Antonio García Martínez
Founder @spindl_xyz. Wrote 'Chaos Monkeys' (https://t.co/LHo7Hb5gz2). Wearer of many hats. גם זה יעבור 🇺🇲🇪🇸
120+ Book Recommendations by Antonio García Martínez
The Israeli Century
Yossi Shain
Started reading this over shabbat (partial credit @ShabbosReads ?). Wondered when someone would write the thundering "Israel is now the center of world Jewry, the diaspora is a side show whose values are dated and dysfunctional" take...and here it is. https://t.co/xKjEJ0p7Fa
The Image
Daniel J. Boorstin
Discusses news gathering, celebrity, travel, prestige, and the American dreamWe're all just living in a world predicted by Boorstin, McLuhan, Debord, and Ong decades ago, who saw the first break from textual to visual and oral society. The only recent tweak is the acceleration due to ubiquitous networked computing. https://t.co/oHKfoK1COK
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Carlota Perez
This isn't (just) some idle Twitter conjecture. Read Carlota Perez on the nature of financial booms and how they lead to new technological regimes, again and again and again. You need the irrational exuberance to get the railroad or Internet fiber network. https://t.co/j1hxf7jefW
Dominion
Tom Holland
A historian of antiquity shows how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable. It was this that rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-had been a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. Our morals and ethics are not universal. Instead, they are the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the world.For the longer version, read @holland_tom. https://t.co/lFcjIoDio3
This Is My God
Herman Wouk
@drakeballew This is a more personal rather than intellectual account, but probably one of the first books I read on Judaism and Jewish life. https://t.co/qKle7urlvS
The War of Return
Adi Schwartz
Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return." In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group—unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts—has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region. In The War of Return, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf—both liberal Israelis supportive of a two-state solution—reveal the origins of the idea of a right of return, and explain how UNRWA - the very agency charged with finding a solution for the refugees - gave in to Palestinian, Arab and international political pressure to create a permanent “refugee” problem. They argue that this Palestinian demand for a “right of return” has no legal or moral basis and make an impassioned plea for the US, the UN, and the EU to recognize this fact, for the good of Israelis and Palestinians alike. A runaway bestseller in Israel, the first English translation of The War of Return is certain to spark lively debate throughout America and abroad.One of the surprise joys of buying used books is finding random documents between the pages. Here, @EinatWilf’s “The War of Return” has a letter from AIPAC thanking a donor with a copy (Wolf spoke at a conference), and summarizing the book’s argument about Israel/Palestine. https://t.co/jlsuLcm1hg
Tubes
Andrew Blum
“Andrew Blum plunges into the unseen but real ether of the Internet in a journey both compelling and profound….You will never open an email in quite the same way again.” —Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times bestselling author of Traffic In Tubes, Andrew Blum, a correspondent at Wired magazine, takes us on an engaging, utterly fascinating tour behind the scenes of our everyday lives and reveals the dark beating heart of the Internet itself. A remarkable journey through the brave new technological world we live in, Tubes is to the early twenty-first century what Soul of a New Machine—Tracy Kidder’s classic story of the creation of a new computer—was to the late twentieth.This gives a very surface flavor of the actual wires that make our world talk to itself. https://t.co/JWvlvThfd4
The Pursuit of the Millennium
Norman Cohn
This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Cohn covers the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe.For a fascinating compendium of how every Christian society absolutely pops off with some messianic/apocalyptic madness every time they're under social stress, read Cohen. https://t.co/uQrGxKBlEi
Imperial San Francisco
Gray Brechin
"A classic of urban history, environmental history, California history, and socially oriented architectural criticism, this work contains scholarship that is thrilling in its comprehensiveness. Never before have the inner dynamics of the regional civilization centered in San Francisco been so comprehensively integrated."--Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California, author of "Americans and the California Dream" ""Imperial San Francisco "is a great gift of a book, the product of extraordinary research, insight, and hard work that connects a lot of dots and gives me a reinvigorated focus and curiosity [about] what California culture was and what might become of it all."--Gary SnyderOr if you want to know who the names are behind the streets and museums, and how the city went from a hovel of brothels and docks to a real city: https://t.co/tU7vAUYXBE
The Barbary Coast
Herbert Asbury
The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered ... the development of San Francisco's underworld in all likelihood would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury's classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes achieved anything close to parity in their populations.) This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter's Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.I've always thought the longer history of SF to be more interesting: the Barbary Coast days, the Gold Rush, the mad dash into becoming a Western metropolis. https://t.co/LuYGVppphz
Season of the Witch
David Talbot
Finally got around to reading 'Season of the Witch,' an excellent (though biased) history of post-WWII San Francisco. It lucidly delineates the abrupt 60s/70s-era shift from a conservative Catholic town to the petri dish of American crazy it is now. https://t.co/EHoIBf3fig
The Cryptopians
Laura Shin
The story of the idealists, technologists, and opportunists fighting to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. In their short history, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone through booms, busts, and internecine wars. Yet today they are very much still with us: Bitcoin currently trades for over $50,000, the value of all crypto assets is greater than $1.7 trillion. The central promise of crypto is too good to pass up--vast fortunes made from decentralized networks not controlled by any single entity and not yet regulated by many governments. Yet cryptocurrency was growing increasingly marginal until a brilliant new idea changed its fortunes once again: Ethereum. In this book, Laura Shin takes readers inside the creation of this new form of cryptocurrency network, which enabled users to launch their own new coins, and in so doing, created a new crypto fever. You'll meet people like Vitalik Buterin, the wunderkind whose idea quickly became a $100 billion empire; Charles Hoskinson, the initial CEO who left the project within five months; and Joe Lubin, a former Goldman Sachs VP whose early involvement in Bitcoin and Ethereum helped him become one of crypto's most well-known billionaires. Sparks flew as these outsized personalities fought for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity. The fortunes of crypto continue to rise and fall, but the people fighting to take it mainstream are making and losing fortunes and careers on it. This fascinating book shows the crypto market for what it really is: a deeply personal struggle to influence the coming revolution in money, culture and power.Laura's book is part-drama and part-comedy, and very eye-opening about how some of the more insane and disruptive tech of recent years was created. https://t.co/lAiHTpdN49
Conspiracy
Ryan Holiday
'Mr. A' was the mastermind behind the last Gawker/Hogan wrecking, as documented in @RyanHoliday's excellent 'Conspiracy': https://t.co/L49d4cvBl2
Build
Tony Fadell
I usually dislike the business-book genre, but there are exceptions. Endorse 'Build' by @tfadell. The lessons I already learned the hard (and expensive) way were worth re-iterating, and there's something novel for everyone. Learn the easy way: read. https://t.co/UESbiNm9zM
Super Pumped
Mike Isaac
Isaac delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance.The book is less fanciful, though seems skewed by the obvious sources who dished to Isaac. I still enjoyed reading it (with a big disclaimer). https://t.co/fyxrtNinZD
The War on the West
Douglas Murray
It has become acceptable to discuss the flaws and crimes of Western culture, but celebrating their contributions is also called hate speech. Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been lured into protests and polarization by lies and hypocrisy. Ranging from an incisive takedown of foolish arguments and activism to a clarion call for the defense of enlightenment values, Murray carefully and methodically shows how far political discourse has strayed in Europe and America from its stated goals: justice and equality. Print run 75,000.@DouglasKMurray "China has concentration camps *now*. Why do Westerners claim our sins are unique?" Like his previous books, Murray eviscerates the flou rhetoric of mainstream liberalism using a scalpel of tight and cutting prose. He recoils at nothing and spares nobody. https://t.co/S0Zza2aAJB
The War on the West
Douglas Murray
The brilliant and provocative new book from one of the world's foremost political writers 'The anti-Western revisionists have been out in recent years. It is high time that we revise them in turn...' In The War on the West, international bestselling author Douglas Murray asks: if the history of humankind is a history of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it? It's become, he explains, perfectly acceptable to celebrate the contributions of non-Western cultures, but discussing their flaws and crimes is called hate speech. What's more it has become acceptable to discuss the flaws and crimes of Western culture, but celebrating their contributions is also called hate speech. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning; however, some of it is part of a larger international attack on reason, democracy, science, progress, and the citizens of the West by dishonest scholars, hatemongers, hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their ongoing villainy. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been lured into protests and polarisation by such lies and hypocrisy. A blistering and important polemic, Murray's latest book carefully and methodically shows how far political discourse has strayed in Europe and America from its stated goals: justice and equality. Propelled by an incisive deconstruction of inconsistent arguments and activism, towards a clarion call for the defence of enlightenment values, The War on the West is one of the most important books for a generation, cementing Murray as one of the world's foremost political writers.Ecstatic to announce that our next Pull Request guest is bestselling author @DouglasKMurray. His new book 'The War on the West' just came out, and like his previous books, it's a grenade tossed into the mainstream discourse. Tune in tomorrow! https://t.co/Mcvy6eGnR0
