Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future.
Language, Thought and Reality
Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak.
It's #BookLoversDay and I want to share the list of awesome #nonfiction books I read for this year's Polymath Training Challenge.
Run on a Hungarian book site, this challenge announces 12 nonfiction topics every year - 11 are the same, the 12th is randomly selected for each participant. You get to pick the books you want to read.
I found some awesome books for this year and finished early, so I'm sharing now 😊 📚
I do not like audio books.
My focus leaves & before long, I realize I have no idea what’s going on. Also, I don’t find listening to a book near as enjoyable as reading it, something gets lost in the process.
All that to say, I’ve been listening to this one. Granted, it’s taken me 2 times of checking it out at the library. These are all true stories that cover many subjects & the endings all make you think, which I love. I highly recommend.
I just finished an interleaved reading of two books, and wow! did they enhance one another.
The first was an approachable philosophical treatise about how science works given that scientists are human with all their faults. The answer: “evidence”. (Thanks to Jim DiCarlo for this rec + confirmation by @markdhumphries).
The second was a book describing the unfolding of ideas about evolution from Darwin’s tree (mutations + survival of the fittest) through more modern ideas about horizontal gene transfer between species - a perfect illustration of the ideas in the philosophical book but not included in it. (Thanks to @cyrilpedia for this rec).
Books can be complementary in all sorts of ways. Do you know of pairings that are enhanced when thought about together?
I’m just starting a book about the nature of time and ideas about time travel by @JamesGleick. Any thoughts on a good complement for it? (Maybe @JamesGleick) even has suggestions?
The fastest way to get me to put a book or story down is to over use exclamation points! I hate it! Don't do it! If every sentence you write ends with a bang, then there is no impact there!
#JustFinished Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
This has been an absolutely fascinating book to read and is perhaps the most important book I'll read all year. Merchant is spot on with his commentary about the parallels between the first Industrial Revolution and now. We have not learned a thing about protecting our populations and economies from mass unemployment during technological upheaval.
Anyone know a bookseller website that focuses on selling #academic works (and ships to the US)? Not a specific press, I know they often sell directly, but a more press-agnostic site. Think Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Waterstones, but for academic books. I'd like to browse various topics, knowing what I'm looking at is considered academic. And sometimes, I want to browse more in-depth or academic topics that wouldn't be on a general public site.
I suppose a university bookstore could work, but I think they tend to focus on what's required reading for the semester's courses, and I want a broader selection than that.
Pandora's Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk by Alison Young
This fearless, deeply reported book about laboratory accidents asks the haunting question some elite scientists don’t want the public to entertain: Did the COVID-19 pandemic start with a lab leak in Wuhan, China?
#books#nonfiction#biography King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig, My rating:5 out of 5 stars, Read from: 04/04/2024 - 04/07/2024.
Book description: The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.
#JustFinished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
I feel like he spent too much time working at being cutesy and not enough at internal consistency. It was an amusing book, however. Taken as a light historical fiction about the run-up to modern life, it's good enough.
One example of the issues with the book follows:
He sets up the straw man of biological essentialism, then knocks it down with social consctructs.
I finished The Art Thief by Michael Finkel. It documents the crimes of one prolific art-loving thief who robbed out-of-the-way castle museums and other convenient locations within a seven-country radius from his home base in Alsace.
I find art heist stories compelling even as they are disconcerting. Probably because I like reading about the art and art crime units as well as the people whose work it is to care for art. In this genre is also art restitution stories, which are also compelling.
Unfortunately (no spoilers), as interesting as it was reading about the stolen art and even the way it was stolen (the audacity -- and no romanticization of the thief here), the book's ending is a letdown.
However, it's a quick little read that's entertaining and also a study in one person's psychology.
The thing about this kind of grief is that nobody knows what it's like until it happens. The sadness becomes a permanent a part of you, lurking just under the surface, and nobody understands. The feeling of being seen is extraordinarily rare. This book made me feel seen, and gave me space to feel the sadness. I'm not OK. But I'm not the only one. #bookstodon#nonfictionhttps://bookshop.org/a/7949/9780525553038
A gripping narrative of power, corruption and greed, The Mechanism is the true story of how a simple investigation into money laundering uncovered the biggest corruption scandal in human history.
The Mechanism is an essential work of non-fiction that exposes the rottenness caused when politicians and big businesses believe they are above the law.
Thinking of queueing this up for my next non-fic read. Or maybe I should first finish the ultra challenging "Designing Organisations"? Or perhaps read both concurrently? 😂
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies
Once treated as the absence of knowledge, ignorance today has become a highly influential topic in its own right, commanding growing attention across the natural and social sciences where a wide range of scholars have begun to explore the social life and political issues involved in the distribution and strategic use of not knowing.
I wrote a book and now I have to wrap it up. In that effort, I have many! facts to check. I think I can plow through the bulk of it at ~60 facts per/day for ~30 days (spread across ~10 sources). My new hobby, I guess?
This type of tedious, detailed work is not my favorite thing. I have the source material, but I need to go back and scrutinize what I wrote in detail to make sure it's correct.
On one hand, it may have been easier if past Nicole did a better job at documenting details along the way. On the other hand, it was really unclear what would make it through the final filter and documenting every little thing would have been even more tedious (and would have disrupted the process of connecting it all together).
Any tips for how to make this new hobby of mine easier or more pleasant?
Five stars: What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman (2023) is a survey of our current understanding of owls. The audiobook is read by the author.
Hidden Links: How Random Historical Events Shaped Our World by Zac Sangeeth & Sangeeth Varghese
Unravelling thread by thread, this book investigates the disproportional effect of historically unconnected and random events like climate changes, imperial pursuits, pandemics, and nomadic migrations on our modern lives in the most unbelievable ways.
Time to read! Going to start reading The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax.
I've already started this book several times but this time I really want to read it. Just have to stay focused and not get distracted by Mastodon. 😅 :mastodon: :blobcatread:
I finished How to Hide an Empire and I didn't think I could be more disgusted with the U.S., but I am. And I even already knew a lot of what was in the book.
(Academic press) book pre-publication reviews are back. Really positive. YES!!!!!!!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉.
So now I'm moving onto final revisions. It feels good to slip back into that headspace again.
My big question for anyone who has sent a book off to the world: What was your strategy for those last steps? There's addressing the feedback, of course. But after that? It will never been perfect. But it has to be great. How do you know when to let it go?