Great Reads
The joy of Readmill
The last 60 or so books I’ve bought, I’ve bought them via Kindle for iPad. Erin recently introduced me to Readmill, which offers a reading app and a way to share highlighted passages online. People can follow one another, see what they’re reading, see which parts of a book someone found most interesting, puzzling, moving, […]
Exercise: Fertilizer for the Brain
Here’s some great motivation to keep up with your running program: John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist who posits that exercise is like fertilizer for the brain. From his book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School: At the molecular level, early studies indicate that exercise stimulates one […]
Managing the Apollo program: the Thursday Update Notebook
Another compelling anecdote from James R. Chiles’ Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, this time about how Joe Shea, NASA’s Apollo program manager, managed his program. By 1964, NASA and its contractors had 300,000 people working on the project: Shea’s main management tool wasn’t that complicated, either, just a looseleaf notebook that his […]
Frozen in place
Inviting Disaster–Lessons from the Edge of Technology is a fascinating read that deconstructs catastrophic events and why they happen. Author James R. Chiles’ style as a storyteller is particularly engaging and compelling. The book is filled with fascinating anecdotal asides on technological disasters of all kinds. He recounts a horrific accident at the Hungarian Carbonic […]
Rosanne Cash on Work Ethic
Steven Pressfield ran an excerpt from Rosanne Cash‘s compelling new memoir, Composed. In it, Cash describes a dream, in which Linda Ronstadt and a man named “Art” are sitting on a couch deep in discussion. When Cash tries to join the conversation, Art dismisses her, saying, “We don’t respect dilletantes.” The dream had a profound […]
The Brain that Changed Everything
Esquire Magazine’s November issue has a fantastic profile on Henry Molaison and his remarkable brain. Brain surgery, whatever the era, always requires at least two frightening qualities in its practitioners: the will to make forcible entry into another man’s skull, and the hubris to believe you can fix the problems inside. After a bicycle accident […]
Concussions: football–your weekly dose of brain damage
Sports Illustrated published a compelling article on long-term brain damage in NFL players–the cumulative effects of weekly hits to the head. Dr. Ann McKee, an associate professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University, studies the brains of deceased NFL players to better understand cumulative trauma to the brain: This slide of a cross-section of […]
On Original Details and the Truth of Experience
In a 2008 New York Times Measure by Measure column, Rosanne Cash writes about the power of original details in writing, and about writing as work and as discovery: Facts are not necessarily the best indicators of the deepest human experience. The table where you found the suicide note, the cup of coffee that turned […]
See a Penny, Pick it Up
As a child, I remember feeling joy at discovering a penny on the street. Today, if I even notice a penny, I step right over it. I never bother to stop. Do you? How many other small treasures do I miss, or worse, dismiss during my day as unworthy of my time and, more importantly, […]
The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr
The Liars’ Club, by Mary Karr, isn’t so much a memoir as a story of survival. Karr recalls her rags-to-riches-to-rags upbringing in Leechfield, Texas (and later Colorado) in the early 60s–a place where “a slow race” was the definitive competition among the kids–where you pedaled just slow enough on your two-wheel bike to be in […]
