Category: Books
-
Mathematica
Mathematician David Bessis has written a book about what we do when we do mathematics. It’s one of the best books I’ve read recently. One the second page, Bessis writes, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” When I was fifteen, I hated this quote from Einstein.…
-
Feynman vs. The Abacus
This is an anecdote from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! It nicely shows what genius actually consists of: Not raw processing power (that’s what the abacus represents), but simple mental connections and intuition. The setting is Brazil, where Feynman spent some time. A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I…
-
You Can’t Access Most Books
150 millions books have been published, according to the estimate I asked ChatGPT for. Around 70 million have been digitized, but 70% of those are neither in the public domain nor commercially available in print. This means that 80 million books are hard to access because they haven’t been digitized,…
-
Aimless Reading
Reading fiction is fun, but interpreting fiction isn’t. Neither am I convinced that trying to interpret novels or poems in a structured way is to be encouraged. What would happen if in English class students read books but didn’t discuss them? My guess is that literature would become more popular…
-
Pastwatch
At a house party this fall, I noticed a wall-to-wall bookshelf filled with science fiction paperbacks. I recognized some of the authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and Poul Anderson, but most of them were new to me. Frederik Pohl and Orson Scott Card took up a lot of the shelf…
-
The Higher Cause Delusion
In the most recent episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks and Richard Dawkins talk about humorist P. G. Wodehouse. Towards the end, Brooks contrasts the bloodless prose of Kant and Hegel with Homer. He accurately observes that Homer represents a world of life in a way that the paragons of…
-
The Best Books I Read in 2025
This year, I read 24 books. That averages two per month, which is a coincidence as I didn’t set myself a target. Most of them I wrote about here. My favorites were: These are the books I liked best in 2025, not the best books of 2025. With the exception…
-
Insider Attacks
In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes a massacre of French colonial soldiers in North Africa, carried out by a local chieftain by the name of El Mammoun (El Mammun in the English translation by Lewis Galantière). The location seems to be what is now Mauritania. This reminded…
-
Wind, Sand and Stars
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French pilot in the early years of aviation. He flew military and civilian aircraft in the 1920s and 1940s before dying in a crash during a reconnaissance flight over Nazi-occupied France in 1944. He is most famous for his children’s book The Little Prince, which…
-
The Malleability of Intuition
Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand the solution as I’m writing it down, and only later, after having thought about it for some time, do I understand it in some nebulous…
-
The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
Thinking about forecasting and AI, I sometimes remember this story by Greg Egan. It was published as part of his collection Axiomatic. Here is my review of Egan’s novel Distress.
-
Arctic Facts
Here are the facts I found surprising enough to highlight in my copy of Arctic Dreams: Most animals live lives in biological keeping with the earth’s twenty-four-hour period of rotation. They have neither the stamina nor the flexibility, apparently, to adapt to the variable periods of light they encounter in…
-
Arctic Dreams
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez still shows the Soviet Union on its maps of the Arctic. There is no mention of global warming, unthinkable for any contemporary report about the region. That’s because it came out in 1986, but that hardly matters. The important parts are untouched by time. One …
-
Child of Freedom, Parent of Prosperity
How much should the government spend on science? One view is that it should spend a lot, since every dollar pays back many times over. The other view is that governmental research spending is wasteful and that many of its benefits could be better realized by industry-funded research. I know…
-
No Book? Big Whoop
Asterisk Magazine’s current issue is about books. Here’s what the magazine editors have to say about those fiber and ink bundles: Books are sources of great and enduring pleasure, but is it really a loss to society if people find their fun elsewhere? One can read for information, but –…
-
The Evolution of Everything
The Evolution of Everything isn’t Matt Ridley’s best book, but it has sections that are among the most thought-provoking writing I’ve come across. The theme is the insight that a lot of good things aren’t created but evolve. For example, is education important for economic growth? According to Ridley, not…
-
Death by AI
The most likely cause of death today is AI. It’s a reasonable statement. The most common cause of death right now is ischemic heart disease, which kills around 13% of people worldwide. However, if we assume that the chance of superintelligent AI turns against humans is higher than 13%, and…
-
The Rational Optimist
Reading and thinking about Birds, Sex & Beauty by Matt Ridely reminded me of his other books I’ve read over the years. He’s a wonderful writer and keen observer, especially in his books. His political writing, for example in the Times, is angrier and not always well argued. The first…
-
Greatness Can’t Be Planned
