Read any good nonfiction lately, Veeky Forums?

Woah, Meacham is your neighbor? You lucky bastard that's so cool. I've only read TJ art of power but all of his books are on my list

>This sounds interesting. Can you expand on its ideas? I'll read it either way

It's about the history of advertising and marketing, and the ad sponsored media business model, which is thanks to the internet the dominant form. starts with the first paper back in colonial nyc to sell page space to make extra money beyond the cover price, and then he follows it all the way up to current "instragram influencers" etc. also worth noting that if facebook, google, and Veeky Forums are the attention merchants (probably attention pimps would be too blunt), what does that make the people creating content for free for those platforms? and what does it make the people that waste all their time getting pleasure from it? (he does not mention Veeky Forums, but the conclusions from it apply here, this site is no exception)

Thanks I intended on reading it but read a bad review and wasn't sure. Will give it a try

On topic: I reread both the "origin of wealth" and "the hour between dog and wolf"

I read some chapters of "essentials of physical anthropology" but it lacks depth (which is to be expected of course as it is the essentials) and I already knew most of it. The chapters on early homonids could be more interesting

>was it better than a meme? it's on my to-read soon list.
I read it when it first came out, and I don't think that there's a single book that's had a bigger effect on my daily life

The Force Awakens is a terrible mess of a film.

>Thanks I intended on reading it but read a bad review and wasn't sure. Will give it a try
I checked out the reviews again and I most certainly will not read it.
People who like it compare it to and recommend "Malcolm Gladwell". Jikes.

> Adams - Jefferson letters

Starts off slow and kind of boring but once their friendship develops it's really good. I guess it was published originally in two volumes and most people just read the second volume. Essential reading for Americas imo. It should be in curricula.

> The Dark Hero of the Information Age

Nice biography of cybernetic wizard Norbert Wiener. Really enjoyable read so far. Has a positive blurb by Vonnegut on the back. You ought to know this man and his work if you read Pynchon or Gaddis. It's why people thought Pynchon and Gaddis were the same person. They were both reading Wiener and directly referencing him.

We need a /nonfiction/ general here, tired of psudo deep and "meaningful" books.

Little essays and journalism about almost everything that happen on the 20 century, written in the same way that he wrote novels.
pretty good shit, desu

Agreed
And after that we purge this place

I generally alternate between a history book and a fiction book. I'm reading pic related at the moment

I'm down.

It's great. Does a good job at telling the battle from all perspectives, focusing on Hilter and Stalin's political struggle for a heaping pile of rubble for a city.

Gladwell has some good shit, Senpai. Never could understand why people shit on him.

>good
>nonfiction

Didn't mean to add that last "for a city".

Have you read any of Wieners works? Are they comprehensible for the layman? My mathematical skills aren't very sharp but i am fascinated by cybernetics

He picks interesting subjects but I rather read about it in other books or even in papers
His writing style angers me

out please.

The Human Use of Human Beings was literally written for the layman. He took his "Cybernetics" book and rewrote it without any formulas or what not.

Human Use of Human Beings is what Pynchon and Gaddis were reading, guaranteed. Although it wouldn't be surprised if Pynchon read the more dense stuff. Wiener really is a great writer. He's not some autistic sperg lord. He knew his audience and he also knew the philosophical and cultural ramifications of his work. It's a fascinating read.

People talk about how relativity and quantum mechanics changed everything but it's kind of bullshit. It was all Wiener.

I read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee last month which was intense but good.

>these two random things correlate, therefore one thing causes the other
He isn't a disciplined thinker

>I read it when it first came out, and I don't think that there's a single book that's had a bigger effect on my daily life

How so?

Just started The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates edited by Ralph Ketcham. Pretty solid so far. Just finished a short biography of Proust. Informative but not in the he-had-toast-for-breakfast-on-this-day way which I found refreshing after a very dull volume on Rodin I finished not long ago.

