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.
Sections inside this page
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 14th 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)
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”
- Collection of articles on world history
- The Manhattan Project: an interactive history
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/index.htm
- Voices of the Manhattan Project
- 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
- 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
- Freakonomics
- Alex and Books
- Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History
- Hari Kunzru’s Into the Zone
- The BBC’s Start the Week
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9xr/episodes/downloads
- Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time
- Roman Mars
Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law - https://learnconlaw.com/
99% invisible - https://99percentinvisible.org/
- Strong Songs
… 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”, …
notes on future additions
Zora Neale Hurston - maybe “Fannie Hurst”
Richard Dawkins (books and TED talk)
Steven Jay Gould