Notes From Underground
Can you be too conscious? In his short 1864 book, Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a man who is “too conscious.” The man, whose name we never learn is so aware of his own …
Books
Benoit Mandelbrot — The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
“I have never done anything like others,” Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) once said. That statement is proven time and time again in his autobiography: The Fractalist. Mandelbrot is …
What Animals Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, believes that her fellow human physicians have much to learn from their veterinary counterparts. These are not …
What is the Purpose of Dreaming? And more on Circadian Rhythms
Continuing with our recent exploration of sleep, I came across this passage by sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright in The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, …
TED Bookstore 2013
If you missed out on attending the famous TED conference this year — you’re not alone. But now you can queue up some of the books that were available at the TED Bookstore for your spring reading …
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — …
The Science of Addictive Junk Food
Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times, just wrote a book called Salt Sugar Fat. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese …
Ernest Hemingway’s Powerful Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Just after publishing his new novel in 1934, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald asked his friend Ernest Hemingway for an honest opinion on the book. And respond Hemingway did. The letter, found …
The sentiments of crowds
A lot of wisdom in this excerpt from Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics: … if there is one thing we know about the sentiments of crowds, it is …
Robert Greene explains the Process to Attain Mastery
The relationship between people and their craft is such that you can tell by the path they have followed whether they are a master or an amateur. Robert Greene, most famous for his exposure of power, …
How feeling powerless directs the narratives of our mind
In his new book Mastery, Robert Greene writes discusses how feeling powerless directs the narratives of our mind. We live in a world that seems increasingly beyond our control. Our livelihoods are at …
Kathryn Schulz on why Knowledge Collapses as often as it Accretes
Kathryn Schulz comments on the fantasy that knowledge is static in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras …
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
A lot of people think that reading, especially critical reading, is on the decline. The thinking goes that we spend too much time distracted on devices. And when we turn the devices off long enough to …
Michael Mauboussin: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
In The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing, Michael Mauboussin goes beyond the general idea that luck is important to outcomes. He explains the type of …
Is Everything For Sale? What Money Can’t Buy
Should we worry that we are increasingly moving towards a society where everything is for sale? In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael Sandel argues that we should for two …
Hetty Green: The Richest Woman In America
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 …