The Shallows made me understand the importance of how information is consumed, as opposed to just focusing on what information is being consumed. I often unplug for days at a time because of the effects easily accessible information has on concentration and retention. No other book affects my daily habits like that.

Are you out of your mind? How old are you? 15? Even then, it's kind of embarrassing not seeing right through his shit.

Like every book that is based on anecdotes instead of statistical research, the "proofs" of Gladwell's arguments are as weak as they can be. He simply examines a few stories and tries to generalize the results, and the stories are not particularly relevant: almost no major scientist, almost no major writer, almost no major painter, etc. There is nothing scientific about this approach of picking a handful of cases and ignoring thousands of widely available biographies of the most influential geniuses of the last century.

Whenever he mentions a professional study, it is an isolated sentence, and no mention is made of how that study was received by the rest of the professional community (i did my due diligence for the first few of them, then found out that most of them did NOT represent the consensus of the community, and gave up doing it for the second half of the book). In other words, it's all "hearsay". It is not that he uses an anecdote to illustrate a claim: he ONLY uses anecdotes. This is a book of anecdotes. And he made no effort to at least pick the study cases from a well-distributed population of successful scientists, writers, inventors, artists, etc: it sounds like it's just whatever interesting story he stumbled on at the library.

Gladwell uses a few biographies of successful people (mostly people who got rich and famous, which seems to be his definition of "success") to prove that a) the place and time matters as much as your brain, and b) hard work is crucial. I have to wonder, of course, what's so special about these claims. Does anyone think that opportunity has nothing to do with success? Does anyone think that the countries with the highest numbers of Nobel Prize winners are the USA, Britain and Germany as opposed to China, India, the Islamic world, Latin America and Africa, because Caucasians are genetically superior? That no African is listed in the rankings of richest people in the world because Africans are dumb? I don't quite understand what is revolutionary about Gladwell's claim that opportunity shapes your destiny.

On the other hand, i find it a bit ridiculous that he hardly mentions cultural factors. There is a reason if nothern Europe did well and southern Europe did not. There is a reason if former Latin colonies like Brazil and Argentina didn't do as well as former Anglosaxon colonies like the USA. There is a reason if so many kids raised in the USA end up with debts while poor immigrants of the same age end up with savings. There is a reason if Jews tend to excel at science, business and music better than others. It is not genetics, and it is not luck. It obviously has to do with the way people are raised in their families and societies. Gladwell's handpicked stories do little to explain why a staggering number of Silicon Valley startups are founded by Indian and Chinese immigrants, some of whom grew up in disadvantaged circumstances.

>It is not genetics
Glad you settled that. The scientific debate currently raging when it comes to the habitability of intelligence was finally decided by a random post on Veeky Forums.

>It is not genetics
Glad you settled that. The scientific debate currently raging when it comes to the heritability of intelligence was finally decided by a random post on Veeky Forums.

yeah this was good, I would recommend following up with his Berlin, 1945

I listened to his podcast and he sounded like a hack

I wasn't talking about intelligence. I was talking about work ethic.

Light non-fiction, interesting perspective.

my diary desu

You should share it with the world then.

This is actually a pretty good book.
It's good to understand how social media works.

I have this book sitting right above me. How far along are you and what to do you think of it?

Very fun book. Kind of batshit wacky with the prehistoric humanoid conspiracies, but still toptier. Hyped for Tao Lin's ripoffs

Don't know if there's an english version but Literaturas germánicas medievales by Borges was pretty good. Nice instroduction to meideval literature.

>Richard Dawkins
Wew lad

Read this in highschool. Agreed it's pretty interesting, but the whole I-ching thing etc made me pretty skeptical of the dude overall. Still fun to think that human consciousness was a consequence of eating magic mushrooms for the initial purpose of heightening sense perception while hunting.

Still reading High Performance MySQL - Optimization, Backups, and Replication.

Brilliant read for anyone who is even remotely critical of the EU.