Recent Feeds + Reads

1. This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman […] a formidable anthology of short essays by 151 of our time’s biggest thinkers on subjects as diverse as the power of networks, cognitive humility, the paradoxes of daydreaming, information flow, collective intelligence, and a dizzying, mind-expanding range in between. Together, they construct a powerful toolkit of meta-cognition — a new way to think about thinking itself.

1. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar [by Cheryl Strayed …] all of Sugar’s no-bullshit, wholehearted wisdom on life’s trickiest contexts — sometimes the simplest, sometimes the most complex, always the most deeply human.

1. Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson constructs a remarkable intellectual, creative, and spiritual biography of Cage — one of the most influential composers in modern history.

1. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag, the second published volume of her diaries, offers an intimate glimpse of the inner life of a woman celebrated as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable intellectuals, yet one who felt as deeply and intensely as she thought.

1. Breakthrough!: 90 Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination by Alex Cornell […] a small but potent compendium of field-tested, life-approved insight on optimizing the creative process from some of today’s most exciting artists, designers, illustrators, writers, and thinkers.

1. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt [seeks] to tease apart the most central existential question of all — why there is a world, rather than nothingness, a question he says is “so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child” — Holt pores through millennia of science and theology, theory by theory, to question our most basic assumptions about the world, reality, and the nature of fact itself, with equal parts intelligence, irreverence, and insight.

1. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg [proposes] that the root of adhering to our highest ideals — exercising regularly, becoming more productive, sleeping better, reading more, cultivating the discipline necessary for building successful ventures — is in understanding the science and psychology of how habits work.

1. The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely asks a seemingly simple question — “is dishonesty largely restricted to a few bad apples, or is it a more widespread problem?” — and goes on to reveal the surprising, illuminating, often unsettling truths that underpin the uncomfortable answer.

1. The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively.

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain dissects the anatomy of this socially-induced guilt and delves deep into one of psychology’s most enduring tenets — that the single most important defining aspect of personality is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum — to break through the “long and storied tradition” of neatly mapping this binary division onto others, like submission and leadership, loneliness and happiness, settling and success.