The Wild Edge

  Photo by  Patrick Robert Doyle  on  Unsplash Reading academic journal articles and books is a hobby that most of the population considers questionable, if not actively insane, but I readily admit that I really do enjoy it. I mean, I'm the kind of nerdy that wrote and published a research paper around a full-time job; for a few months most of my free time was spent doing nothing but reading sources. But there is a line separating enjoyable academic writing from aggravating, a necessary amount of jargon from multisyllabic self-aggrandizement, and many writers seem to rush across it with abandon. Case in point: I'm currently reading a book on irregular warfare by nonstate actors. The premise is fascinating, the thesis sound, and the case studies both interesting and supportive of the author's premise. Yet in two months I've barely picked it up, and I'm still only in chapter one. Why? Because the author has gone out of their way to make the text as dense, difficult, a...