Lists

One of the best books I’ve read: Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity.

Travelling all across the developed world this question’s naturally recurring. Here some likely fragments of the answer:

It’s a stab. Please help with more ideas that come to mind.

I hunger for nonfiction because I love learning and because I long to expand my life, my experiences, my thought—all of them so sadly limited. One particular obsession of mine lately is to find truly great nonfiction in languages other than English. It’s not that there’s a lack of it in English (quite the opposite) but rather a nagging suspicion of Western (American-European) parochialism, of missing out on great works and different perspectives I can’t even imagine.

The surprising thing, though, is how hard it is to found it. I have no trouble finding truly great, truly unique fiction in many languages but my trawlings for worthwhile nonfiction turn out almost always empty.

Perhaps it’s a matter of nonfiction not being as readily exportable and thus translated to other languages. Perhaps there’s just not a English market for translated nonfiction. Perhaps English just sucks into it most modern nonfiction writers, whatever their native language. Perhaps whoever wants to be widely read these days chooses to write only in English. Perhaps nonfiction in other languages is ”remade” rather than “subtitled” into English. Perhaps I need to be introduced to it by a native speaker. Perhaps nonfiction as we now conceive it is a very modern meta-genre. Perhaps nonfiction is a Western thing. Perhaps nonfiction needs a massive community of hundreds of millions of wealthy, educated speakers to foster the few who will read it, let alone write it. Perhaps I’m so drenched in the Anglosphere that I only get it’s version of who’s relevant. Perhaps just as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arab, or French had their golden nonfiction age, this is English’s. Perhaps.

Lacking an answer, my guess these days is that English nonfiction is, personally, by far the only worthwhile modern nonfiction in the world.

But I’m still looking. And so, dear Interwebs, please help me out, what examples do you know of truly great nonfiction in languages other than English?

Anything goes, as long as it’s general, nonlocal, non-culturally-specific (say, no books on Kohdo, the Japanese art of smelling incense, or on the cuisine in the Mexican state of Oaxaca) but to give you a more specific idea of what I’m looking for, here are some subjects dear to my heart and some outstanding representatives within them (with the few items in languages other than English bolded):

• Economics —think Daniel Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich;
• History —think Peter Watson’s Modern Mind and Ideas, Mitchel Waldrop’s The Dream Machine;
• Philosophy —think Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves;
• Reference —think Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Diccionario Maria Moliner;
• Biology —think Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, cognitive science (think Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs);
• Neuroscience —think Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence;
• The Singularity —think Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, Hans Moravec’s Mind Children;
• Computer science —think David Hillis’s Pattern in the Stone, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter Norville’s Ambient Findability, Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect;
• Philosophy/language/cognitive & computer science —think Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach;
• Aphorisms —think Jorge Wagensberg’s Si la naturaleza es la respuesta…;
• Essays —think Alfred N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Fernando Savater’s A Decir Verdad;
• Information Design —think, of course, of Edward Tufte’s masterful works;
• Comics —think Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics,  The 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation, Rius’s works;
• Artificial Intelligence —think Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind;
• Interface design —think Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things;
• Design —think Cristopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form;
• Journalism —think John Battelle’s The Search;
• Business —think anything by Peter Drucker;
• Medicine —think Atul Gawande;
• Language —think Claude Piron’s La Bona Lingvo, George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, Giles Fauconnier’s The Way We Think;
• Selfhelp —think Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion Emocional, Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, Harry Browne’s _How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World;
• Finance —think The Essays of Warren Buffet;
• Sociology —think Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Guillermo Oliveto’s El Futuro Ya Llegó;
• Psychology —think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self;
• Biography —think Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Sam Walton’s Made in America;
• Mathematics —think Michael Spivak’s Calculus, Tobias Dantzig’s Number;
• Education —John Holt’s How Children Fail, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry’s La Tragedia Educativa, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine;
• Programming —think The Pragmatic Programmer, The Little Schemer;
• Technology —think Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control;
• Periodicals —think The Economist, The New York Times;
• Video —think TedTalks, Helvetica, David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth;
• Animation —think The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Trusted Computing, The Machine;
• And other wonderful, unclassifiable stuff —think James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, El Retorno del Cangrejo Parte IV, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Evolving Self.