No plan survives first contact with the enemy Helmuth von Moltke The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything Dwight Eisenhower I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s possible to will greatness into existence. On the contrary, to a first approximation none of the grand strategies that I have…
-
Rome Was Different
In SPQR, Mary Beard provides an overview of the history of ancient Rome from its founding to the first century AD. She knows her stuff and there are some surprising insights. For example, I didn’t know how much the Romans where sticklers for the rule of law. Unfortunately, her prose is…
-
Shamanism
There are those who travel spirit worlds. They may know that those worlds only exist in their minds, or they may believe that those worlds are real. They use drugs to enter altered states, sometimes in combination with music. They burn herbs, they paint their bodies, they put on masks,…
-
Birds, Sex & Beauty
We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine,” then why the extravagance of the score? Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Natural selection, defined by genes that benefit survival becoming more frequent,…
-
Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry
It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colors for a hundred million years. I’m a mammal and mammals don’t do beauty much. We mammals…
-
In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin’s most well-known work is In Patagonia. It’s a mix of travel writing, history and a fiction. It was first published in 1977. Below are a few paragraphs I highlighted. A hundred years ago, the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their…
-
Great Argus
Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem to depict three-dimensional “pebbles“, showing the extent to which sexual selection will go.
-
Selective Breeding for Longevity
In his Science Fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. They arrived there by selective breeding for old age. What would it take to actually breed a population to maximize its life span? Doing this in humans isn’t…
-
Consider the Fish
Fishing is a bit cruel but also makes me feel closer to nature. Jon Ontario talks about this conundrum here. It’s the same tension David Foster Wallace talks about in Consider the Lobster. Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related…
-
Font Indifference
What convinced some typesetters that it’s okay to add a paragraph on the font they chose for a book on the last page? Why not also have the bookbinder write something on which paper they chose and whoever set the book’s price write something about their economic considerations? Before I…
-
Moana
My kids don’t care what I’m reading. Sometimes, when they have run out of other things to do, they leaf through my current book, only to toss it aside contemptuously after a few seconds. Kon-Tiki is different. As soon as they saw the photos of the six bearded Scandinavians sailing…
-
Shrunken Heads
This is from Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. Heyerdahl and his friend Herman Watzinger talk with Jorge, a Peruvian acquaintance, over dinner. I laid my fork carefully aside, and Jorge told his story. He was once living with his wife in the jungle, washing gold and buying up supplies for other gold-washers.…
-
Kon-Tiki
In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl led an expedition to cross the Pacific on a raft built from balsa wood in the style of the ancient Incas. Believe, even if it’s in a weak theory, moves mountains. While building his raft, Heyerdahl was given many good reasons that his expedition would fail.…
-
Outdoor Books
This is a good list of nature, travel and adventure books compiled by Ken Ilgunas. His personal preferences align more with my own than the supposedly more objective meta-list he compiled from comparable book lists. The top spots in that list are dominated by old travel books, most of them…
-
The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurthy is set in a small Texas town in the 1950s. McMurthy didn’t idolize the time or the place, which is clearly modeled on his hometown. Instead, he pulled off the seemingly impossible: Lots of shocking descriptions of sex, but without being titillating. Sex…
-
Napping Outside
One of my favorite things when I’m out backpacking or canoeing is to take an afternoon nap under a tree somewhere. Karl Heinrich Waggerl wrote about this experience in his Wagrainer Tagebuch (Wagrain diaries). Waggerl was an Austrian writer who is so unknown in the English-speaking world he only has…
-
Visual Thinking
This is one of the books that influenced me as a kid but that I had forgotten about since. I only re-discovered it because I went through some old books of mine on a trip back home. Visual Thinking by Marco Meirovitz and Paul I. Jacobs introduces mathematical concepts and…
-
Revenge of the Tipping Point
Malcom Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point is thought-provoking without being a great book. This isn’t easy to pull off, but Gladwell did it. I read Gladwell’s original Tipping Point back in 2012. In the introduction to Revenge, Gladwell mentions that he meant to revisit the ideas in Tipping Point.…
-
Network Television
[Larry] Gross and several of his colleagues once did a fascinating bit of research to demonstrate what television of that era was capable of. He analyzed the responses of a large group of people who were asked how they felt about the biggest hot-button racial issues of the 1970s, such…
-
Anthroposophy
