Recommendations

Walmart, (Sam) Wal(ton’s) mart. The Walton fortune has long been split among 4 main heirs and still each shard is listed in the top 4, 5, 6, and 7 of America’s richest, each with over $20 billion.

It’s time to (re)read Sam Walton and be inspired by history’s most successful practitioner of commerce, there are too many opportunities out there waiting for us!

It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best. Because that’s how Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things. At first, we amazed ourselves. And before too long, we amazed everybody else, especially folks who thought America was just too complicated and sophisticated a place for this sort of thing to work anymore.

Apropos of Christmas:

A traves del traductor al español de Diaporah fue que me tope con este desaforado elogio al ensayista Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. Se me enchina la piel. Entusiasma el entusiasmo, cuando tan honesta y esplendidamente escrito, no? Es la primera vez que oigo de el. Habra que leerlo, alguien ya lo ha hecho?

Ferlosio se retiró a estudiar y a escribir incansablemente.. una clase de escritura… el ensayo de alto contenido intelectual—que en España había quedado anclado en formas dieciochescas y encorsetado en ampulosos moldes de cursilería retórica y vulgaridad estilística que aún hoy hacen estragos. La no-ficción escrita por Sánchez Ferlosio, con su fama de cascarrabias encerrado en la España del XVII, es lo más moderno, aventurado y experimental que en nuestro país se ha hecho en este terreno. Cuando alguien quiera saber quién ha construido en nuestro tiempo una forma nueva de pensar escribiendo, háblenle del joven Ferlosio, no de los viejos prematuros que siguen explotando hasta la saciedad fórmulas de almidón. Es la escasez de ejemplos cualitativamente comparables (y no la supuesta excentricidad del autor) lo que constituye la singularidad de los ensayos de Ferlosio… entre esas páginas están las mejores que, en el campo del pensamiento, se han escrito en castellano desde que comenzó el siglo XX. O sea, no sólo es nuestro ensayista más moderno, también es el mejor.

José Luis Pardo, Las fuentes más sabias de la lengua, El País

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

Believe the hype. Please take a while and go play with it! Its help, as is Wolfram’s tradition, is excellent, the best introduction.

And with a mission “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”, it opens up as big and inspiring a project for this generation.

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

This is such a great animated explanation of the credit crisis—a success in using new media in the service of clarity. It almost makes me angry of all the sweet hours I spent in the Economist, Answers, Wikipedia wrangling with finance jargon.

For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:

It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.

This rings so true it hurts.

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.

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.

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?

• 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.

• 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.