Extra points (not-at-all-necessary but cool parameters):

• the book is less than 200 years old. One extra point if also less than a 100 years old. A further extra point if also less than 50 :).
• from a non-Western language (like Japanese!),
• third culture-ish,
• NOT yet translated into English.

Hoy, en la fila para ordenar de Il Tavolo, que siempre es exquisito, habia un grupo de amigas que siendo su primera vez pidieron una enumeracion de lo que ofrecia el bistro. Ya para terminar la retahila menciona el cajero que tenian “tes de raspberry y naranja”. “Naranja y que?”, pregunta confundida una de las amigas (la mas bella, de cejas oscuras y cabellos claros, a la Kate Winslet). “Naranja y raspberry”, responde inmutable el cajero y sigue impasible durante la larga pausa en que la amiga evidencia seguir en ayunas. “Uno de naranja,” acaba respondiendo atolondrada.

Siguieron el resto de las amigas y ya para cuando toco mi turno habia encontrado en mi Blackberry (!) la traduccion de raspberry, que me evadio en ese momento. “Frambuesa!” Es lo primero que le digo al cajero. “Es raspberry en epanhol”. “Es lo mismo”, me responde enfadado. Pero no, no lo es. Porque con frambuesa te hubieras comunicado, con raspberry confundiste.

Lejos, muy lejos, estoy de ser un purista del espanhol o un paranoico anticolonialista (si acaso soy el colonialista…). Como cualquier amigo puede atestiguar y al igual que muchos de ellos, mi lengua materna es el spanglish y hoy en dia escribo (blogs, correos, messenger) casi siempre en ingles siempre que mi interlocutor lo hable aunque sea como segunda lengua. Pero trato siempre que hablo con alguien que solo habla espanhol de anotar mi spanglish natural con sinonimos o parafraseos en espanhol. No hacerlo, no intentarlo siquiera, es lo que me espanto de este cajero. Si no te preocupa que te entiendan, para que hablar?

Ahora que siguiendo esta logica del entendimiento la verdad es que no hay mas que reconocer que sino fuera por flojera, condicionamiento, y, si, pedanteria tendria todo el sentido del mundo sustituir blog por bitacora, messenger por mensajeria instantanea, marketing por mercadeo (la otra vez vi marquetin!), link por enlace y asi (en vez de etcetera, que es nomas latin para “y el resto…”). Hasta ahi todo va bien para los academicos pero porque parar ahi? Por que no es medico de ninhos el pediatra, medico de la piel el dermatologo, musculo del corazon el miocardio, aprendiz por si mismo el autodidacta, inflamacion del estomago la gastritis y asi?

Y bueno, ya siguiendo esta logica de entendimiento hasta sus ultimas consecuencias, por que no aprender Esperanto, “el buen lenguaje”?

Charles S. Peirce has been called by Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”

I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.

How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?

OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”^SOURCE

Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better (or shorter) intro than the logical reasoning pedia.

And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ^ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.

By focusing on the number of individuals (genders) required for reproduction we can distinguish species into three classes: those that require one individual (self-reproducers), those that require two (pair reproducers), and those that require three or more (group reproducers). The question is thus: are there group reproducer species? why?

We usually refer to the first class as asexuals, the second as sexuals, and it is a major puzzle of evolutionary biology to account for the existence of the latter^{D, WP}. Like the bee that fluttered in the face of our best aerodynamic theories, sexuals mate impudently in the face of our best evolutionary theories.

But sexuals exist. Everywhere, in fact, at our order of magnitude. So we can’t just sweep pair reproducers aside and carry on our happy, simple theorizing of a self-reproducing world.

Asking the group reproducer question, on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by people to whom it comes as a revelation that the class is obviously empty. I don’t think it is. Obvious, that is. Life on earth does some pretty fucked up stuff, natural gangbanging doesn’t strike me as particularly eccentric. Asimov describes a group reproducer species in great detail in The God Themselves and neither the author nor I (before) ever thought the point merited any explanation.

And if there are no group reproducers (or precious few) their non-existence (or extreme dearth) is as much a fact in need of explanation as their existence (or abundance).

I’m making a list of fascinating things about the English language. As, say, my interviewer at frog design can attest, I overflow with opinionated passion but suck at showcasing. I overtell and undershow. I’m constantly nagging people with my fawning for English, for its beauty, expressiveness, and flexibility, but when pressed to put my love into reasons I’m as vague and mushy as a Christian.

