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How will governments and society respond to a global climate disaster? Kim Stanley Robinson paints a vivid picture of what’s possible in a brilliant work of fiction that straddles science, economics, and politics. In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson takes the reader to a near future and lays
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“The best, most complete friendships are those in which friends love and wish each other well as ends in themselves, and not solely, or even primarily, as means to further ends—social advancement, amusement, the promotion of some cause, or even mutual edification or improvement. In such friendships, the friends
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This is a sample of a monthly book recommendation newsletter I send to almost 200 readers each month. You can sign up for it here. In February I spent time thinking about “hits”. Only a tiny fraction of films, out of hundreds released each year, generate blockbuster returns. Only a
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Here’s a message I sent to my private mailing list today. I haven’t blogged in a while so I thought I’d share something. If you like it, you can join over 100 other people (or 144 to be exact) who receive an email from me once a
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“But the problem is that most things look trivial if we look at them the wrong (or perhaps right) way, and everything is ephemeral. It’s vanity, for instance, to think that having a best-selling book or winning a literary prize is not ephemeral. Given the fickleness of taste and
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In 2015 I took on the challenge of reading 53 books (roughly one title a week). After completing the marathon, I came to appreciate a few points about the process: 1. Each book is a catalyst for growth: you can learn something new, challenge old beliefs, and perhaps even, dare
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Predictably Irrational “In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find, to their horror, that
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After receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918, Max Planck went on tour across Germany. Wherever he was invited, he delivered the same lecture on new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur grew to know it by heart: “It has to be boring giving the same speech each time,
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“But just as the human body didn’t evolve to deal well with today’s easy access to abundant fat and sugars, and will crave an extra cheeseburger when it shouldn’t, the human mind, apparently, didn’t evolve to deal with excess money, and will desire more long after
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“Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child
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My New Bedroom (Limited to 3 Colours) “Instead of composing freely, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints. But that’s precisely the point. Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be
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“Many aspiring artists, for example, have at some stage to deal with the harsh truth that they are merely quite good and do not have what it takes to be truly exceptional. Potential that appears unlimited to youth may look more finite when seen through more experienced eyes. Jean-Paul Sartre