3 good reads

New York Review of Books. “We Are Hopelessly Hooked,” by Jacob Weisberg. Review of four books on the impact of digital devices are having on how we think and behave. Favorite lines are from a section on trolls: “We can’t just deal with the emotional toll of brutality on the Web by toughening up. We need a Web that is less corrosive to our humanity.” Mind Hacks blog. “A quartet of complementary brain books.” Four must-read books on neuroscience for the lay person. On Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience: It tackles several areas as examples of where these fallacies […]

How Matt Ridley changed my mind on climate science

There is no shortage of compelling literature about climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben are two of the best practitioners. Kolbert’s game-changing Field Notes from a Catastrophe opens with the story of how residents of the tiny Alaskan village of Shishmaref are abandoning their homes because progressively warmer temperatures delay the seasonal freezing of the Chukchi Sea. As a result, those living near the Chukchi are vulnerable to storm surges featuring 12-foot waves capable of carrying their houses into the sea. In Eaarth, McKibben warns that our home planet is already irreversibly altered by climate change: “In 2003, France […]

The best blog post ever

I first came across Leo Babauta’s writing in 2006 or 2007. This was shortly after he started his blog Zen Habits, and it focused mostly on task-based self-improvement: productivity hacks (such as keeping his email inbox empty); getting fit (quit smoking and start exercising) and how to get out of debt (tips for spending less money and how to start saving). Over the years, Babauta has largely stuck with writing about self-improvement, and while he still tackles the same topics (healthy eating, fitness, and personal finances) his approach to personal change is more zen than habits. For a while, Babauta […]

5 lessons for living from a haiku master

Haiku as we know it today―a rich means of expression and one of Japan’s highest art forms―can be traced to Bashō, a 17th-century haiku master. An example of his work―one of his most well-known haikus―evokes the Zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping: Old pond― A frog jumps in The sound of water As Stephen Addiss tells it in his 2011 book The Art of Haiku: Its History Through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters, early haiku was more akin to limericks, jokes, and puns: “Bolstered by goodly quantities of sake, composing humorous linked verse became a very […]