=================================== Thought-provoking books and media =================================== .. caution:: This section is mostly finished. Here I propose a list of some books which might inspire thinking beyond their specific subject matter. This "thinking beyond..." can be due to (a) an approach to the subject matter that brings several disparate fields together, or (b) a way of finding angles of analysis of a topic that expand our way of thinking about any subject. Some words about the choice of books: The list is clearly arbitrary: I have put down books I am familiar with and which I found thought-provoking. The most obvious "selection effect" is my personal preference in reading. I don't agree with everything that is said in all of them, and sometimes I don't even agree with the book's overall thesis, or the way the author has chosen to argue it, or even the tone. Still, they can be though-provoking, and reading them can be a part of your own dialectic in how you think about a subject. For example, "The Dawn of Everything" seems to use what I sometimes characterize as a "I have a big chip on my shoulder" approach: the authors are proposing a different view of prehistoric civilizations from a mainstream narrative, and they feel the need to frequently point out how wrong the proponents of other narratives are. When I read these passages I found them awkward: they impeede the flow, and leave me less convinced than I might be otherwise. It is also "clannish": it limits the efficacy of that discussion to those who have read the books they are criticizing. Still, I think it is important to be aware of their point of view, and I would recommend reading the book if you want to do a full tomography of early civilization. Sometimes the book shows how the author has put careful thought into how to present the material. In the introduction to "The Story of Art", for example, Gombrich writes: "[...] I have tried, in writing this book, to follow a number of more specific self-imposed rules, all of which have made my own life as its author more difficult, but may make that of the reader a little easier." Other times I have found that a book is "intellectually not lazy". For example, although one might argue with some specifics, Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" is a *tour-de-force* that does not skimp on explaining methodology and sources. .. sidebar:: How to *read* these resources There are many articles and books on how to read books. In this vast space of opinions there is really no need for mine, but I will put my oar in just a little bit, and express some opinions while I am at it. An article I have found to be **good** (and also brief!) is Paul Edwards's "How to Read a Book" (I read it at version 5.0). You can can `find it here `_ [#]_ It points out the fundamental difference between reading fiction (where you have to read in order, since it is building up suspense) and nonfiction where you can and should dart around. Edwards puts it really well (and concisely!) with gems like: So unless you're stuck in prison with nothing else to do, NEVER read a non-fiction book or article from beginning to end. Instead, when you’re reading for information, you should ALWAYS jump ahead, skip around, and use every available strategy to discover, then to understand, and finally to remember what the writer has to say. This is how you’ll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time... Almost all the books and articles I'm proposing here are non-fiction, so please attack them with the optimization goal that Edwards proposes. I also recommend skipping the awful book by Adler and Van Doren "How to Read a Book". This is one of several awful books that has acquired the status of being a "classic" and gets recommended out of group-think. .. rubric:: Footnotes .. [#] In case the published copy moves away I also offer a copy for download here: :download:`PaulEdwards-HowToReadABook_v5.0.pdf` I can do this because the author did the awesome thing of offering it under a creative commons BY-SA license. .. contents:: Sections inside this page :depth: 1 :local: :backlinks: none Books: non-fiction ================== History ------- Tamin Ansary The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection Barbara Tuchman A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14\ :sup:`th` Century The march of folly: from Troy to Vietnam David Fromkin The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century Margaret MacMillan War: How Conflict Shaped Us Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Mary Beard S.P.Q.R. A History of Ancient Rome Jared Diamond Collapse David Graeber and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature Leonard Mlodinow The Upright Thinker Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer Politics -------- Ibram X. Kendi How to Be an Antiracist Francis Fukuyama The Origins of Political Order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution Michael Lewis The Fifth Risk Jae Gutterman Her Neighbor's Wife Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design John Green The Anthropocene Revisited: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet Art --- E\. H. Gombrich | The Story of Art | (There is an edition of this book for younger readers.) Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation Miscellaneous ------------- Hanif Abdurraqib They can't kill us until they kill us: essays Garry Kasparov How Life Imitates Chess Computer science, AI, math -------------------------- Melanie Mitchell Artificial Intelligence for Thinking Humans Complexity: A Guided Tour Douglas Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll Julia Galef The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters Leonard Mlodinow The Drunkard's Walk Richard Hamming The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn Nate Silver The Signal and the Noise Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Psychology ---------- Michael Lewis The Undoing Project Jim Davies Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One With the Universe Being The Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business David McRaney You are Not so Smart Marcel Mauss The Gift Writing and literary criticism ------------------------------ Harold Bloom The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages ( https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/harold-bloom/the-western-canon/ ) How to Read and Why Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar The madwoman in the attic : the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination Steven Pinker The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Philosophy ---------- Anthony Gottlieb The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy Bertrand Russell A history of Western Philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory Jonathan Glover Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century