There are more than 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide, and more than 2,000 Waldorf kindergartens. As a kid, I went to one of them and didn’t like it. Later, I went to Austrian public schools and preferred it. My experience isn’t universal: One of my sisters, who had done her whole…
-
An African Abroad
A recently published review of a travelogue first published in 1963 was intriguing enough for me to order and read it. An African Abroad was written by adventurer Ọlábísí Àjàlá. Everything about him is interesting, starting with the name: Never before have I encountered anyone with so many diacritical marks…
-
People Don’t Read
Women read more than men, but that’s an incomplete observation, Oy argues here. Nobody reads contemporary literary fiction any more. People still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction. They argue that it’s at least partly a quality problem: For the last twenty years American literary…
-
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I have known about Annie Dillard for some time but I have never before read anything she has written. In retrospect, that was a mistake. There is no better nature writing than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan, Dillard possesses an awe of nature that is…
-
Tree Climbing
As a kid, I liked to climb a tall fir that stood beside our house. Its branches were spread close and evenly, which made it easy. Because I was climbing close to the trunk, the needles on the outside hid me from my parents’ eyes. One of my favorite parts…
-
Life and Art
Life and Art, Richard Russo‘s newest book, is a collection of his essays. It came out only a few days ago, and since I like his novels, I picked it up. Some of the essays, including Meaning and Miracles, are gems. Others are fine but I won’t read them again…
-
Sea of Tranquility
Sometimes I read books that turn out to be boring, but rarely do I come across one I dislike. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is one of them. It wasn’t written for me or someone like me. Instead it seems to have been written for Netflix producers,…
-
Revelation and Delusion
This is from Feet of Clay by Anthony Storr, as quoted in Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way…
-
Under the Banner of Heaven
In They Call me Trinity, a comedy western starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, a group of Mormon pioneers is harassed by a languid, land-grabbing criminal called the Major and an allied band of Mexican bandits. Because their religion does not permit them to fight, the Mormons initially respond to the…
-
Miracles
When I say that I have experienced miracles, I mean that I witnessed things that are unlikely to have happened by chance. My “miracles” are interesting coincidences, nothing more. I assumed that it was obvious that I didn’t mean the word literally. I don’t believe that those events had supernatural…
-
Nuclear Nazis
In The Berlin Project, Gregory Benford, who is deservedly known for writing some of the best hard science fiction around, asks what would’ve happened if the United States had developed a nuclear bomb early enough to use it against the Nazis during World War II. Then there’s the question what would’ve…
-
Mistakes
This is Daniel Dennett quoting William James in Intuition Pumps: He who says “Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe … It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of…
-
Intuition Pumps
Like all artisans, a blacksmith needs tools, but – according to an old (indeed almost extinct) observation – blacksmiths are unique in that they make their own tools. I met Daniel Dennett in Ghent in 2008. The students of the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie had been organizing a symposium that…
-
Why We Die
In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan looks at longevity, and whether there may be a way to extend it. I’ve talked with Ramakrishnan a few times when I did my PhD at the same Institute where he solved the structure of the ribosome. Remembering those conversations, it occurs to me…
-
Shaman
Nothing remains of the millions of brilliant men and women who lived before we invented writing. A few cave paintings and some carved figurines are the only exception. But what about their music, their science and their worldview? We know next to nothing, and this is likely to remain the…
-
Finite and Infinite Games
In this little book, James P. Carse argues that evil is the termination of possibilities, or as he calls it, of infinite play. Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the…
-
Collider Bias
This is also known as Berkson’s paradox. It arises when there is ascertainment bias in the study design. Here’s an example from Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West’s book, Calling Bullshit: It seems that when dating there is an inverse correlation between attractiveness and niceness. However, those who are…
-
The Humanities are Avoiding AI
Few people working in the humanities have extensively tested the latest large language models, and most people base their opinions on what they have heard or read others say about them. This is surprising, as those who write and read for a living are well positioned to judge an algorithm…
-
The Game of Life
The board game Go is famous for having extremely simple rules yet having an almost unlimited number of ways to play it. The mathematician John Horton Conway was good at coming up with simple games that resemble Go in that they have simple rules and complex outcomes. This includes games…
-
Infinite in All Directions
The universe seems to be designed not just to allow live, but to favor interesting, diverse live, with plants and animals and minds and cultures. It didn’t have to be this way. There seem to be safeguards built into the universe to prevent one lifeform taking over, resulting in bland…
