Exactly. He fooled you. It takes a remarkable amount of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that his examples aren't exactly the same books coming out now. "One Dimensional Man" is the exact same sort of book as "Guns, Germs and Steel." "The Lonely Crowd" is "You Are Not A Gadget" 50 years ago. "The End of Ideology" is the exact same sort of book as "The End of Food" or "Eaarth." He's attempting to say "books used to be cool, man, but now, like, publishers are all like laaame and stuff." He's a liar and a failure. Lorenz's "On Aggression" can be summed up in one sentence: "People behave a lot like animals, let us study the ways." It's a "big idea" book. So, for that matter, was Darwin's "On The Origin of the Species." Or, fuck that, Galileo's "Siderius Nuncius." "Big idea" books are nothing new - they are works that have a point. This is not intellectually dishonest. It's intellectually rigorous. Saying that somehow "Guns, Germs and Steel" goes "on and on about one big idea" is to completely miss the point of "Guns, Germs and Steel." Yali's question was "how come white folks have so much cargo, and New Guinians have so little?" The flip answer is "guns, germs and steel" but the real answer is "because civilization is a complex and fragile beast that takes many forms, here let me spend 480 pages exploring the reasons." Pretending that this is "one idea" is ridiculous. Further, pretending that it's somehow dishonest to come up with a few theories about Wikipedia based on studying it for six months, rather than acknowledging that it's bloody dishonest to write a book proposal that you're nowhere near ready to work on, is bloody craven.