Carlo Rovelli Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity Brian Christian The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values Thomas Moore Utopia Medicine and epidemiology ------------------------- Laurie Garrett The Coming Plague Richard Preston The Demon in the Freezer Richard Rhodes Deadly Feasts Jeremy N. Smith Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients. Tracy Kidder Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure The World Mountains Beyond Mountains (Adapted for Young People) .. sidebar:: How to *frame* these resources Read critically: for each book or article you read, look for articles with contrasting points of view. Always make sure you are convinced that you understand the context ... make sure you have always asked the next question (refer to our other chapters) ... does it teach us how to write about subjects? ... FIXME: unfinished Articles, article collections, blogs ==================================== Paul N. Edwards How to Read a Book (version 5.0 on 2022-05-29) - https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20230526182410/https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf Articles related to the New York Times "1619 Project" * https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html * https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/ * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inclusive-case-1776-not-1619/604435/ Collection of articles on world history https://www.worldhistory.org/ The Manhattan Project: an interactive history https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/index.htm Voices of the Manhattan Project https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/ Sridhar Mahadevan Quora response on art and AI - https://www.quora.com/Do-you-believe-human-art-and-design-is-about-to-crumble-because-of-the-introduction-of-artificial-intelligence/answer/Sridhar-Mahadevan-6?share=1 Taylor Branch The Shame of College Sports - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/ Blas Moros's The Rabbit Hole blog and more - https://blas.com/ You are Not so Smart blog - https://youarenotsosmart.com/ Brian Doyle How Did You Become a Writer? - https://theamericanscholar.org/how-did-you-become-a-writer/ Audio/visual ============ This section is necessarily less permanent. The links I give here might not work: some material might have disappeared from the web, or might have been moved to a different location. Still, it should be possible to find almost all this material with some effort. Lectures -------- Richard Feynman Los Alamos From Below - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w Richard Rhodes Twilight of the Bombs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRN2g8uoQkg Stuart Firestein The Pursuite of Ignorance - TED talk - http://historyofliterature.com/ Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science - Santa Fe Institute public lecture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIah2JtqlZk Melanie Mitchell Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMUqvhuDZtQ&t=228s The Future of Artificial Intelligence - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwHDAfAAKd4 Brian Arthur Complexity Economics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8IzaECeQOk Paul Bloom How Pleasure Works - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOfP-Lubuw Can prejudice ever be a good thing? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDBcoRLkut8 Amanda Palmer The Art of Asking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMj_P_6H69g Brian Christian The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zs-GQ-ECLs Quentin Skinner Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction - Talks at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKGuzJ6GwHM Richard Hamming You and Your Research - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw Hans Rosling Global population growth, box by box - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg DON'T PANIC - Hans Rosling showing the facts about population - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E 200 years in 4 minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8t4k0Q8e8Y David Foster Wallace This is Water - transcript and audio - https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ Interviews ---------- Michael Lewis "In conversation" on the art of writing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVMW__W6ulY Podcasts -------- History of Literature http://historyofliterature.com/ Freakonomics https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ Alex and Books https://alexandbooks.com/podcast Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history Hari Kunzru's Into the Zone https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/into-the-zone The BBC's Start the Week https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9xr/episodes/downloads Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl Roman Mars Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law - https://learnconlaw.com/ 99% invisible - https://99percentinvisible.org/ Strong Songs https://strongsongspodcast.com ... And what about fiction? =========================== Fiction might have greater influence on us than non-fiction: reading fiction alters our mood more, which can predispose us to assimilate new ways of experiencing subject matter. This can lead to provoking new thoughts that then stay with us. Fiction, as well as art and music, can also make us realize that the words and art media are pliable and can be formed into remarkable new works. That frame of mind would be a precious one for a researcher. But is there a reason to put a list here? I thought about it at length: it is tempting to mention the books that have had great effect on me, or that I know have had the effect on others. But it would not put *you* along a path to get the same out of it. I do not know how to work in with the indirectness with which fiction affects us, which ... in the end I came up with science fiction books, but they seemed appropriate from a different point of view. The extreme "world building" in science fiction gives it a sliver of non-fiction-ness. So I am looking for suggestions on how to think about a section on fiction, or on reasons to remove this stub altogether. Meanwhile I have two suggestions: * Follow reading lists from books of literary criticism, or the light-weight version which are blogs and podcasts about books. Now your reading of fiction will be accompanied by an analysis of the books, and you will have a greater self-awareness of the effect it has had on you. * Read treatises that discuss a genre of fiction on a large-scale, such as Aristotle's "Poetics", Auerbach's "Mimesis", Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy", ... .. rubric:: notes on future additions Zora Neale Hurston - maybe "Fannie Hurst" Richard Dawkins (books and TED talk) Steven Jay Gould