So I do lists. And this particular one is fairly advanced, with so many items and examples that there’s a multi-leveled hierarchy already. One of its headings is titled “informal, unique, almost idiomatic affixes”—y’know, stuff like she- (“the she-Shepherd“), out- (“innovators out-fail the competition”), over- (“don’t overdo it”), -away (“assume away”), -friendly (“gay-friendly”), -up (“trade up”), and so on. I find most of them not only unique to English but uniquely expressive.

One particularly good example is in the phrase in the title. The full context comes from a verse from Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (you can listen to it here, covered by Rufus Wainwright):

The lyrics manage to portray tragic, flawed love in two lines and it all hinges on that magic “outdrew” verb.

English first names might be all the rage in Mexico^ELZR, but haven’t you noticed how American Hispanic last names are starting to sound? I’m not just taking about Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, or Ricky Martin, I’m talking biotechnologist Juan Enriquez^WP, essayist Richard Rodriguez^{WP, ELZR}, dancer David Bernal^{YT, WP}, Google’s George Reyes^WP, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas^WP, filmmaker Robert Rodiguez^WP, Synopsys’s Brian Cabrera^F, cartoonist Michael Ramirez^WP, YouTVPC’s Sam Martinez^WSJ, actresses Sara Ramirez^WP and Michelle Rodriguez^WP, jurist Alberto Gonzales^WP. It is not my intention to give a Hispanic hit parade^WP, my only point here is how through habituation these most Latin of last names are getting an English ring to them.

Another good thing that stemmed from High Fidelity was it’s introducing me to the first Bob Dylan song I actually liked: Most of the time (mp3, lyrics).

In an attempt to expand my melodic horizons I had previously downloaded his discography, planning to plod through it eventually. The going, though, proved sheer torture. I don’t like his voice nor his instruments, and all his songs seemed to blend into the same inane harmonica.

When I first listened to Most of the Time I thought an old black woman was singing. I liked the pace though, and I started listening. The structure revealed with a couple of lines and I was hooked. In its epistrophe^WP and nostalgia it reminds me a lot of Alberto Cortez’s Distancia (mp3, lyrics).

I started browsing around with more method (listening the intersection between his discography and Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time). I “discovered” I want you, Like a Rolling Stone, Lay Lady Lay, Blowing in the wind, Mr. Tambourine man, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Visions of Johanna. Most I’d heard before, covered, but I’d never really listened to them. A masterful songwriter (he’s been nominated several times for a lit Nobel) with “unusual” voice and renditions, Dylan reminds me a lot of Jose Alfredo Jimenez^WP and Georges Moustaki^WP: they’re all acquired tastes, popularized by covers, appreciated only after attentive overexposure. All of which is fine by me, acquired tastes tend, oddly, to be the most rewarding.

Sometimes, I must confess, I can be such a jewpie^U. Now, of course I regard Judaism with the same special scorn I reserve for all religions, of course I think endogamy and voluntary isolation are bullshit (“We have lost more Jews to intermarriage than to the Holocaust”; ”..better to lose a kid here and there and save the community”), and of course I condemn Israeli violence (I’ve never been able to wrap my head around Zionism—why would America’s elite minority give a rat’s ass for some piece of desert?). But the thing is, I not only resonate strongly with Jewish secular culture (with Richard Rodriguez^ELZR arrogance I confess to trying to become more Jewish^ELZR), I find secular Jews extremely over-represented among what I consider to be the very best things we as a species have made—y’know, science, physics, math, computers, technology, the web, economics, capitalism, business, philosophy, literature, academia, modern pop culture…

That above, only impromptu, was what I answered when Andrea, whom I love but who can be frighteningly fundie^U some times, shocked me with some rather anti-semitic comments. She remained skeptical and demanded examples of such mensch. I stuttered two or three before I blanked out.

And this was how I started compiling a list of Jewish people I admire for some reason or other—a task surprisingly easier than I expected, thanks both to the famed Jewish self-obsession and to paranoiac antisemitism. I’ve included the intersection of influential AND admired-by-me Jews (so you won’t find, say, Freud or Marx, who while influential, are personally anti-admired) and I mention their books or accomplishments that have most impressed me. It’s been some months now of almost subconscious compiling and while the list is of course incomplete, it’s already intriguing.

So, a to-be-updated list of influential AND admired-by-me Jews: