Edward O. Thorp is a remarkable chap, and so this is a remarkable autobiography. A Depression-era child whose parents were smart but desperately poor, young Thorp took part-time jobs so that he could buy raw materials. As a boy,...
What is Dark Data? Consider the example of the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. Should the shuttle launch, despite fears that low temperatures might weaken the "o-ring" seals? A graph of seven previous occasions when the o-rings...
'"Racist" and "antiracist" are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or...
I've been a fan of Maria Konnikova's writing for a while. She's a Harvard-educated academic psychologist who switching to writing and turned out to be even better at that than psychology - her book, The Confidence Game, is a...
Sleight of Mind offers "75 ingenious paradoxes in mathematics, physics and philosophy" - and there are many classics here - the Monty Hall problem; the Hilbert hotel; Feynman's sprinkler; Achilles and the Tortoise. I was expecting...
Okay, this week I'm plugging my own brand new book, The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy. At least, a little bit. But I have some other books to tell you about too. One of the joys of writing this book was to be able to pick up two or three wonderful...
Rutger Bregman's new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, makes a simple argument: most people, most of the time, are decent. Whether this strikes you as absurd, or obvious, may depend on what side of bed you got out of. Bregman makes a strong case that we've been...
What is it like to be caught up in the middle of an unthinkable disaster? Why are our responses to these extreme and unexpected events themselves often extreme and unexpected? Amanda Ripley began writing this book after interviewing survivors of the 9/11 attacks....
A brief shout-out this week for a brief-but-good book, The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare For Disasters by Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther. Meyer and Kunreuther combine a nice dose of behavioural science with some striking examples: Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane...