An interesting book is out this week on the science of human altruism: A Cooperative Species by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. It sounds like it might be a good read with Edward O. Wilson’s latest: The Social Conquest of Earth. From the book description […]
Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets asks us to consider the consequences of our society becoming so market driven. Decca Aitkenhead quotes Sandel in her review in the Guardian: “We live at a time when almost […]
From Weldon Owen, an infographic illustrating the process from idea to book.
Courtesy of Brain Pickings. I like this quote too. It comes from Carl Sagan, whose 1980 PBS series Cosmos was such a success. This quote comes from the eleventh episode called “The Persistence of Memory,” and it’s about books. “What an astonishing thing a book […]
Two great feature stories came out this week about Robert Caro’s 40-year effort to chronicle the life of Lyndon Johnson: one in the New York Times Magazine, the other in Esquire. The fourth volume, The Passage of Power, which will hit stores on May 1. […]
I’ve always loved the work of economist Robert Shiller. His insight always seems to be ahead of its time–consider his books Irrational Exuberance,The Subprime Solution, The New Financial Order and most recently Animal Spirits. He has a new book coming out soon called Finance and […]
Robert Moor writes about the “bones of the book” at n+1. He reviews a book of essays titled, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books: “Then I read the collection’s penultimate contribution, by the novelist Reif Larsen. In it, he makes an […]
It seems like everybody is talking about this book right now: Coming Apart by Charles Murray. Both those on the left and the right are talking about (and arguing about) this book, most likely due to its author. Murray wrote the very controversial book The […]
The current debate about publishing has centered on technology. Will the world of print go away as e-readers continue to gain ground? Yet, this article by Curtis White in Lapham’s Quarterly shows that this question only gets to part of the issue. “When we speak […]
Jonathan Haidt’s research is cited in a wonderful book I am reading at the moment: Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature. Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia, has conducted research on how your politics really are shaped by […]