Chaos Monkeys
Antonio Garcia Martinez
Liar’s Poker meets The Social Network in an irreverent exposé of life inside the tech bubble, from industry provocateur Antonio García Martínez, a former Twitter advisor, Facebook product manager and startup founder/CEO. The reality is, Silicon Valley capitalism is very simple: Investors are people with more money than time.Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are the seductive go-between. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez. After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel. Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?@GergelyOrosz I get into a lot of the internal Facebook culture, from the posters to the cultish behavior, in ‘Chaos Monkeys,’ if really want the deep dive. https://t.co/4uplLGYa8I
The United States of Anonymous
Jeff Kosseff
@rabois @loganbartlett @micsolana Read @jkosseff’s new book, which is about just this. https://t.co/k5bN78eZ0j
The Image
Daniel J. Boorstin
Discusses news gathering, celebrity, travel, prestige, and the American dreamA 'pseudo-event' is made-for-consumption media event, usually involving celebrities: entities known for their well-known-ness. These now seem natural, but were once odd: life once consisted of real people and events. Boorstin's book is outstanding. https://t.co/dMnZFl1P0F
The Founders
Jimmy Soni
“Deeply reported and bracingly written, this book is an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Code Breaker A definitive, deeply reported look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and others whose stories have never before been told. They have defined the modern world. This experience defined them. Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Airbnb, among many others. They defined 21st-century innovation and entrepreneurship—and still shape that template today. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of how they first connected and cut their start-up teeth has gone untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payment company called PayPal. It would grow to become one of the world’s foremost companies, but that success was anything but certain. From the outset, the team faced industry skeptics, bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni pulls back the curtain on PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, Soni shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the countless individuals whose stories never made the front pages nor earned banner headlines—but whose contributions were vital to PayPal’s success. The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness, one that casts a long and powerful shadow over modern life. Jimmy Soni’s narrative offers deep insight into how this once-in-a-generation assemblage of talent came to work together and how that collaboration changed our world forever.@peterthiel @DavidSacks @mlevchin @lukenosek @jimmyasoni Jimmy's book is exceptional: it's tech history as it was being made, as recounted by the people who made it (plus there's an Easter egg embedded in the book!): https://t.co/rzl9l62xeX
Work Pray Code
Carolyn Chen
Her book, both sociological study and cultural rumination, is worth reading. Filled with interviews with actual employees who've subbed in their work lives for a broader religious or community one. It'll resonate with anyone in the Valley daze. https://t.co/9O0Vce3mF9
The Cryptopians
Laura Shin
The story of the idealists, technologists, and opportunists fighting to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. In their short history, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone through booms, busts, and internecine wars. Yet today they are very much still with us: Bitcoin currently trades for over $50,000, the value of all crypto assets is greater than $1.7 trillion. The central promise of crypto is too good to pass up--vast fortunes made from decentralized networks not controlled by any single entity and not yet regulated by many governments. Yet cryptocurrency was growing increasingly marginal until a brilliant new idea changed its fortunes once again: Ethereum. In this book, Laura Shin takes readers inside the creation of this new form of cryptocurrency network, which enabled users to launch their own new coins, and in so doing, created a new crypto fever. You'll meet people like Vitalik Buterin, the wunderkind whose idea quickly became a $100 billion empire; Charles Hoskinson, the initial CEO who left the project within five months; and Joe Lubin, a former Goldman Sachs VP whose early involvement in Bitcoin and Ethereum helped him become one of crypto's most well-known billionaires. Sparks flew as these outsized personalities fought for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity. The fortunes of crypto continue to rise and fall, but the people fighting to take it mainstream are making and losing fortunes and careers on it. This fascinating book shows the crypto market for what it really is: a deeply personal struggle to influence the coming revolution in money, culture and power.Currently reading this on the history of Ethereum, by @laurashin (whom I should probably have on the Pull Request @getcallin show). https://t.co/MLK6wKppJX
The Founders
Jimmy Soni
@DavidSacks @jimmyasoni I can't recommend @jimmyasoni's book highly enough. Full of improvisation and gumption, fear and arrogance, it perfectly captures the operatic drama of early(ish) Silicon Valley and (now) big players when they were just hustlers trying to figure it out. https://t.co/uAx415IHf7
The Managerial Revolution
James Burnham
Read this to understand how we got here: https://t.co/XnOLRecoFl
The Decadent Society
Ross Douthat
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think. Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we’re furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today’s discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave. In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens. Correcting both optimists who insist that we’re just growing richer and happier with every passing year and pessimists who expect collapse any moment, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition—how we got here, how long our age of frustration might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.@machineloveus https://t.co/Gny1osl9RF
Miami
Joan Didion
Didion penned the best portrait of the wild 1980s Miami of my childhood, and the scheming and imperious Cuban exiles who populated it. Told by a wide-eyed New Yorker, of course, but still....a snapshot of a budding metropolis and its febrile origins. https://t.co/MGwmmrlLgl
Bad News
Batya Ungar-Sargon
"Bad News is a response to Thomas Frank's 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas." I ask the same question he asked about the right, but about the left: Why is the media obsessed with racism, even though it's getting objectively better by every measure we have? I argue that the liberal media is mainstreaming a woke culture war based on ideas that were relegated to the academic fringe as recently as a decade ago because it's in their economic interests to do so. It explores how digital media and social media supplied journalists, now part of the American elite, with an alternative way to feel like heroes while further consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few rather than the many. The book then explores the larger context of the great American class divide, and how journalism has been both a product and accelerator of inequality"--@bungarsargon @balajis @AshleyRindsberg Batya's book is out now, and is worth reading for the history of American journalism and how we got here alone. https://t.co/FsQYNridfZ
Leviathan and Its Enemies
Samuel T. Francis
*Leviathan and Its Enemies* is Samuel T. Francis's magnum opus on political theory and the history of the modern world, which had been lost to the world after his untimely death in 2005 and is published here for the first time. This edition includes new introductory and critical essays by Jerry Woodruff, Fran Griffin, and Paul E. Gottfried. In his Introduction, Jerry Woodruff writes, "Following [James] Burnham, Sam believed a new ruling elite emerged in 20th-century. . . . the growth of giant corporations, the expansion of government power and bureaucracy, and the widespread emergence of mass organizations gave birth to a powerful class of skilled professionals to guide and manage the vast operations of the means of economic production, which, on a smaller scale, were once in the hands of private entrepreneurs and their families. As a result, the old ruling bourgeois elite, along with its political and social institutions and its view of society and politics, were replaced by a new "managerial elite," with a world outlook that set out to remake society according to its own interests, and which was hostile to any bourgeois remnants in conflict with that project."@AleResnik Or go straight to the hard stuff: Francis. ‘Leviathan and its enemies’ https://t.co/v9NGBJRsB0
Le suicide francais - Ces quarante annees qui ont defait la France - Bestseller format (French Edition)
Eric Zemmour
Les Français ont perdu confiance. Ils ont le sentiment que le pays fait fausse route. Mais ils hésitent encore sur les raisons qui ont pu les conduire dans cette impasse. A quel moment se sont-ils égarés ? Ont-ils été trompés ? Pour les éclairer, Eric Zemmour se livre à une analyse sans tabou de ces quarante dernières années qui, depuis la mort du général de Gaulle, ont "défait la France". En historien et en journaliste qui a connu bien des protagonistes de cette triste épopée, il mobilise aussi bien la politique que l'économie ou la littérature, le cinéma et même la chanson. Revenant sur des faits oubliés ou négligés, mais décisifs, comme la loi de 1973 nous obligeant à nous endetter auprès des marchés financiers, il nous réserve quelques surprises. L'auteur relit chronologiquement le passé pour démasquer une succession d'aveuglements technocratiques, de "politique spectacle" délétère, de faux débats et de mensonges, notamment sur la famille, l'immigration, l'Europe ou la mondialisation... Il souligne notamment la responsabilité des élites dans ce fiasco. Quarante ans d'indifférence au sort des vrais "invisibles" de la République (ouvriers, paysans, employés et cadres "rurbains" chassés en grande banlieue) ont, avec la crise économique, engendré un peuple blessé et perdu, livré aux nouveaux despotes de Bruxelles. Il est temps de faire les comptes ! C'est le premier pas nécessaire pour espérer pouvoir un jour guérir de nos maux.As someone who's followed him since his breakout book 'Le Suicide Francais', it's somewhat amusing to see France's Zemmour compared to Trump. Perhaps if Trump possessed anything like an intellect and regularly wrote non-fiction bestsellers. A better comp would be Ben Shapiro.
The Wires of War
Jacob Helberg
From the former News Policy lead at Google, an urgent and groundbreaking account of the high-stakes global cyberwar brewing between Western democracies and the autocracies of China and Russia—that could potentially crush democracy. From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google’s internal global product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating Cold War between democracy and autocracy. Since the conflict takes place in the murky gray zone over trade routes and fiber optic lines, Helberg calls this developing tech-fueled battle a Gray War. On the front-end, we’re fighting to control the software—applications, news information, social media platforms, and more—of what we see on the screens of our computers, tablets and phones, a clash which started out primarily with Russia, but now increasingly includes China and Iran. Even more ominously, we’re also engaged in a hidden back-end battle—largely with China—to control the Internet’s hardware, which includes devices like cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, and 5G networks. This Gray War will shape the world’s balance of power for the coming century as autocracies exploit 21st century methods to re-divide the world into 20th century-style spheres of influence. Helberg cautions that the spoils of this war are power over every meaningful aspect of our society, including our economy, our infrastructure, the screens we constantly consult for information and entertainment—and what news we deem as truth. Without a firm partnership with the government, Silicon Valley is unable to protect democracy from the autocrats looking to sabotage it from places like Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. The stakes of the ongoing cyberwar are no less than our nation’s sovereignty and institutional agency, the freedom of our democratic allies, and even the ability of each of us to control our own fates, Helberg says. And time is running out.Helberg's book looks at the information war currently underway between the US and both Russia and China, and how we're failing as an open society to counter our geopolitical opponents. https://t.co/HJU91YppK7
Barbecue and Bad News (An Adams Grove Novel, 6)
Nancy Naigle
Welcome to Adams Grove...where the barbecue isn't the only thing that sizzles. Savannah Dey politely agreed to attend her ex-husband's wedding, but she'd be grateful for any reason to get out of it...which is why the speeding ticket from the handsome sheriff of Adams Grove is both a surprise and a reprieve. With one quick call to her editor, the aspiring columnist finds herself with a new assignment and the perfect excuse to get closer to the man who pulled her over. Now, all she needs is a way to deal with all the bad memories the small town dredges up... Sheriff Scott Calvin can't forget the woman who set off his radar, but he's determined to send Savannah on her way. He's done making bad choices, and this beautiful city gal is sure to leave Adams Grove once she finishes her story. By the time she's stirred up a hornet's nest, he's already falling for her. Will trouble bind them together, or will her secrets tear them apart?Then on Wednesday at 5pm Pacific we'll have @jacobhelberg, former news policy lead for Google, on to discuss his new book 'The Wires of War'. https://t.co/GfXqwRiISA
The Tree of Life and Prosperity
Michael A. Eisenberg
One of Israel's most successful venture capitalists uses the words and actions of the Hebrew patriarchs to lay the foundations for a modern growth economy based on timeless business principles and values. Entrepreneurs, businessmen, and investors are constantly looking for principles and rules that will pave the way for success. Usually, those at the forefront are successful entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley or legendary Wall Street investors. But the principles of economic growth, wealth creation and preservation were written long before the rise of the modern market economy and its heroes. Michael Eisenberg--one of the most successful venture capitalists in Israel, and one of the first investors in Lemonade, WeWork, and Wix--reveals in The Tree of Life and Prosperity the eternal principles for successful business, economics, and negotiation hidden in the Torah--and shows their relevance to the modern world we live in.Then on Wednesday at 5pm Pacific we'll have @jacobhelberg, former news policy lead for Google, on to discuss his new book 'The Wires of War'. https://t.co/GfXqwRiISA
Bad News
Batya Ungar-Sargon
"Bad News is a response to Thomas Frank's 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas." I ask the same question he asked about the right, but about the left: Why is the media obsessed with racism, even though it's getting objectively better by every measure we have? I argue that the liberal media is mainstreaming a woke culture war based on ideas that were relegated to the academic fringe as recently as a decade ago because it's in their economic interests to do so. It explores how digital media and social media supplied journalists, now part of the American elite, with an alternative way to feel like heroes while further consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few rather than the many. The book then explores the larger context of the great American class divide, and how journalism has been both a product and accelerator of inequality"--Batya's book 'Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy' is a look at how media went from a working-class occupation concerned with the economic underdog, to a woke crusade led by elites, for elites. https://t.co/G8UnYFjVHn
The Tree of Life and Prosperity
Michael A. Eisenberg
@getcallin @mikeeisenberg His book is an interesting parallel between the key readings of the Torah and the very worldly life of venture capitalism...and just modernity more broadly. https://t.co/MYtcfcqEDp
Apocalypse Never
Michael Shellenberger
@winmyvote @moultano I nominate @ShellenbergerMD. https://t.co/D1HZKCG0PJ
Why Liberalism Failed (Politics and Culture)
Patrick J. Deneen
Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?@michelletandler If you’re interested in the new right that’s emerging (rather than the old right of Friedman, Hayek, etc), read Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”. It’s the animating spirit of Vance, Masters, Hawley, and the new generation of conservative politicians. https://t.co/WYBu1P3KNW
The Genetic Lottery
Kathryn Paige Harden
A provocative and timely case for how the science of genetics can help create a more just and equal society In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health—and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society. In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society. Reclaiming genetic science from the legacy of eugenics, this groundbreaking book offers a bold new vision of society where everyone thrives, regardless of how one fares in the genetic lottery.My latest for Pull Request! An interview with noted geneticist @kph3k who recently made major waves with her phenomenal book 'The Genetic Lottery' about genetics, equity, and public policy. https://t.co/HqrMGKnio3
Imagined Communities
Benedict Anderson
@VinodSreeharsha @amitshetty This is a big topic, but I think it's worth noting that the nation-state (as we understand it today) was an invention of the Enlightenment and made possible by literacy and the printing press. The classic book here is Anderson's 'Imagined Communities'. https://t.co/H3ZeYI5WVm
The Genetic Lottery
Kathryn Paige Harden
Currently reading this by @kph3k. Out Sept. 21st anywhere fine books are sold. She and I will be chatting for Pull Request in a couple of weeks. https://t.co/lchZPkWIF4
The Gun
C. J. Chivers
@cjchivers Just to fanboy on Chivers a bit, his book 'The Gun' is a fascinating history of one of the most impactful inventions of the 20th-century, the AK-47, and how it completely changed the nature of ground war. https://t.co/s7hNLlr0t8
The Fighters
C. J. Chivers
“A classic of war reporting...The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.” —The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner C.J. Chivers’s unvarnished account of modern combat, told through the eyes of the fighters who have waged America’s longest wars. More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared. The Fighters is a tour de force, a portrait of modern warfare that parts from slogans to do for American troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the G.I.s of World War II and Michael Herr for the grunts in Vietnam. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters presents the long arc of two wars.Reading @cjchivers' excellent 'The Fighters', which is just spectacular war reporting on the 'forever wars'. Such sacrifice for such an undeserving and confused leadership class. https://t.co/ehHRvgIdXH
The Deep Places
Ross Douthat
This is his latest, out next month. https://t.co/2DfW2e4zsb
The Prime Ministers
Yehuda Avner
The unique thing about Israeli history, aside from the absolutely wild and improbable adventure of its founding, is how all the main characters and their derring-do is in living memory still: it’s like reading about the Founding Fathers in the 1820s. https://t.co/fE3a3QAIsg
An Anxious Age
Joseph Bottum
Theory: Protestantism is never created nor destroyed, it's merely converted into different forms. https://t.co/aHfXOyVSVk
The Pursuit of the Millennium
Norman Cohn
This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Cohn covers the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe.Christian millenarianism, specifically its frequency and intensity, is one of those (many) oddities of the religion. None of this is new; in fact, it's happened with almost every major catastrophe for the past 2,000 years. https://t.co/uQrGxKBlEi
Tournament of Shadows
Karl Ernest Meyer
From the romantic conflicts of the Victorian Great Game to the war-torn history of the region in recent decades, Tournament of Shadows traces the struggle for control of Central Asia and Tibet from the 1830s to the present. The original Great Game, the clandestine struggle between Russia and Britain for mastery of Central Asia, has long been regarded as one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts in history. Many believed that control of the vast Eurasian heartland was the key to world dominion. The original Great Game ended with the Russian Revolution, but the geopolitical struggles in Central Asia continue to the present day. In this updated edition, the authors reflect on Central Asia's history since the end of the Russo-Afghan war, and particularly in the wake of 9/11.A great book on the period, which I’m sure nobody responsible for this fiasco bothered to read, is ‘Tournament of Shadows’. https://t.co/U89B9q5enC