-
Shotgun Seminars
In Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson describes a way to organize that I have not encountered before. It seems ideally suited to journal clubs to make sure that everyone has read the paper and can express their thoughts on it without the help of PowerPoint: At our institute in…
-
Commander’s Intent
From Robert Coram’s biography of fighter pilot John Boyd: In a blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize…
-
Less is More
I have previously written about how sometimes, knowing less can be an advantage. One example of this was that it’s easier to detect if someone is lying when only listening to them compared to a situation where we also watch them talk. Most of the information that predicts if someone…
-
The Major System
Anyone with sufficient motivation can remember almost anything. There is an ancient technique to remember hundreds of random numbers in a short amount of time by breaking down the number, then linking each component to an image and forming an easy to remember story from those images. For example, the…
-
Storms of Steel
This is a World War I memoir by German soldier Ernst Jünger. It describes his experiences fighting in one battle after the next while seeing almost all of his comrades die. I’ve never read anything more vivid about the horrors of war. What makes Storms of Steel particularly effective is…
-
Ecstatic Truth
The French novelist Andre Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.” […] After I short Family Romance, LLC in Japan, Japanese television started to get interested in the phenomenon that nowadays, from an agency that employs some two thousand people,…
-
Every Man for Himself and God Against All
I have never seen a movie by Werner Herzog’s but after reading his memoir I will have to. Here are some of his insights: We weren’t backpackers who carry practically an entire household on their backs in the form of a tent, a sleeping bag, and cooking equipment; we walked…
-
The Uniform of Individualism
The has been too little personal involvement, and too much involvement in organizations which were insisting that other organizations should do what was right … Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line. Wendell Berry This is from an essay by Wendell Berry in the…
-
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is full of insights about human nature. Of the many quotable passages, this one foreshadows what Richard Feynman wrote 200 years later about epistemic democracy: It had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were…
-
Men Don’t Read
“Women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales,” writes David Morris in the New York Times. Why is that? Most new books being written by women may have something to do with it but can’t completely explain it. After all, there are millions of books by male…
-
Why So Ugly?
Given that we’re wealthier and technologically more capable than we were 100 years ago, why is our architecture not only the same everywhere but also much uglier? Tom Wolfe tried to answer this in From Bauhaus To Our House. I didn’t know about the book and I’m grateful to Scott…
-
The Giant’s House
This novel by Elizabeth McCracken is a story about freaks and how on the inside they’re like the rest of us. It has many good parts. Here’s one: “It pains me to say this,” he told me, “but I’m not susceptible to love. Probably I’m immune.” He sighed. “That sounds…
-
The Mind is Flat
Our subconscious minds analyze vast amounts of information, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what I used to think before reading Nick Chater’s The mind is flat, which proposes a radical and well-argued departure from the way most people assume…
-
Other Minds
My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher had given her that claims not only spiders but also centipedes, scorpions and snails for the insect class. Anyway, this is about a science book…
-
The Jewess of Toledo
Lion Feuchtwanger published this historical novel in 1955. It’s set in Spain during the second half of the 12th century, which is the golden age of the Middle Ages. It’s the time of Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, both of which make appearances in Feuchtwanger’s novel. Back in Spain,…
-
Smut in Arabian Nights
The English translation of 1001 Nights by Richard Burton from 1888 is explicit for its time, and it seems that Burton made the translation even spicier than the original. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid once slept with three slave-girls, a Meccan, a Medinite and an Irakite. The Medinah girl put her…
-
Not Transferable
As a scientist, a common lament I hear from my colleagues is that there aren’t enough scientists in politics. Although there are some who’ve made it to the top – Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Claudia Sheinbaum – we’re underrepresented compared to other professions like lawyers or businesspeople. Personally, I don’t…
-
The Overstory
The Overstory by Richard Powers is different from any novel I’ve ever read. It’s experimental in the sense that it is composed of multiple tangled stories, much like the canopy of a forest, which is appropriate since it’s a book about trees and how we relate to them. “A book…
-
Outdoor Books
I don’t get to spend as much time as I’d like out of doors and try to make up for it by reading. Here are my favorite non-fiction outdoor books:
-
Shallow Mysteries
Books like Gödel, Escher, Bach give you goosebumps because they hint at something grand, but they can also be frustrating. This review articulates this more coherently.
