Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
We all have a feeling that literature is important. And yet many of us avoid the category altogether, feeling it’s a waste of time to pick up literature when we can learn so much more from …
Every two weeks, from 2007 to 2011, Yann Martel sent a book to then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper. Each book was accompanied by a letter telling the PM why he might enjoy that particular …
In the classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau echoes Warren Buffett on having an inner scorecard and defining your own success: If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, …
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) remains best-known for Civil Disobedience and for Walden, a beautiful ode to simplicity and self-sufficiency. Thoreau moved into a cabin he built by Walden Pond to …
“We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.” *** The most difficult of …
“Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more …
One of the reasons that we deny the role of luck is that it acts as a cold counterbalance to the notion of hard work. At every stage in our lives, we are taught that the best way to make our way in …
On November 13, 1849 a crowd of over 30,000 people gathered outside a prison in South London to witness the public execution of Marie and Frederick Manning. Marie and Frederick, a married couple, had …
David Foster Wallace remains both loved and hated. His wisdom shows itself in argumentative writing, ambition, and perfectionism, and perhaps one of the best, most profound, commencement addresses …
In December 2004, Bryan A. Garner, who had already struck up a friendship with David Foster Wallace, started interviewing state and federal judges as well as a few key writers. With over a hundred …
John Keats coined the term negative capability to describe the willingness to embrace uncertainty, mysteries and doubts. The first and only time Keats used the phrase was in a letter on 21 December …
Rebecca Mead has written a book like no other I’ve come across. My Life In Middlemarch is an irresistibly creative story about how her favorite book, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, changed …
I recently picked up Sophocles’s Antigone. Sophocles wrote more than 100 plays in his lifetime, but only seven complete tragedies remain. In Antigone, Polynices, son of Oedipus, went to war with …
The first category of ignorance is when we do not know we are ignorant. This is primary ignorance. The second category of ignorance is when we recognize our ignorance. *** This article builds on …
I picked up a copy of the first complete English edition of Giacomo Leopardi‘s Zibaldone. Giacomo Leopardi is the most radical and channelling of nineteenth-century poets and thinkers, yet the …
We all want to read more. If reading older books is exponentially more beneficial for acquiring knowledge than reading newer things, then reading the great books is a good place to start. These books …