An Anxious Age
Joseph Bottum
The "decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces" of yesterday (to quote Burroughs), are the blue-check media crowd and institutional mandarins of today. Recommend Bottum on the topic. https://t.co/kFVt7A0oGX
The Virtue of Nationalism
Yoram Hazony
A leading conservative thinker argues that a nationalist order is the only realistic safeguard of liberty in the world today Nationalism is the issue of our age. From Donald Trump's "America First" politics to Brexit to the rise of the right in Europe, events have forced a crucial debate: Should we fight for international government? Or should the world's nations keep their independence and self-determination? In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony contends that a world of sovereign nations is the only option for those who care about personal and collective freedom. He recounts how, beginning in the sixteenth century, English, Dutch, and American Protestants revived the Old Testament's love of national independence, and shows how their vision eventually brought freedom to peoples from Poland to India, Israel to Ethiopia. It is this tradition we must restore, he argues, if we want to limit conflict and hate--and allow human difference and innovation to flourish.Coincidentally, just finished @yhazony's 'The Virtue of Nationalism' and his framing of the collision of the West's shame around Auschwitz and the current state of Israel is an enlightening one, and relevant in all these post-Shoah rekindlings of Jewish life in Europe. https://t.co/86a8X5fyyn
Two Years Before the Mast
Richard Henry Dana
The quote is from 'Two Years Before the Mast', a classic sailing memoir of a Harvard student who drops out to become a common seaman on a trading schooner, rounds the Horn, and ends up trading what's then a very wild California coast. https://t.co/5mM6hjBFcw
An Anxious Age
Joseph Bottum
Investigates the way in which the Catholic Church has achieved a new level of political and cultural importance in an America where the main line Protestant churches are losing influence.@llunved Oh yes! This is all sublimated Protestantism. Bottums' book 'An Anxious Age' is great on this.
The Decadent Society
Ross Douthat
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality TV politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think. Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we’re furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today’s discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised and that the paths forward lead only to the grave. In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable, and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens. “Full of shrewd insights couched in elegant, biting prose…[this] is a trenchant and stimulating take on latter-day discontents” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition—how we got here, how long our frustration might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.Wednesday, 3/17 We'll have one of my favorite writers on, NYT columnist and author @DouthatNYT. His book 'Decadence' is a beautifully grim diagnosis of our national malaise, plus he's got a *new* book coming out. https://t.co/aBMyTNPW5y https://t.co/6M1feOCQQd
Ben Franklin's Web Site
Robert Ellis Smith
Explore the hidden niches of American history to discover the tug between our yearning for privacy and our insatiable curiosity. Book jacket.This is from Robert Ellis Smith's "Ben Franklin's Web Site" which is a breezy and timely review of privacy practice and law going back to the nation's founding. https://t.co/GIh7xjHRkh
Return of the Strong Gods
R. R. Reno
"'Return of the Strong Gods,'...is a thoughtful contribution to American political debate. It is incisively written and full of modern observations. Mr. Reno explains, better than any book I can remember, the present-day progressive's paranoid fear of fascism and neurotic determination to ferret out racism where none exists." —The Wall Street Journal After the staggering slaughter of back-to-back world wars, the West embraced the ideal of the “open society.” The promise: By liberating ourselves from the old attachments to nation, clan, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we could build a prosperous world without borders, freed from dogmas and managed by experts. But the populism and nationalism that are upending politics in America and Europe are a sign that after three generations, the postwar consensus is breaking down. With compelling insight, R. R. Reno argues that we are witnessing the return of the “strong gods”—the powerful loyalties that bind men to their homeland and to one another. Reacting to the calamitous first half of the twentieth century, our political, cultural, and financial elites promoted open borders, open markets, and open minds. But this never-ending project of openness has hardened into a set of anti-dogmatic dogmas which destroy the social solidarity rooted in family, faith, and nation. While they worry about the return of fascism, our societies are dissolving. But man will not tolerate social dissolution indefinitely. He longs to be part of a “we”—the fruit of shared loves—which gives his life meaning. The strong gods will return, Reno warns, in one form or another. Our task is to attend to those that, appealing to our reason as well as our hearts, inspire the best of our traditions. Otherwise, we shall invite the darker gods whose return our open society was intended to forestall.@AndrewSmithClub Indeed. https://t.co/JFy2h2l56m
The God That Failed
Richard H. Crossman
This classic work and crucial document of the Cold War brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century, including André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and Louis Fischer, on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism. In describing their own experiences, the authors illustrate the fate of leftism around the world.This of course is a reference to this classic collection of essays by former Communist intellectuals. https://t.co/dzHPGhEJFs
Private Truths, Public Lies
Timur Kuran
@KyleTibbitts Recommend this gem by @timurkuran. https://t.co/ay81Po99Zg
Imagined Communities
Benedict Anderson
The defining, best-selling book on the history, origins and development of nationalism What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.Some of the most grievously overlooked history in the "how was the modern world invented?" genre is the invention of nation-states (that's right, they're a novel invention), and how that was a necessary and coterminous step with liberal democracy. https://t.co/5zYOdXDejC
The New Class War
Michael Lind
To understand the full implications of a society run by PMCs, recommend The New Class War by Lind. https://t.co/McqwZWJSWu
Rise and Kill First
Ronen Bergman
Presents an assessment of Israel's state-sponsored assassination programs that evaluates the protective beliefs that are instituted into every Israeli citizen, the role of assassination in the state's history, and the ethical challenges of Israel's policies on targeted killings.Israel has maintained a targeted killing program since before it existed. A prior example was the civilian intimidation and assassination of the German scientists helping Egypt build a rocket program. @ronenbergman's book is the epic history. https://t.co/aSZZffFGUl
The Darkening Age
Catherine Nixey
A bold new history of the rise of Christianity, showing how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizationI recently finished @CatherineNixey's excellent (though polemical) 'A Darkening Age', about early Christian zealots and how they dismantled the Classical world piece by piece. Toppling of statues has always been kind of popular in these moments. https://t.co/l66LvDjSyH
The New Class War
Michael Lind
In his 'New Class War', he just dissects the political status quo like a biology teacher does a worm: no organ or component is spared his dry, cutting scrutiny. https://t.co/9qaE5UhpTz
No Rules Rules
Reed Hastings
I gave into the latest Valley book fad, and I'm reading the Netflix book. It's surprisingly good, though it's a playbook for turning yourself into an upbeat and efficient capitalist soldier (while at work at least). https://t.co/IUYfX6r7YC
An Anxious Age
Joseph Bottum
Investigates the way in which the Catholic Church has achieved a new level of political and cultural importance in an America where the main line Protestant churches are losing influence.@rezendi It's subtle. I recommend reading @JosephBottum's 'An Anxious Age' for how the church-going Episcopalian of the past became today's Whole Foods-shopping, BLM-sign-waving White liberal. https://t.co/qBfGvibMgQ
How Dante Can Save Your Life
Rod Dreher
@alexqgb You're not the first. By @roddreher. https://t.co/ad3e6MxQZJ
An Anxious Age
Joseph Bottum
Investigates the way in which the Catholic Church has achieved a new level of political and cultural importance in an America where the main line Protestant churches are losing influence.Back to Protestantism: I'd never discerned the direct relationship between the bien-pensant liberalism of the Whole Foods class with the implosion of post-war Mainline Protestantism until I read @JosephBottum's excellent 'An Anxious Age'. Recommended. https://t.co/qBfGvibMgQ
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
Christopher Lasch
"[A] passionate, compelling, and disturbing argument that the ills of democracy in the United States today arise from the default of its elites." —John Gray, New York Times Book Review (front-page review) In a front-page review in the Washington Post Book World, John Judis wrote: "Political analysts have been poring over exit polls and precinct-level votes to gauge the meaning of last November's election, but they would probably better employ their time reading the late Christopher Lasch's book." And in the National Review, Robert Bork says The Revolt of the Elites "ranges provocatively [and] insightfully." Controversy has raged around Lasch's targeted attack on the elites, their loss of moral values, and their abandonment of the middle class and poor, for he sets up the media and educational institutions as a large source of the problem. In this spirited work, Lasch calls out for a return to community, schools that teach history not self-esteem, and a return to morality and even the teachings of religion. He does this in a nonpartisan manner, looking to the lessons of American history, and castigating those in power for the ever-widening gap between the economic classes, which has created a crisis in American society. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy is riveting social commentary.@daily_barbarian THAT book is an absolute work of genius. It's almost unfathomable how prescient Lasch managed to be.
