Yardley calls it a "measured but passionate and immensely important book."

Publishers Weekly describes it as "devastating ... alarming ... impressive ... vivid ..."

There are times when the capacity of mankind to blind itself to plain reality is simply breathtaking.

...

Wishful thinking tells me that perhaps this time the call will be heard. Experience teaches another, and far gloomier, lesson.

See also the recent post on The Idols of Environmentalism:

When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Jonathan Yardley, on the new book by Callum Roberts

A sampling:

Most of it doesn’t matter.

Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever.

Trying to please other people is largely a futile activity.

Everything takes twice as long as you plan for and produces results about half as good as you hoped.

See also Augustine's Laws.

Things I wish I’d known when I was younger

These color images of the World Trade Center under construction in 1969 bring a new perspective to our impressions of that structure. Native Wisconsinite Richard Quinney was on the faculty at NYU at the time; he spent the spring roaming the city, capturing the images that caught his eye. Quinney was especially fascinated with the construction of the World Trade Center, not just visually, but also in the context of the city's changing landscape and the political and social climate of the time. The 161 color slides he produced of the rising structure gained a dramatic new significance on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers fell victim to terrorist attack. For his comments on his experience documenting the construction and the significance these photographs possess today, see "110 Stories" in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Autumn 2002 (Vol. 86, No. 1).

Construction of the World Trade Center, 1969: The Photographs of Richard Quinney

Many people seem at first glance to be primarily interested in ideas, but if you look closely you will start to see little clues that they are more interested in social status than it seemed.

For example, they attend more than you would expect to boring well-funded topics, relative to fascinating orphan topics, to bad arguments by well-known people, relative to good arguments by obscure people, and to attention for their insights, relative to generating theirs or reading others'.

The more successful a group, the more of them that tend to be such "fine feathered friends."

To me, this is the main downside of associating with the successful.

Obscure people, bring us your good arguments!

Overcoming Bias: Looking for a Hard-Headed Blogger

Short and sweet; worth reading.

... an open-mindedness that was part idealism and part indulgence ... a rented house at the Jersey Shore ... gauze blouses and tousled Stevie Nicks perms ... clove cigarettes ... a seen-it-all continental daze ... a time of freedom and openness, a time before omnipresent fear ... a perspective to be gained from seeing things from a distance ...

Breaking Away

The peak oil crowd might want to check this out.

World Without Oil is a serious game for the public good. It enlists the 'collective imagination' of Internet users to help us confront a real-world issue: the risk our oil dependency poses to our quality of life. It's the first major "alternate reality game" to use immersive collaborative storytelling to build a vivid, realistic vision of a possible future.

Here's how to play:

(1) Imagine your life in this oil shock.
(2) Create something on the Web to express your reality: a blog post, an image, a video, an audio file.
(3) Tag it "worldwithoutoil" so others can find it.
(4) Tell us about your creation by emailing it to us. Be sure to include a link to your story!

World Without Oil

See also the recent radio segment, Graphic Design Can Cause Seizures.

79 Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut’s critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Beirut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut’s intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov’s Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it its truth. In 79 Short Essays on Design, designers and non-designers alike can share and revel in his insights.

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design | Michael Bierut

Richard Dawkins and I share much in common. We are both biologists by training who have written widely about evolutionary theory. We share an interest in culture as an evolutionary process in its own right. We are both atheists in our personal convictions who have written books on religion. In Darwin’s Cathedral I attempted to contribute to the relatively new field of evolutionary religious studies. When Dawkins’ The God Delusion was published I naturally assumed that he was basing his critique of religion on the scientific study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. I regret to report otherwise. He has not done any original work on the subject and he has not fairly represented the work of his colleagues. Hence this critique of The God Delusion and the larger issues at stake.

This seems worth a look. See also Freeman Dyson on Daniel Dennett, from last year. (Full text is behind a paywall, unfortunately).

Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion

1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
2. Humans are naturally polygamous
3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
9. It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male)
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Brought to you by Psychology Today magazine.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

From Publishers Weekly:

From the world's first car bomb in 1920 (actually a horse-drawn wagon, exploded by anarchist Mario Buda in downtown Manhattan), to those incessantly exploding in Iraq, Mike Davis shows how these "quotidian workhorses of urban terrorism" are responsible for "producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle."

At its best, this is a gripping supplementary history, full of surprising, often contrarian facts and voices behind some of the most spectacular acts of violence on record.

Packed with horrific and heartrending details, the book goes beyond the statistics to portray the human and moral costs of this gruesome political lever.

From TLS:

For all its gripping “noirish” flourishes and “cool” asides, this is a serious, disturbing and pessimistic book that resonates with widespread contemporary terrors. Above all, it is an excellent analysis of the arrogant miscalculations, cruelties and sometimes wanton stupidity of various governing elites.

A Brief History of the Car Bomb