Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
A brilliant post from brain pickings drawing our attention to Susan Sontag and the commodification of wisdom. As the interconnectedness and velocity of information continue to grow, these passages …
E.B. White, noted author of Charlote’s Web and co-author of The Elements of Style, answers a question on the role of the writer in a society that has become increasingly enamored of and …
Last year, literary critic Joseph Epstein wrote The best book on the art of writing that I know is F. L. Lucas’ Style: The Art of Writing Well. At the time of Epstein’s comments, the book …
Ok, so you’ve seen the nine books Bill Gates is reading this summer. Gates has some pretty smart friends and they were kind enough to share what they were reading this summer too. ****** Vinod …
What happens if you take Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present and look at some of the ‘best’ one-star reviews posted on Amazon.com? Catch-22 by Joseph …
A reddit reader posed the question “I want to read 12 history books in one year to know ‘all the things’, what should be on the list?” After much debate, the 12 below were …
Calling to mind Daniel Dennett’s advice on how to compose a successful critical commentary, Susan Sontag offers three steps to refuting any argument, from the newly released As Consciousness Is …
“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 …
If you haven’t already decided on your summer reading list, here is a curated list of multi-disciplinary books that can help fill your brain. Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for …
Philosopher Bertrand Russell: The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: 1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. 2. Do not think it …
David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College is a timeless trove of wisdom — right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your …
Aristotle claimed that poetry—at the time, he meant the epics of Homer and other tragedies, which we now call fiction—was better than history. He argued that fiction tells us what is possible, whereas …
In this short lecture, Kurt Vonnegut explains the different shapes that stories can take using a chalkboard. Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines …
David Foster Wallace in Consider the Lobster: A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in SWE—Standard Written English—(he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just …