The Bay of Pigs
Peter Wyden
It saddens me to think that likely >95% of Americans younger than me have no idea what Bay of Pigs even represents. It was one of the most bizarre, high-stakes gambles this country has ever made. Read about it. You won't believe it. https://t.co/nkJmNNWV78
- Popular consensus says that the US rose over 150 years to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilisations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, the US was overshadowed by Europe for its first two centuries. What if this isn't the end?Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America's future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, Maçães takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path. We can see the birth pangs of this new civilisation in today's debates on guns, religion, foreign policy and the significance of Trump. What will its values be, and what will this new America look like?
Today's sunset reading brought to you by @MacaesBruno, who graciously agreed to be interviewed for The Pull Request about his new book 'History Has Begun'. https://t.co/QiF9gqUjrD
Private Truths, Public Lies
Timur Kuran
Preface Living a Lie The Significance of Preference Falsification Private and Public Preferences Private Opinion, Public Opinion The Dynamics of Public Opinion Institutional Sources of Preference Falsification Inhibiting Change Collective Conservatism The Obstinacy of Communism The Ominous Perseverance of the Caste System The Unwanted Spread of Affirmative Action Distorting Knowledge Public Discourse and Private Knowledge The Unthinkable and the Unthought The Caste Ethic of Submission The Blind Spots of Communism The Unfading Specter of White Racism Generating Surprise Unforeseen Political Revolutions The Fall of Communism and Other Sudden Overturns The Hidden Complexities of Social Evolution From Slavery to Affirmative Action Preference Falsification and Social Analysis Notes Index.The best book on this is the academic but very readable 'Private Truths, Public Lies' by @timurkuran. What tangled webs we weave, when we all try to fit in while under the gaze of a crowdsourced panopticon. https://t.co/x9aclbftHE
- There are moments in life when one is caught utterly unprepared. Drawing on both his rabbinical training and his scholarship in Buddhism, Lew leads readers on a journey from confusion to clarity, from doubt to belief, as he opens a path to self-discovery that is accessible to readers of all faiths.
From Alan Lew's wonderful rumination on the Jewish 'Days of Awe' (the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur): https://t.co/J6LCVkQyog
The Revolt of the Public
Martin Gurri
Riding a tsunami of information, the public has trampled on the temples of authority in every domain of human activity, everywhere. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how ordinary people, gifted amateurs networked in communities of interest, have swarmed over the hierarchies of accredited professionals, questioned their methods, and shouted their failures from the digital rooftops. In science, business, media - and, pre-eminently, in politics and government - established elites have lost the power to command attention and set the agenda.The consequences have been revolutionary. Insurgencies enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere have mobilized millions, toppling dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, crushing the ruling Socialist Party in Spain, inspiring "Tea Parties" and "Occupations" in the United States. Trust in political authority stands at an all-time low around the world. The Revolt of the Public analyzes the composition of the public, the nature of authority and legitimacy, and the part played by the perturbing agent: information. A major theme of the book is whether democratic institutions can survive the assaults of a public that at times appears to be at war with any form of organization, if not with history itself.I'm (re)reading 'Revolt of the Public' by @mgurri as homework for an interview, and it's so damn good. Seems even more prescient now than when it came out. https://t.co/8HPF75gDKe
Never Lost Again
Bill Kilday
@kane This book by @bkilday recounts that miraculous transformation from primitive humans navigating the world by line of sight and paper maps to navigating it as gods. https://t.co/eeHx0rkdla
Ninety Percent of Everything
Rose George
Slightly less piratical, @rosegeorge3's 'Ninety Percent of Everything' is a great romp through the world of modern shipping. https://t.co/bmxUE5yxPm
Outlaw Sea
William Langewiesche
As for how is it that a Moldovan-flagged vessel owned by a Russian on the way to Mozambique gets stuck in Beirut: the modern world of shipping is a fascinating and lawless one, regulated (if at all) by archaic custom and the home of endless corruption. https://t.co/HAT30BisBY
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Harriman Definitive Edition)
Charles MacKay
Charles MacKay's groundbreaking examination of a staggering variety of popular delusions, crazes and mass follies is presented here in full with no abridgements. The text concentrates on a wide variety of phenomena which had occurred over the centuries prior to this book's publication in 1841. Mackay begins by examining economic bubbles, such as the infamous Tulipomania, wherein Dutch tulips rocketed in value amid claims they could be substituted for actual currency. As we progress further, the scope of the book broadens into several more exotic fields of mass self-deception. Mackay turns his attention to the witch hunts of the 17th and 18th centuries, the practice of alchemy, the phenomena of haunted houses, the vast and varied practices of fortune telling and the search for the philosopher's stone, to name but a handful of subjects. Today, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds is distinguished as an expansive, well-researched and somewhat eccentric work of social history.To those of with a history fetish for all the panics, manias, lunatic crusades, and self-induced bouts of collective madness, but who somehow still wonder how humans could be so stupid, our present is just a feast of pedagogical delights. Read MacKay: https://t.co/R3yQmK6Kw4
Prefab Architecture
Ryan E. Smith
Prefabrication and Architecture, a manual about prefab architecture, is primarily written for the architect and construction professional. it is the only professional reference on prefab architecture, with information on the many facets of off-site construction. Prefabrication can allow for greater efficiency and precision, lessen environmental impact, and shorten construction cycles. Smith offers designers and construction professionals guidelines that rethink all stages of the design process in order to effectively utilize the fabrication process.The housing problem is a fascinating one, and one we desperately need to solve. For a great textbook on both the history and current trends in prefab housing, check out this book (among others): https://t.co/c4FV6FeUra
Sacred Fragments
Neil Gillman
The modern Jew, living in a world of shattered beliefs and competing ideologies, is often confronted with questions of faith. Sacred Fragments is for those who still care enough to continue the struggle. In forthright, nontechnical language the author addresses the most difficult theological questions of our time and shows that there are still viable Jewish answers for even the greatest skeptics.@Pooch7171 This book which, despite the current hideous cover, is a wide-ranging rumination on modernity and (mostly) Jewish spirituality. From the Conservative Jewish tradition. https://t.co/UqIubuRDNz
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Ana Menéndez
A collection of short stories from the heart of Castro's Cuba illuminates the wit and powerful insight of this Pushcart Prize-winning Cuban-American writer. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.@lacker @TeflonGeek Also, 'In Cuba I was a German Shepherd'. Again, more of a literary memoir than non-fiction: https://t.co/fffVOZUmkG
Dreaming in Cuban
Cristina García
The story of a family divided politically and geographically by the Cuban revolution.--Publisher description.@lacker @TeflonGeek Not very many. Historically, the Western left was enamored with the revolution, thus mostly ignored the Miami exiles (when it wasn't denigrating them). There have been a few literary treatments. 'Dreaming in Cuban' by Cristina Garcia (local SF author): https://t.co/yEy7vLR9Zm
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Jon Ronson
"From the author of The Psychopath Test and Lost at Sea, an exploration of shame, one of our world's most overlooked forces. Public shaming as a form of social control, such a big part of our lives it feels weird when there isn't anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn't cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What's it doing to them? An examination of human nature and its flaws"--Publisher's website.@JewishWonk Jon Ronson wrote a pretty definitive book back in the early days of the phenomenon. It now reads almost as quaint, the shock at something that's now commonplace. But I think he captures the dynamics well. https://t.co/vkNoeGjEnj
Working in Public
Nadia Eghbal
The weirdest thing I could tell non-tech people about how the tech world works is this: The entire tech world runs largely on free software written by volunteers, and everything you touch sits above that base. @nayafia has written THE book documenting that astounding reality. https://t.co/t7l9lJ5dnX
