Four great books

I read some good books last year, but these four were marvelous. All have expanded and clarified how I see the world and approach my work on a daily basis. Shared in the hopes that you might enjoy them as well:

Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin

The culting of brands

I blogged recently about wanting to write a book comparing cults, built-to-last corporate cultures, and wildly successful consumer brands. As I secretly hoped, someone has already written such a book, and it's phenomenal.

If Jim Collins described the optimum corporate culture for the late 20th century, then Douglas Atkin in "The Culting of Brands" has intuited the human relationship model behind the most powerful business innovations, and grassroots social, technological, and religious movements of the new century.

Cycles of culture

In his recent SALT talk, Steven Johnson plugged the book Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti. I just finished it, and it's hands-down one of the best analyses of literary history I've ever read.

Moretti practices what he calls "distant reading," looking at the full literary output of a society over time. His models—the graphs, maps, and trees of the title—bring some hidden cycles of human culture into sharp relief. He also offers some tentative, but compelling hypotheses regarding how and why new artistic forms arise, evolve, and decay.

P.S. Anyone interested in an engaging debate about cycles of artistic form should also check out the discussion of music—and specifically, David Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain on Music"—taking place in the North American Future Salon Yahoo! group. Look for the subject header "Accelerating Change."

Business writing with a kick

Early on Christmas morning, I finished reading The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Indusry from Crop to the Last Drop from New Press. The two authors—Nina Luttinger and Gregory Dicum, fellow San Franciscans—are superb storytellers. Every chapter is a joy to read, with insightful and lucid descriptions of the history of third places, the effects of globalization on the developing world, and the promise and potential snarls of the sustainable food movement.

Digital utopians

I saw Fred Turner (author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Rise of Digital Utopianism) give an interesting talk earlier this week. Next Thursday 11/9, he'll be joining Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold for a panel discussion at Stanford. Anyone wanna go?

39 Positions

Also this week, I heard Evany Thomas read from her new book The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple's Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions.

I haven't read the book yet, but if it's half as funny as Evany was in person, it will make a primo holiday gift, either for yourself or someone special. My favorite position name so far is "¡Dormimos!" (We sleep!).

I'm not sure yet what to make of the observation that "The Cliffhanger" is the favored position of consultants...

Shutting out the Sun

I attended a great talk this evening with Michael Zielenziger, author of the new book "Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation." His summary of Japan's economic and social collapse over the past fifteen years is chilling and deeply insightful. The book uses the phenomenon of hikikomori—young Japanese men who lock themselves in their apartments for years at a time—as a prism for looking at all of Japanese culture.

Back in action

I just got back from two busy weeks on the East Coast, and I'm hopelessly behind on sharing great links, or what's on my mind generally. But here's some quick catch-up.

I had some long car rides between DC and NYC that I put to good use, listening to the podcasts of the seminars of the Long Now Foundation. They are all riveting and provocative. Stewart Brand is my hero.

I had the unexpected scare, and joy, last week of going on a hot air balloon ride with my family in Clinton, New Jersey, close to where I grew up. I got over my fear of crashing quickly, and then only had to worry about my hair catching on fire. But intimations of mortality aside, it was beautiful to see a place I knew well from a completely new vantage point. Every dog for miles barks at a hot air balloon, every kid waves at you, and, in New Jersey at least, you can see every herd of overpopulated deer. I was mid-way through reading Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn," so with architecture on my mind, it was fascinating to see what dozens of families had done to evolve their old barns or customize their McMansions. If you want to see how people really live—in other words, what's in their backyards—go on a hot air balloon ride.

In his SALT lecture (see above), Kevin Kelly mentions that new tools are more useful to science than new theories. I love how romantic Kelly is about science in general, equating it to the capital-T collective human project. And I think he's right about the impact of new tools, especially considering that I was listening to his months-old talk on an iPod, while I dictaphoned observations into my RAZR. But what interested me most about his comment is how new tools affect not just science and how it's done, but also the arts. One theme I'm trying to bring out in this blog because I'm so fascinated with it is the intersection of the arts, new media, and business. I think all the best thinking and techniques about how to live well and create impact in a post-modern, technologically mediated world have been solved by the performing arts. All of this was on my mind recently when I read an excellent story in the NYT about the actress Vera Farmiga, and how she has carved out a professional and personal journey outside the Hollywood mold. I was particularly struck by how she uses video taping in innovative ways to hone her craft. It's a great article, all the more so to me because I went to high school with Vera, and it's inspiring to see what she's done, and how eloquent and successful she has become, in the last fifteen years.

And other high school friends are doing amazingly well. Big congratulations to my friend Chris in London whose social shopping site Crowdstorm went into beta last week and is getting tons of great press. My friend Marc, who I had dinner with in NYC, is making a name for himself as a VP programming at Logo. Beyond high school, another friend of mine is featured without a modeling credit in the latest Trendwatching newsletter on "status skills" which is very much worth a read. Last but not least, Dervala.net has written a review of "The Culture of New Capitalism," with typically great insight about technology, life, work, and integrity.

And I haven't forgotten about Second Life. I've visited some amazing places there recently and met some people doing really pioneering work with the platform. More on that soon... but since all my real-world photos from the East Coast trip are ho-hum, here is a pic of my avatar's recent visit to Svarga—a generative, fully functioning ecosystem in Second Life. If Brian Eno were a gardener, this is the world he would create.

I love the fall, with all its excitement, possibility, warmth, stress, growth.

From Dawn to Decadence

From Jacques Barzun, a rich, highly readable history of Western civilization, from the Renaissance to the present.

Things to be happy about: A Suitable Boy

A deeply satisfying novel from Vikram Seth set in mid twentieth-century India.

Too darn hot

Yesterday, the temperature in my neighborhood in San Francisco reached 95 degrees. (Our typical weather this time of year is high-60s.) I'd be happier about putting on flip-flops and heading for the beach today if I didn't know that the hot weather here and across the world this summer is clearly due to global warming.

For anyone looking to get up to speed quickly on climate change, I strongly recommend Tim Flannery's recent book The Weather Makers. Flannery goes broader and deeper than the recent Al Gore movie—with more detail on the hard science, as well as potential solutions. Frightening, but essential reading.