Neuroscientist Sam Harris Selects 12 Books Everyone Should Read
By Maria Popova On an excellent recent episode of The Tim Ferriss Show — one of these nine podcasts for a fuller life — neuroscientist Sam Harris answered a listener’s question inquiring what books everyone should read. As a lover of notable reading lists and an ardent admirer of Harris’s mind and work, I was thrilled to hear his recommendations — but as each one rolled by, it brought with it an ebbing anticipatory anxiety that he too might fall prey to male intellectuals’ tendency to extoll almost exclusively the work of other male intellectuals. (Look no further than Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reading list for evidence.) And indeed Harris did — the books he recommended on the show, however outstanding, were all by men. Complement with the reading lists of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Carl Sagan, and Alan Turing, then revisit Harris on the paradox of meditation and subscribe to The Tim Ferriss Show here.
World Renowned Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.
What Makes a Great City: Anaïs Nin on the Poetics of New York
by Maria Popova “Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power.” This week, I’m in Malmö, Sweden, where I’m opening a session on cities at The Conference. In pondering the question of what makes for a thriving city brimming with robust public life, I was reminded of a passage from a letter Anaïs Nin wrote to her lover Henry Miller, found in the sublime A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953 (public library) — a tome you might recall from recent literary jukebox installments. Dated December 3, 1934, this letter stands in stark contrast to Nin’s grim take on New York in comparison to Paris some five years later, but it bespeaks the same exhilarating enthusiasm for the city that Jan Morris captured a decade later and that New Yorkers and visitors of all eras have been — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes wholeheartedly, always inevitably — infected with: I’m in love with N.Y.
Brian Eno’s Reading List of Twenty Books Essential for Sustaining Human Civilization
By Maria Popova UPDATE: The folks from the Long Now have kindly asked me to contribute to the Manual for Civilization library — here is my own reading list. There is something inescapably alluring about the reading lists of cultural icons, perhaps because in recognizing that creativity is combinatorial and fueled by networked knowledge, we intuitively long to emulate the greatness of an admired mind by replicating the bits and pieces, in this case the ideas found in beloved books, that went into constructing it. After the reading lists of Carl Sagan, Alan Turing, Nick Cave, and David Bowie, now comes one from Brian Eno — pioneering musician, wise diarist, oblique strategist of creativity — compiled for the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilization, a collaboratively curated library for long-term thinking. Join me in supporting the Manual for Civilization, then revisit Eno’s insights on art.
Do we need to be a lot more careful about publicly lauding doctors who support paleo principles
There's been a lot of press recently around Dwight Lundell, MD - a retired heart surgeon who is cited in at least one traditional food blog as "an accomplished surgeon". He had a SOTT.net article in which he sounded reasonably in line with paleo principles. He's even had a recent March 17 Fox News appearance. Like others, I had the impulse to trumpet this, "Heart Surgeon says yadayadagrassfedsaturatedfatisgoodyadayada
Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman
by Maria Popova “Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.” To celebrate beloved author and dedicated diarist Anaïs Nin, here is the second installment in my ongoing collaboration with author, artist, philosopher, design interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, based on a 1941 entry from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library). Like our first collaboration, this beautiful typographic collage drawing is based on one of Nin’s most timeless insights on love, culled from her many volumes of diaries and her love letters with Henry Miller. Like last time, the artwork is available on Society6, with 100% of proceeds benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women writers and artists.
25 Essential Books That Every College Student Should Read
There is no college student who would like reading books, they say. Can you believe it? We hardly think so! Yes, reading is fashionable. Again. And every college student is always in fashion as a rule.
William James on Habit
by Maria Popova “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.”
Anaïs Nin on Embracing the Unfamiliar
by Maria Popova “It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.” We’ve already seen that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what drives science, and that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. John Keats wrote of this art of remaining in doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” and famously termed it “negative capability.” But count on Anaïs Nin to articulate familiar truths in the most exquisitely poetic way possible, peeling away at the most profound and aspirational aspects of what it means to be human.