Dominion
Tom Holland
A historian of antiquity shows how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable. It was this that rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-had been a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. Our morals and ethics are not universal. Instead, they are the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the world.It is so utterly baked into the Western worldview at this point that the weirdness of it goes largely unremarked upon, except for those steeped in the very tradition from which it emerged. For more, I'd consult @holland_tom's 'Dominion'. https://t.co/lFcjIol99V
Sacred Fragments
Neil Gillman
The modern Jew, living in a world of shattered beliefs and competing ideologies, is often confronted with questions of faith. Sacred Fragments is for those who still care enough to continue the struggle. In forthright, nontechnical language the author addresses the most difficult theological questions of our time and shows that there are still viable Jewish answers for even the greatest skeptics.I wonder how many followers I'd lose if this account turned into a Jewish book discussion. In further news, 'Sacred Fragments' by Neil Gillman is an excellent self-debate around empiricist modernity vs. revealed covenantal monotheism. https://t.co/BnUvaxakYz
The Biggest Game in Town
Al Alvarez
@wesyang Ditto Al Alvarez. I'd check out both before embarking on it. https://t.co/DuZTEWQzKw
Positively Fifth Street
James McManus
@wesyang No, but the good news is that for standard Texas Hold 'Em, the math isn't very complex. If math were key, poker wouldn't be perhaps the last remaining game of skill AI hasn't conquered. James McManus was a writerly sort who played poker at a high level: https://t.co/yo8qp0B7Jk
The Decadent Society
Ross Douthat
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think. Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we’re furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today’s discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave. In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens. Correcting both optimists who insist that we’re just growing richer and happier with every passing year and pessimists who expect collapse any moment, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition—how we got here, how long our age of frustration might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.In @DouthatNYT's latest book 'Decadence', he posits this thought experiment: Would you rather live in a world with all human technology until around 2000 (but no Internet or social media)? Or all technology right now, except for 20th-century technologies like indoor plumbing?
Six Days of War
Michael B. Oren
It's Jerusalem Day (Yom Yerushalayim), the holiday that commemorates the unification of Jerusalem following the capture of East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. A good a time as any to finally read this classic from @DrMichaelOren. https://t.co/oBsHOCI9cu
Rise and Kill First
Ronen Bergman
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The first definitive history of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF's targeted killing programs, hailed by The New York Times as "an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject." WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD IN HISTORY NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY JENNIFER SZALAI, THE NEW YORK TIMES NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist * The New York Times Book Review * BBC History Magazine * Mother Jones * Kirkus Reviews The Talmud says: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel's DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively. In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman--praised by David Remnick as "arguably [Israel's] best investigative reporter"--offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions. Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country's military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world's most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a "Mossad within the Mossad" that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism). Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel's most secret activities. Bergman traces, from statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel's targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli nation, the Middle East, and the entire world. "A remarkable feat of fearless and responsible reporting . . . important, timely, and informative."--John le Carré"If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." -Babylonian Talmud I'm reading 'Rise and Kill First' by @ronenbergman. Please remind me to never piss off the Israeli state. https://t.co/j07Ff3Rv3D
The Making of Prince of Persia
Jordan Mechner
Two new books! Courtesy of @stripepress and @katelaurielee. Per usual, Stripe Press books are the most beautifully laid out and printed book published today. https://t.co/NXVXCmM7zC
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
Richard W. Hamming
Two new books! Courtesy of @stripepress and @katelaurielee. Per usual, Stripe Press books are the most beautifully laid out and printed book published today. https://t.co/NXVXCmM7zC
Halakhic Man
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Halakhic Man is the classic work of modern Jewish and religious thought by the twentieth century's preeminent Orthodox Jewish theologian and talmudic scholar. It is a profound excursion into religious psychology and phenomenology, a pioneering attempt at a philosophy of halakhah, and a stringent critique of mysticism and romantic religion.@NaCo89 This looks interesting. Thanks! https://t.co/d5NxnSTCms
A Paradise Built in Hell
Rebecca Solnit
Explores the phenomenon through which people become resourceful and altruistic after a disaster and communities reflect a shared sense of purpose, analyzing events ranging from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina.This isn't even odd if you look at data. Human 'pro-sociality' skyrockets precisely in times of disaster and need. The only time I felt anything like a neighborhood spirit in suburban Miami was the weeks after Hurricane Andrew, which wrecked the city. https://t.co/qoVsxfDSVH
Discovering The News
Michael Schudson
@Velowit Those subscription powered, regional papers were all completely and explicitly partisan. The only thing remotely resembling 'news' were the new 'wire' services, precisely because their content could be syndicated by any side. Read: https://t.co/BGQx7SNbq8
Empire of Illusion
Chris Hedges
The author navigates America's divided culture--where a minority embraces film, theater, and books, while the majority cling to a world of fantasy and false certainty--to expose what he sees as an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.@sriramk @briannekimmel Did you ever read 'Empire of Illusion' by Hedges? He's a former seminarian turned socialist, and he kicks of his redo of Boorstin's The Image with a mock-rhapsodic take of a WWE match. Wouldn't read whole book, but if the sample has the wrestling part, definitely worth it.
- How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling--mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues--have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent--and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
@AlxThomp It comes off as inhumane, but putting on our amoral economic historian hats on for a sec, it's largely correct. Four things consistently reduce inequality: plague, revolutions, mass-conscript warfare, and social collapse. For more such upbeat takes: https://t.co/k0LDnZlL4Z
What it Takes
Richard Ben Cramer
@paulg @giridevanur @krenzx @naval @eladgil As much as I'd love to imagine both these scenarios, I have a hard time believing that any tech person would run the gauntlet necessary to assume public office in the US. At least from my reading of accounts like 'What It Takes' (a classic of the genre). https://t.co/wTtVujqz7z
Gnomes Deluxe Collector's Edition
Wil Huygen
Explains everything one might want to know about gnomes, including how long they live, what their houses are made of, how long pregnancy lasts, what they do for a living, and where they go on their honeymoon.@SirKneeland It's from that 'Gnomes' book, I think. A classic! https://t.co/LNZ2MzKPFI
The Attention Merchants
Tim Wu
"From Tim Wu, author of award-winning The Master Switch, and who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--a revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting," and its transformative effect on our society and our selves"--I feel guilty confessing this given our books were reviewed together by @nybooks, but I only just now gave @superwuster's 'Attention Merchants' a full read. It's excellent, and will likely live on as the reference history on modern advertising. https://t.co/u4GWppMZhw
All this is from Eric Hoffer's 'The True Believer', which is a prophetic masterpiece just bristling with wisdom. The average page jumps with more insight than a year's worth of a 'serious' glossy magazine. https://t.co/DpDkT8zCSv
The Book of Ecclesiastes
Tremper Longman
In this contribution to The New International Commentary on the Old Testament, Trevor Longman takes a canonical-Christocentric approach to the meaning of the fascinating but puzzling book of Ecclesiastes.The Book of Ecclesiastes is, of course, one of the greatest works of Western culture. I find myself (re)reading it constantly.
The Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq
A new novel by the author of Whatever follows the lives and fortunes of Bruno and Marcel, born to a bohemian mother during the 1960s, who are brought up separately and pursue their own individual paths--as Bruno battles madness and sexual obsession and Michel, a molecular biologist, comes up with a unique way to express his disgust with the violence of humankind. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.Recently someone asked me to give them a book so 'they'd get to know me', and my thought is to give them Houellebecq's 'Elementary Particles', but I fear I'll never hear from them again.
The Stand
Stephen King
A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, while experiencing dreams of a battle between good and evil, move toward an actual confrontation as they migrate to Boulder, Colorado.@DanielRogoff The Stand! I recall reading that cinder block of a book in high school over the course of a few days. Stephen King is unduly snubbed by the elite literary set.
Spark
Bill Chambers
Learn how to use, deploy, and maintain Apache Spark with this comprehensive guide, written by the creators of the open-source cluster-computing framework. With an emphasis on improvements and new features in Spark 2.0, authors Bill Chambers and Matei Zaharia break down Spark topics into distinct sections, each with unique goals. You'll explore the basic operations and common functions of Spark's structured APIs, as well as Structured Streaming, a new high-level API for building end-to-end streaming applications. Developers and system administrators will learn the fundamentals of monitoring, tuning, and debugging Spark, and explore machine learning techniques and scenarios for employing MLlib, Spark's scalable machine-learning library. Get a gentle overview of big data and Spark Learn about DataFrames, SQL, and Datasets--Spark's core APIs--through worked examples Dive into Spark's low-level APIs, RDDs, and execution of SQL and DataFrames Understand how Spark runs on a cluster Debug, monitor, and tune Spark clusters and applications Learn the power of Structured Streaming, Spark's stream-processing engine Learn how you can apply MLlib to a variety of problems, including classification or recommendation@Wrexler_42 I'm reading a technical guide on distributed computing, if you can believe it. How far I have fallen in my return to tech. Woe is me. Woe is me! https://t.co/rbUORJ1nv4
Chaos Monkeys Intl
Antonio Garcia Martinez
Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most provocative chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez. After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and Chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg’s desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sports cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley cad. Now this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization, and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, how will we survive?@oliviasolon No. Not at all. Entirely the opposite. Look up the history of 'Sponsored Stories' (or read the chapter in Chaos Monkeys), the tag-along monetization product to platform. Huge failure, wasted a year of time (at least).
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Interesting and provocative... It gives you a sense of how briefly we've been on this Earth' Barack Obama What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human in the perfect read for these unprecedented times. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us. In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we're going. 'I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species' Bill Gates **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**@sarthakgh @zck Did we talk about 'Sapiens' yet? Because Harari has really changed me.
The End of Men
Hanna Rosin
@boomereng Apparently, they're over with. https://t.co/mb7U8WE4cR
Boyd
Robert Coram
John Boyd may be the most remarkable unsung hero in all of American military history. Some remember him as the greatest U.S. fighter pilot ever -- the man who, in simulated air-to-air combat, defeated every challenger in less than forty seconds. Some recall him as the father of our country's most legendary fighter aircraft -- the F-15 and F-16. Still others think of Boyd as the most influential military theorist since Sun Tzu. They know only half the story. Boyd, more than any other person, saved fighter aviation from the predations of the Strategic Air Command. His manual of fighter tactics changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights. He discovered a physical theory that forever altered the way fighter planes were designed. Later in life, he developed a theory of military strategy that has been adopted throughout the world and even applied to business models for maximizing efficiency. And in one of the most startling and unknown stories of modern military history, the Air Force fighter pilot taught the U.S. Marine Corps how to fight war on the ground. His ideas led to America's swift and decisive victory in the Gulf War and foretold the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On a personal level, Boyd rarely met a general he couldn't offend. He was loud, abrasive, and profane. A man of daring, ferocious passion and intractable stubbornness, he was that most American of heroes -- a rebel who cared not for his reputation or fortune but for his country. He was a true patriot, a man who made a career of challenging the shortsighted and self-serving Pentagon bureaucracy. America owes Boyd and his disciples -- the six men known as the "Acolytes" -- a great debt. Robert Coram finally brings to light the remarkable story of a man who polarized all who knew him, but who left a legacy that will influence the military -- and all of America -- for decades to come. ..For more on Boyd, this is an excellent source: https://t.co/qKZyPppQZb
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, is a 16th-century political treatise. The Prince is sometimes claimed to be one of the first works of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. It was also in direct conflict with the dominant Catholic and scholastic doctrines of the time concerning politics and ethics.The Prince has the general theme of accepting that the aims of princes-such as glory and survival-can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.Although it is relatively short, the treatise is the most remembered of Machiavelli's works and the one most responsible for bringing the word "Machiavellian" into usage as a pejorative. It even contributed to the modern negative connotations of the words "politics" and "politician" in western countries. In terms of subject matter it overlaps with the much longer Discourses on Livy, which was written a few years later.Machiavelli emphasized the need for realism, as opposed to idealism. Along with this, he stresses the difference between human-beings and animals since "there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beast". In The Prince he does not explain what he thinks the best ethical or political goals are, except the control of one's own fortune, as opposed to waiting to see what chance brings. Machiavelli took it for granted that would-be leaders naturally aim at glory or honor. He associated these goals with a need for "virtue" and "prudence" in a leader, and saw such virtues as essential to good politics and indeed the common good. That great men should develop and use their virtue and prudence was a traditional theme of advice to Christian princes. And that more virtue meant less reliance on chance was a classically influenced "humanist commonplace" in Machiavelli's time, as Fischer says, even if it was somewhat controversial. However, Machiavelli went far beyond other authors in his time, who in his opinion left things to fortune, and therefore to bad rulers, because of their Christian beliefs. He used the words "virtue" and "prudence" to refer to glory-seeking and spirited excellence of character, in strong contrast to the traditional Christian uses of those terms, but more keeping with the original pre-Christian Greek and Roman concepts from which they derived. He encouraged ambition and risk taking. So in another break with tradition, he treated not only stability, but also radical innovation, as possible aims of a prince in a political community. Managing major reforms can show off a Prince's virtue and give him glory. He clearly felt Italy needed major reform in his time, and this opinion of his time is widely shared.Machiavelli's descriptions in The Prince encourage leaders to attempt to control their fortune gloriously, to the extreme extent that some situations may call for a fresh "founding" (or re-founding) of the "modes and orders" that define a community, despite the danger and necessary evil and lawlessness of such a project. Founding a wholly new state, or even a new religion, using injustice and immorality has even been called the chief theme of The Prince. Machiavelli justifies this position by explaining how if "a prince did not win love he may escape hate" by personifying injustice and immorality; therefore, he will never loosen his grip since "fear is held by the apprehension of punishment" and never diminishes as time goes by. For a political theorist to do this in public was one of Machiavelli's clearest breaks not just with medieval scholasticism, but with the classical tradition of political philosophy, especially the favorite philosopher of Catholicism at the time, Aristotle. This is one of Machiavelli's most lasting influences upon modernity.There are very few modern books I'd classify as works of genius, as being on par with Machiavelli's 'The Prince' or Sun Tzu's 'Art of War'. But Eric Hoffer's 'The True Believer' is one. And now supremely timely. Written by a lifelong tramp and longshoreman, no less. https://t.co/lIIuMfze46
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Art of War is composed of only about 6,000 Chinese characters, it is considered by many to be the greatest book on strategy and strategic thinking ever written. . 350F PROFESSIONAL READING LIST.There are very few modern books I'd classify as works of genius, as being on par with Machiavelli's 'The Prince' or Sun Tzu's 'Art of War'. But Eric Hoffer's 'The True Believer' is one. And now supremely timely. Written by a lifelong tramp and longshoreman, no less. https://t.co/lIIuMfze46
There are very few modern books I'd classify as works of genius, as being on par with Machiavelli's 'The Prince' or Sun Tzu's 'Art of War'. But Eric Hoffer's 'The True Believer' is one. And now supremely timely. Written by a lifelong tramp and longshoreman, no less. https://t.co/lIIuMfze46
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
@metaphoricmusic @argyris @Micaheadowcroft @PatrickDeneen I've only read The Road. I should probably read more.