-
Arsenic for Longevity
In an essay first published in 1877 in Waldheimat, Austrian writer Peter Rosegger describes his encounter with peasants in Styria using arsenic as an anti-aging drug. This is a translation by Copilot, with some editing for readability: On one of the trips I took as I student, I stopped at…
-
Alien Artifacts
As a kid, before I knew better, I liked to read Erich von Däniken. In Chariots of the Gods, he explained that the pyramids were built by aliens and that evidence of extraterrestrial development aid is evident in the artifacts of other ancient civilizations too. More recently, additional outlets such…
-
Alien Oceans
2030 is going to be a big year for those curious about life in the solar system. The Europa Clipper spacecraft that just launched is going to arrive in the orbit of Jupiter and begin the exploration of its moon Europa. The following year, a second spacecraft, the Jupiter Icy…
-
Simpler Than We Thought
Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is…
-
Arabian Nights
Here are some beautiful illustrations by Franz Xaver Simm from an old (likely late 1800s) German edition of 1001 Nights:
-
Project Habakkuk
In his memoir I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier, Max Perutz describes his work on a secret project during World War II to build an aircraft carrier out of ice. Project Habakkuk relied on strengthening the ice by adding sawdust, which increased its strength, as well as an on-board…
-
Dignity
If you’ve read or seen Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance and want to get a broader perspective of poverty in a rich country, or if you’d prefer to bypass Vance entirely, consider Dignity by Chris Arnade. It’s a portrait of what Arnade calls back row America: The homeless, the addicts, the prostitutes and their quest…
-
Richard Russo
All of Richard Russo’s book have enough in common that I’m always looking forward to the next one. The downside is that I also already know what it’s about, more or less. Russo writes so well that I sometimes feel guilty reading him. An author who knows how to tell…
-
Madaus
A few years ago, my uncle gave me an old book created by the German pharmaceutical company Madaus, which is nowadays part of Rottapharm Biotech, to celebrate their 50th birthday. There is no publication date, but since Madaus was founded in 1919, it’s probably from 1969. The book’s visual style also fits that era.…
-
Max Steele
Writer Max Steele doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page, which is an injustice. I feel that he should be more well known, but not strongly enough to actually do something about it and start that Wikipedia entry. Also, I don’t know anything about him beyond what I can guess…
-
The Precautionary Principle
Or: Should you really never change a working system? Given an innovation whose future positive and negative impact are uncertain, which position should be taken regarding its adoption? The precautionary principle states that proponents of the innovations should have to prove its harmlessness before it is introduced. That’s because we…
-
Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod
Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken McLeod are two of the most interesting contemporary science fiction writers. Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and MacLeod’s Intrusion are among my favorite novels. Here the two of them talk about global warming and space travel. One notable quote by Robinson on private space travel: An individual…
-
A Lucky Guess
A colleague and I were looking over a graph with same data he had produced. I didn’t understand it, so I asked him about a data point that stuck out. “Why is this one so big?” I asked, hoping that the answer wouldn’t turn out to be too obvious. He…
-
Ninety-Two in the Shade
This is Thomas McGuane’s most well-known novel and the first I’ve read. It captures 1970s Key West, a place and period that I’ve recently encountered through the documentary All That Is Sacred. The novel isn’t much like anything I’ve read before. It’s off-the-charts playful. Some parts are funny, like this…
-
Terry Pratchett
So much universe, and so little time. Terry Pratchett As a kid, I read all of Terry Pratchett‘s books that I could get my hands on, including those that aren’t part of the Discworld universe and those resulting from collaborations with Neil Gaiman and Stephen Baxter. An aunt gave me…
-
Ishi in Two Worlds
Since moving to California, Lassen National Park in Northern California has become one of my favorite places. It’s less well known than Yosemite and the other national parks in driving distance of San Francisco, and therefore less crowded. On the contrary, it sometimes seems deserted, which is astounding considering the…
-
The Hunter and the Whale
This is one of the lesser known novels by Laurens van der Post, and I can see why. The story is nothing special, yet there are some beautiful paragraphs: I was linked, through such a night, with all the life there had ever been and ever would be. I knew…
-
Not To Spend It, But To Have It
Paul Auster, who died earlier this year, on his father, but actually on money: It was not so much the money itself he wanted, but what it represented: not merely success in the eyes of the world, but a way of making himself untouchable. Having money means more than being able…
Nehaveigur 