Nehaveigur

Category: Reading

  • Why Read? Don’t you have better things to do?

    Is reading novels really a better use of time than watching clips on YouTube? I like to read, not because I think it makes me…

  • Peripheral Drinking: David Samuels goes to Polynesia

    David Samuels has published an article about America, inspired by a recent visit to American Samoa. There, at the country’s extreme periphery, he sits in…

  • Two Visions of the Future: Science fiction scenarios that aren’t stories

    Scenario 1 We have extensively terraformed a planet circling a distant star. Its atmosphere is breathable and because of its low gravity, trees  grow a…

  • Plumbing, and Lack Thereof: Our ancestors’ sanitary arrangements were objectionable

    If we invent a time machine, I predict that we’ll get temporal tourists returning from the past, horrified about how people used to do their…

  • Gateway: A sci fi novel from 1977 that has aged well

    Gateway by Frederik Pohl won both the Nebula award and the Hugo, which was a bigger deal back when it came out almost 50 years…

  • Mathematica: Learning math means training your intuition

    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…

  • Feynman vs. The Abacus: Sometimes intuition wins over processing power

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Literary Voyeurism

    This essay by Scott McClanahan is a hole through which I can peek inside a world that is closed to me but that I have…

  • 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.…

  • Wolf

    Wolf by Jim Harrison is a novel about being outdoors and about traveling. It’s Harrison’s first novel, published in 1971. There is a lot in…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • The Funny Side of Cancer

    He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Playing With the Sun As With a Little Brook

    Girl lithe and tawny, the sun forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes…

  • 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…

  • Tom McGuane’s Cameo

    Some trivia: I’m 80% sure that writer Thomas McGuane makes a cameo appearance in the music video for Jimmy Buffett’s 1974 song Come Monday. 70…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Living

    Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing…

  • 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…

  • Preparation Charter Houses: Better than university?

    The two most interesting ideas on what could replace college I’ve come across are charter houses and The Preparation. Charter houses, proposed by Slime Mold…

  • Where the Mountains are Nameless

    There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And…

  • 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…

  • Shakespeare: I’d like to like him

    There are things we like the idea of, but if we’re honest, we don’t want to do them. Contributing to a tight-knit community, going to…

  • 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…

  • Give Me My Task and Let Me Do It Right

    Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh Grave, where is thy victory? Oh Life, you are a shining path And hope springs eternal Just over…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Star Bowl Spinning Overhead

    Writing by starlight Can’t see the words Fill a page Nothing there Waterfall distant sound Tree against stars Milky Way Juniper Jupiter white rock Wind…

  • All That Is Earth Has Once Been Sky

    Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone.…

  • Open Day and Night

    O goddess-born of great Anchises’ line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to…

  • 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…

  • Everybody Sees That I Am Old But You

    Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead, But I. So I, as I grow stiff…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Computational Irreducibility: An underappreciated concept to understand the universe

    Computational irreducibility is a profound concept about how the world works. In many complex systems, the only way to know what will happen is to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • When Adventure’s Lost its Meaning

    In the quiet misty morning When the moon has gone to bed When the sparrows stop their singing And the sky is clear and red…

  • 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.…

  • Drinking With a Little Bird

    This is a poem by Austrian actor Kurt Sowinetz. You can watch him recite it here but I as far as I know, it hasn’t…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • What Stirs the Life in You?

    The Garden’s scent is a messenger, arriving again and again, inviting us in. Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles stir life underground. What stirs the life in…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Smooth Between Sea and Land

    Here, on the level sand, Between the sea and land, What shall I build or write Against the fall of night? Tell me of runes…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Fred?

    From out of the cold Caribbean Into the Desert Libyan There crawled a strange amphibian, And we shall call him “Fred”! You say you want…

  • 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…

  • Sick

    “I cannot go to school today!” Said little Peggy Ann McKay “I have the measles and the mumps A gash, a rash, and purple bumps…

  • Resist Summary

    This is from Simon Sarris’ blog, The Map is Mostly Water: It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You…

  • 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…

  • Santa and the Reindeer

    “This is the hour,” said Santa Claus, “The bell rings merrily.” Then on his back he slung his pack, And into his sleigh climbed he.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 ……

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Wall

    What would I do if I were isolated on an island or on an uninhabited planet? is something I sometimes think about. A lot of…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Point of View

    Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless Christmas dinner’s dark and blue When you stop and try to see it From the turkey’s point of view. Sunday…

  • The Mind is Flat

    Our subconscious minds do the real thinking, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what…