wrong things to be wrong, get in the way, annoy the opposition, and allow yourself to devote time to do things for your own enjoyment.

And in that spirit, my book stack also includes a fair amount of palate cleansers in the mix: Jena Friedman’s “Not Funny,” short stories by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose main character is named after Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Though it’s hard to read Vonnegut without stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of wisdom, like this one from his novel “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior.”

Zachary Bernstein is a writer, editor and songwriter. He’s working on his debut novel about a poorly managed remote island society.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has announced a bold plan for the Navy to build a new, large warship that he is calling a “battleship” as part of a larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet.”

“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump claimed during the announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

According to Trump, the ship, the first of which will be named the USS Defiant, will be longer and larger than the World War II-era Iowa-class battleships and will be armed with hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, rail guns, and high-powered lasers — all technologies that are in various stages of development by the Navy.

The announcement comes just a month after the Navy scrapped its plans to build a new, small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns, deciding instead to go with a modified version of a Coast Guard cutter that was being produced until recently. The sea service has also failed to build its other newly designed ships, like the new Ford-class aircraft carrier and Columbia-class submarines, on time and on budget.

Meanwhile, the Navy has struggled to field some of the technologies Trump says will be aboard the new ship.

The Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars and more than 15 years trying to field a railgun aboard a ship before finally abandoning the effort in 2021.

Laser technology has seen more success in making its way onto Navy ships in recent years, but its employment is still limited. One system that is designed to blind or disable drone sensors is now aboard eight destroyers after spending eight years in development.

Developing nuclear cruise missile capabilities or deploying them on ships may also violate non-proliferation treaties that the U.S. has signed with Russia.

A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing plans, told the Associated Press that design efforts are now underway for the new ship and construction is planned to begin in the early 2030s.

Both Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan spoke about the new Trump-class warship as a spiritual successor to the battleships of the 20th century, but historically that term has referred to a very specific type of ship — a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore.

This type of ship was at the height of prominence during World War II, and the largest of the U.S. battleships, the Iowa-class, were roughly 60,000 tons. But after World War II, the battleship’s role in modern fleets diminished rapidly in favor of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles. The U.S. Navy did modernize four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s by adding cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, along with modern radars, but by the 1990s all four were decommissioned.

According to a newly created website for the “Golden Fleet,” this new “guided missile battleship” is set to be roughly the same size as Iowa-class battleships but only weigh about half as much, around 35,000 tons, and have far smaller crews — between 650 and 850 sailors.

Its primary weapons will also be missiles, not large naval guns.

Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with a view toward keeping older technology instead of modernizing.

During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for the return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.

He has also complained to Phelan about the look of the Navy’s destroyers and decried Navy ships being covered in rust.

Phelan told senators at his confirmation hearing that Trump “has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one (o’clock) in the morning” about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it.”

On a visit to a shipyard that was working on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate in 2020, Trump said he personally changed the design of the ship.

“I looked at it, I said, ‘That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful,’” Trump said at the time.

He said Monday he will have a direct role in designing this new warship as well.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

Phelan said the new USS Defiant “will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port.”

Toropin and Madhani write for the Associated Press.