All the Trouble in the World
P. J. O'Rourke
In light of the Gretapocalypse, I re-read the 'Overpopulation' chapter (sub-title: 'Just enough of me, way too much of you') in PJ O'Rourke's 'All The Trouble in the World'. Oft-repeated at this point, but we don't make humorists like we used to. https://t.co/4LjIzrET4h
The Outlaw Ocean
Ian Urbina
A riveting, adrenaline-fueled journey through some of the most dangerous regions of the earth--the high seas, where lawlessness and physical risk prevail. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. Perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world's oceans: too big to police, and with no clear international authority, the oceans have become the setting for rampant criminality--from human trafficking and slavery to environmental crimes and piracy. Now, in The Outlaw Ocean, Ian Urbina--prize-winning reporter for The New York Times--gives us a galvanizing account of the several years he spent exploring and investigating the high seas, the industries that make use of it, and the people who make their--often criminal--living on it. He traveled on fishing boats and freighters, visited port towns and hidden outposts. He witnessed both environmental vigilantes and transgressors in action and faced a near-mutiny aboard a police ship conveying him to a meeting point miles from the coast. He describes pursuing employment agencies and shipowners to hold them accountable for labor abuses and traveling with a maritime repo man. Combining high drama, an investigative reporter's eye for detail, and a commitment to social justice, The Outlaw Ocean is both a gripping adventure story and a stunning exposé of some of the most disturbing realities that lie behind fishing, shipping, and, in turn, the entire global economy.@rezendi @anne_theriault Reading this one now. https://t.co/d8dxgJL7i4
The Outlaw Sea
William Langewiesche
@anne_theriault @rezendi Read his 'Outlaw Sea' if you liked his nautical reporting. https://t.co/HAT30BisBY
Prefab Architecture
Ryan E. Smith
Prefabrication and Architecture, a manual about prefab architecture, is primarily written for the architect and construction professional. it is the only professional reference on prefab architecture, with information on the many facets of off-site construction. Prefabrication can allow for greater efficiency and precision, lessen environmental impact, and shorten construction cycles. Smith offers designers and construction professionals guidelines that rethink all stages of the design process in order to effectively utilize the fabrication process.@NODEeco If you're interested in more about prefab housing, this book is really great. Yes, the tech has been around for a while (Sears used to sell prefab houses), and the barriers are mostly psychological or legal. But I think its time has come. https://t.co/t7QsCyFdoZ
Liar's Poker
Michael Lewis
The author recounts his experiences on the lucrative Wall Street bond market of the 1980s, where young traders made millions in a very short time, in a humorous account of greed and epic folly.@paulg @rivatez Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, which motivated me to drop out of a PhD for Wall Street, and then motivated me to write my own memoir.
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.@taffyakner To be clear, I think Franzen deserves much of the praise heaped on him. 'The Corrections' was a monumental work whose passages still ring in memory. I thought 'Freedom' was solid, but its detour into bird-saving harangues by the end left me indifferent to news of 'Purity'.
Gratitude
William Frank Buckley
The conservative columnist renews his call for a year of voluntary national service for young people eighteen and over, in areas such as health, day care, and the environment, to strengthen their feeling and appreciation for their nation@argyris You know who wrote an entire book about that idea? William F. Buckley. https://t.co/9YT5Cz6pdI
Super Pumped
Mike Isaac
Isaac delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance.With @CaseyNewton, @karaswisher , and @MikeIsaac at the book launch party. Meaning...you should all buy this book. https://t.co/1dP1eaZhRY https://t.co/RkLewgWU21
Private Truths, Public Lies
Timur Kuran
Preface Living a Lie The Significance of Preference Falsification Private and Public Preferences Private Opinion, Public Opinion The Dynamics of Public Opinion Institutional Sources of Preference Falsification Inhibiting Change Collective Conservatism The Obstinacy of Communism The Ominous Perseverance of the Caste System The Unwanted Spread of Affirmative Action Distorting Knowledge Public Discourse and Private Knowledge The Unthinkable and the Unthought The Caste Ethic of Submission The Blind Spots of Communism The Unfading Specter of White Racism Generating Surprise Unforeseen Political Revolutions The Fall of Communism and Other Sudden Overturns The Hidden Complexities of Social Evolution From Slavery to Affirmative Action Preference Falsification and Social Analysis Notes Index.The viral premium placed on performative belief by social media only makes the delta between falsified and revealed preference only grow. The key work here is Kuran's 'Private Truths, Public Lies', which delineates the phenomenon in academic depth. https://t.co/x9aclbftHE
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
Describes the escapades of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a drug-saturated group of hippies who get in and out of trouble with the law.@argyris And then 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' to understand NorCal hippie culture.
The right stuff
Tom Wolfe
A narrative of the early days of the U.S. space program and the people who made it happen, including Chuck Yeager, Pete Conrad, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn.@argyris 'The Right Stuff', which is very timely given the Apollo anniversary.
Dinosaurs: A Visual Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition
Dorling Kindersley Publishing Staff
Updated with the latest discoveries about the prehistoric world! Explore all of prehistory--the plants, the reptiles, the swimmers, the flyers, the dinosaurs, the mammals, and more in this comprehensive visual celebration of prehistoric life. Dinosaurs is not simply a catalog of facts--it is a visual celebration of the history of all life on Earth, with a special focus on dinosaurs. It features more than 100 dinosaur species, many illustrated with exclusive, brand-new artworks. The new images vividly reflect the very latest research into what these prehistoric creatures looked like, including stunning new discoveries about feathered dinosaurs. Material is organized by category of animal: invertebrates, early vertebrates, dinosaurs and birds, and mammals.The existential despair of reading the Smithsonian's excellent dinosaur encyclopedia to your child, and realizing that all of human life pales in comparison to the 56 million years of the Jurassic and that nothing matters. https://t.co/LMSh3dClqs
The Odyssey of Homer
Homer
It's as if the densely textual refuses to be oralised, cf. Walter Ong. While the reverse doesn't seem true to us (we can read 'The Odyssey'), we're actually missing the in-person attributes that made orality unique: the vagaries of recitation, music, chanting, body language.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
"In this powerful, straight-from-the-hip examination of the internal obstacles to success, bestselling author Steven Pressfield shows readers how to identify, defeat, and unlock the inner barriers to creativity. The War of Art is an inspirational, funny, well-aimed kick in the pants guaranteed to galvanize every would-be artist, visionary, or entrepreneur." --from back cover.If any creative needs a tough-love pep talk, or any aspiring creative needs a reality check around what being a 'professional' means, I recommend Pressfield's 'The War of Art'. It's the harsh lesson (or reminder) you need. https://t.co/Z1gbyA5QxZ
The Image
Daniel Joseph Boorstin
For more on our pseudo-event culture, Boorstin's 'The Image' is a brilliant exploration of how that culture started with TV. https://t.co/N7Pe3ajkIy
Bobos in Paradise
David Brooks
Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo. In his bestselling work of "comic sociology," David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today's upper class -- those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation.The most hilarious sendup of the NYT weddings nomenklatura is of course the first chapter of @nytdavidbrooks 'Bobos in Paradise', a perhaps unparalleled skewering of that entire caste. https://t.co/1tpGidqPo7
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
Willie Stark's obsession with political power leads to the ultimate corruption of his gubernatorial administration.From perhaps the best American political novel ever written, Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men". https://t.co/nTHi29JfC4
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch
When The Culture of Narcissism was first published in 1979, Christopher Lasch was hailed as a "biblical prophet" (Time). Lasch's identification of narcissism as not only an individual ailment but also a burgeoning social epidemic was groundbreaking. His diagnosis of American culture is even more relevant today, predicting the limitless expansion of the anxious and grasping narcissistic self into every part of American life. The Culture of Narcissism offers an astute and urgent analysis of what we need to know in these troubled times.Here's my soundcloud... Actually, fuck that. Go read Christopher Lasch's 'The Culture of Narcissism' instead. He called our current insanity in the 80s/90s, in tight, evocative prose. 'Revolt of the Elites' also called our current political moment. https://t.co/FgBPesNddg