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I’ve recorded this one before, but I thought the first time was a little rough. This one’s got a lot of background noise in it, though. Got to work on that in my new recording space.

It Won’t Be Long

This is a real book. You might think it isn’t, but it is. And it is awesome.

An eloquent call for better environmental stewardship, and a sobering review of the damage we’ve done so far.

Pinker reviews what human language can tell us about the structure of our minds and thoughts.

Damn, what a good novel!

Quine analyzes the referential mechanisms of English. Along the way he introduces the notion of “radical translation”, the attempt to translate a wholly unknown language into a known one, concluding that it is, in general, not possible.

On June 17, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers played a game of basketball. It was the sixth game in the NBA Finals and Boston was leading the best-of-7 series by 3 games to 2. Boston had had a rough road to the Finals, with several series going to seven games against teams they had been expected to beat handily. Comparatively, LA had cruised to their Finals berth and many analysts had picked them to win.

Venkatesh is a sociologist who spent ten years studying a housing project in Chicago. He gained access to the projects through a sort of partnership with a local gang leader, without whose permission he would not have been able to get very far. In this book he tells the story of his experiences and the lives of the people in Robert Taylor Homes.

Pollan surveys the Western landscape of eating and finds it wanting. He comes up with some rules of thumb he summarizes with “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”.

Krauss constructs the history of an oxygen atom from the Big Bang to far into the future. Absolutely engrossing.

I think we may be living through a golden age of popular science writing. There is so much quality work to be read in so many scientific fields it is hard to know where to begin.