Recent posts – Page 7

The unlikely journey of a talented, black physicist from the hood shows the mechanics of ‘privilege’

Impressive and heart-warming life story

Old-fashioned advertising creativity is very, very important in marketing effectiveness; unlike ‘thinking logically’

One can leave it to an ad-man to create a false dichotomy, starting from a naive and short-sighted definition of ‘logic’.

Addresses are useful, but the system for assigning them varies between countries

Deirdre Mask – The address book

Badly written collection of arbitrary anecdotes that include addresses, but do not bring any notable insight to the reader.

Beyond a certain point, the limiting factor in your career is most likely a behavioral flaw

Marshall Goldsmith – What got you here won’t get you there

Valuable perspectives on how the minds of successful people work

One can remove the gods from the story of Troy’s fall, but it is so much better if you leave them in

Stephen Fry – Troy

As engaging as the other parts of the trilogy.

The secret to closing a deal is convincing content, delivered convincingly

Oren Klaff – Flip the script

The gripping storytelling makes the shameless bragging accceptable and entertaining.

Politicians need not believe in conspiricy theories to spread them

Russel Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum – A lot of people are saying

January 2020: The book spells out the scary power of herd mentality in a post-truth world (indebted to Harry Frankfurt and Fernbach and Sloman).

March 2022: In the perspective of this book, it is curious to see how far Putin can stretch his narrative on the Ukraine invasionfor his domestic audience.

The West has been underestimating the threat of Putin for many years

Garry Kasparov – Winter is coming

March 2022: A foresighted moral plea, that after the Ukraine invasion has become an even more chilling read.

When belief in progress has vanished, populists promise to rebuild the past – at all costs

Timothy Snyder – the road to unfreedom

October 2019: Elaborate and fascinating analysis of Putin’s Russia, which bears striking parallels to what populists in Western countries try, more recently.

March 2022: Chilling to see these themes back in Putin’s messaging around the Ukraine invasion.

Anything, from a generic concept to a highly personal experience, can be rated on a five-star scale

John Green – The anthropocene reviewed

Although the book is charming at times, reviewing an era through the personal experiences of one arbitrary writer in the early 21st century is a lost cause right from the start.

From Anime to the Karaoke machine and the Gameboy, Japanese design has had an outsized influence on pop culture

Matt Alt – Pure invention

Highly entertaining book, providing entertaining facts and refreshing perspectives.

Governments of developing countries should: 1. stimulate household farming 2. push through land reform, and 3. protect their budding manufacturing industry – in that order

Joe Studwell – How Asia Works

Interesting historical perspective on economic development with renewed relevance in a post free-trade world.

The US postal service is a success story of the benefits of public funding

Winifred Gallagher – How the post office created America

In theory a fascinating topic, but in practice a boring read; as I should have expected because the Post leveraged rather than drove innovation.

To solve the problems facing our planet today, we need to think ahead seven generations

Roman Krznaric – The good ancestor

Hard-felt plea for including future generations into political decision making.

Bayesian nets help prevent flawed statistical arguments and enable the leap from correlation to causation

Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie – The book of Why

The practical and relevant examples (health effect of smoking, impact of humanity on climate change) of causal inference alone make the book worthwhile.