Thoughts while reading Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris. Ian Morris’ extraordinary book has led me to a surprising conclusion: that climate change has been one of the most profound determinants of the course of human history.
Continue Reading...Thoughts while reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee As my 70th birthday draws inexorably closer, I find myself spending inordinate amounts of time thinking about the changes that have taken place during my lifetime. After all, 70 years is nearly a century — well, 7/10 of a century, […]
Continue Reading...Charles Darwin was by no means the first person to posit a theory of evolution. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a famed naturalist in his own right, had written about the idea decades before. Others had published speculation about evolution as well, some of them years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. One of these was a Scottish gardener who, in 1831 (the year Darwin departed England on the Beagle), wrote up his own thinking about the principles of natural selection in an obscure book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which was ignored by one and all at the time (with the possible exception of ship-builders and foresters).
Continue Reading...Thoughts on reading The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, by Peter Bergen
Continue Reading...The summer after I finished fifth or sixth grade (I forget which), my photo appeared in my home-town newspaper along with a two- or three-paragraph story. In the photo, I was carrying a teetering stack of books, my weekly haul from the public library. The story quoted one of the librarians about my seemingly unquenchable […]
Continue Reading...No, I’m not going to tell you that one is vastly better than the other. It’s not that simple. Early adopter that I am, I purchased my first Kindle not long after the device came on the market. Within weeks, I had found a new love-object. It quickly became apparent that I was able to […]
Continue Reading...If you have a Kindle, as I do, you’ve come across complaints in the pages of Amazon.com about the “outrageous Kindle price.” Most of the time, as you know, that price is $9.99. In my earliest encounters with this all-too-common complaint, I wondered whether there was a groundswell of concern for the financial health of […]
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