Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
From F. Scott Fitzgerald—famous author of The Great Gatsby—comes this letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald. Offering a hint of his parenting, the letter from August 1933 concludes with a list of things to worry about and things …
Michel de Montaigne, one of the most erudite humanists of the 16th century, died on September 13th in 1592. [B]orn in 1533 into the minor nobility of his family’s estate near Bordeaux. … His father, a man of ideas, entrusted his early …
Five years ago today David Foster Wallace committed suicide. His May 21st, 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon college, This is Water, is one of greatest of all time. Offering a simple explanation of the value of …
Michael Mauboussin is the author of numerous books, including More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, and The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck …
Freeman Dyson reviews the new biography of Oppenheimer by Ray Monk: The subtitle, “A Life Inside the Center,” calls attention to a rarer skill in which Oppenheimer excelled. He had a unique ability to put himself at the places and times at …
Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. The book takes a deep look at Sherlock Holmes’s methodology to develop the habits of mind that will allow us to mindfully engage the world. As part of my …
Karl Pillemer is the author of 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans. I posted some of the key lessons from his book last week. As part of my ongoing series of interviews with authors and experts, I had the …
After reading How to Make Mistakes and How to Criticize with Kindness, a reader sent in a link to this video of Philosopher Daniel Dennett speaking at Google. Dennett is the author of the faboulous Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for …
Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. His recent book, The Half-life of Facts, explores how much of what we think we know has an expiry date. Samuel, who was happy to be the first in an ongoing series of …
While Rockefeller and Carnegie built monopolies, Hetty Green patiently became the wealthiest woman in the world by taking advantage of the Gilded Age’s speculative excess – buying when others panicked and maintaining ready cash …
Jeff Bezos recently stopped by the office of 37 Signals. After talking product strategy he answered some questions. In his answer to one question he shared some thoughts on people who were “right a lot.” He said people who were …
Nassim Taleb elaborates on the Copernican Principle, a concept first introduced on Farnam Street in How To Predict Everything. For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For …
“Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born to a family in Geneva. His mother passed only a few days after his birth. A few years later, his father fled after a duel. At the tender age of 16 he left …
Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize laureate and polymath, offered many contributions to the world in fields such as computer science/artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, economics, and management. This brief excerpt, taken from his …
You’d break the law. In fact most of us would. How can I say this with near certainty? Because if you were put in a position where the ends justified the means, the means would become acceptable. The person who steals bread so his …
“The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.” The progress of …
I thought Warren Buffett said a lot of interesting things in his recent interview with Charlie Rose. Here are some of the bits that stood out for me. Fairness: BUFFETT: …I also think fairness is important and I think getting rid of …
On television, modern histories of Rome lead one to think that Romans were rather well off, enjoyed a lot of free time, and commanded the largest and most powerful empire in the history of the world. That is, until the Americans came along. …
Marshall McLuhan rocketed from an unknown academic to rockstar with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. Understanding Media contained the simple prophecy that electronic media of the twentieth century—at …