Letters Remain

Tag: books

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures

    Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach—the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…

  • The Science of Persuasion

    Persuasion is not an art; it’s a science. That’s according to Yes!—the book by social psychologists Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin that proposes to offer 50 ‘scientifically proven ways to be persuasive’.  For his review of the book, Alex Moskalyuk lists these 50 ways to be persuasive, as gleamed from dozens of psychology studies.…

  • Evolutionary Consumption

    Geoffrey Miller, author of the excellent Mating Mind, has recently released Spent; a look at consumerism and marketing through his lens of evolutionary psychology. With an existing knowledge of evolutionary psychology theories the ideas in Miller’s latest will come as no surprise. These two reviews are still worth perusing, however: Jonathan Gottschall provides a concise…

  • How Do Free Online Book Releases Affect Sales?

    Do free book releases (gratis and/or libre) affect books sales in a positive or negative way? To try and find out, John Hilton of Brigham Young University tracked the sales of books 8 weeks prior and following a number of promotional free release from various publishers. On March 4 of this year, Random House announced…

  • Writing ‘On Writing Well’

    William Zinsser—author of 17 books—talks in length on the trials and tribulations of writing ‘On Writing Well’. My initial fear of immodesty was misguided. The best teachers of a craft, I saw, are their own best textbook. Students who take their classes really want to know how they do what they do—how they grew into…

  • Tournament of Books

    The fifth annual Tournament of Books is currently in progress. The tournament—dubbed the “battle royale of literary excellence”—pits 16 of the best novels published in the previous year against each other to find the winner of the coveted Rooster. Round one: 2666 vs. Steer Toward Rock Netherland vs. A Partisan’s Daughter The White Tiger vs.…

  • Most Borrowed Author in Britain

    For the second year in a row James Patterson has been announced as the UK’s most borrowed author. Interestingly, all is not as it seems: in calling Patterson “less a novelist than a literary factory”, The Guardian notes that he actually employs a large number of writers to do the majority of his writing. Patterson and the…

  • Books on Molecular Gastronomy

    Molecular gastronomy is defined as the “scientific discipline involving the study of physical and chemical processes that occur in cooking”. Following on from a conversation I had with Andrew this past weekend—and after reading this great article from The New York Times—I decided to compile a shortlist of the best books on molecular gastronomy (according to me):…

  • Typography and Design (Two Free Ebooks)

    Getting Real is the undisputed bible of agile software development—a manifesto that can change your view in a single reading. However when it comes to typography and design, the closest I have ever come to such a document was Mark Boulton’s Better Typography presentation. Now there’s a contender: The Vignelli Canon (pdf) I can’t do…

  • Gladwell, Journo-gurus, and Anecdotes as Science

    You can guarantee that whenever Malcolm Gladwell brings out a book he’ll make headlines. And with his latest book having recently been released, here are a number of interesting and contrasting views. First (via Kottke, and in Gladwell’s own words), what to expect from Outliers: though the story of Sidney Weinberg, from high-school dropout to…