Last week there were a couple of remarks on Twitter about Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and within an hour or so we had a handful of people interested in doing some sort of book club. So far 9 people have signed up for the group at Goodreads. It’s open to anyone in the London [...]
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bookldn,
books,
gdldn,
reading,
social media
Two books covered in this post; best is last… Via BusinessWeek I read about a new book called Exploiting Chaos by Toronto’s Jeremy Gutsche (founder of TrendHunter and apparently an all-around busy guy). The subtitle is “150 Ways to Spark Innovation in Times of Change.” Billed as a “visually delicious business book,” it looks like a great [...]
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bob sutton,
books,
business books,
chaos,
collaboration,
mort hansen
When a person orders four books at once from Chapters.Indigo.ca — all of which were “in stock” — why did they ship one of them a day before the other three… which, because of the weekend, resulted in all four arriving via the same delivery anyways… with the result that the latter three were in [...]
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books,
complaints,
personal,
random,
rants
If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well). At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise… The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion [...]
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books,
emergence,
generativity,
guns germs and steel,
jared diamond,
malcolm gladwell,
nature via nurture,
nature vs nurture,
outliers,
potentialities,
process,
social entrepreneurship
by OpenConceptual on 07-04-2009
in reading
Read Carlin Romano’s piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Obama, Philosopher in Chief” (via aldaily). The article includes a number of useful references for further study (if you haven’t read them already). Adding to Obama’s speech in Cairo (as well as at Buchenwald and Omaha Beach), here are some key books mentioned: Kwame Anthony Appiah, [...]
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barack obama,
books,
conversation,
cosmopolitanism,
dialog,
leadership,
openness,
philosophy,
politics,
pragmatism
by Brian on 07-03-2009
in art
Part of me wishes I knew about this a couple of weeks ago: it would be fun. But the part of me that is not totally fucking insane (getting smaller and smaller) is glad that I didn’t. I just heard about this via bloggingheads: a bunch of intellectually (and otherwise) ambitious young blogger-types have set out [...]
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blogging,
books,
david foster wallace,
infinite jest,
infinite summer,
writing
Halfway through his review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it became totally clear to me. I mean, I always knew it but I didn’t appreciate the full implications until now. Malcolm Gladwell is essentially an entertainer. He writes to be read and enjoyed rather than to challenge and educate. He turns ideas into [...]
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abundance,
blogging,
books,
business books,
chris anderson,
entertainment,
free,
intellectuals,
journalism,
malcolm gladwell,
pop intellectuals,
publishing,
seth godin,
the new yorker,
web,
wired
Just finished Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Loved it. Exactly my kind of book: smart, funny, yet sincere — almost as good as actually being in the company of someone I really get along with. It was the first conversation I’d had in ages, the first time I’ve been able to talk [...]
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anti-career,
authors,
books,
career,
geoff dyer,
heros,
jeff in venice death in varanasi,
writing
Douglas Rushkoff is one of those writers I imagine my own work resembling. We have a lot of the same ideas and sentiments: fairly critical of business and marketing but not in a simple anti-capitalist way. Get Back in the Box has a fairly central place in my bibliography. His documentaries for PBS Frontline, The [...]
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books,
corporatism,
crisis,
douglas rushkoff,
life inc,
recovery
I signed up for Goodreads last summer and now I’m finally using it thanks to the fact I actually know other people on there — the whole point of it is to make book-reading more social. Here’s my profile if you’re interested in friending-up — the more, the better. I signed up after reading an [...]
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books,
fiction,
geoff dyer,
goodreads,
james wood,
jeff in venice death in varanasi,
joseph o'neill,
literature,
netherland,
reading,
social media
After years failing to get engaged with any fiction, it was finally a TV series — The Wire — that made me enthusiastic enough about character and narrative to pick up a novel and actually read it all the way through. Then the natural author to go to was Richard Price, who wrote a handful of Wire episodes, and [...]
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autotelesis,
books,
fiction,
lush life,
ortega y gasset,
richard price,
self-becoming,
will to relevance
Fluid Factors of Success
by OpenConceptual on 07-06-2009
in commentary
If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well). At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise… The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion [...]
Tagged as: books, emergence, generativity, guns germs and steel, jared diamond, malcolm gladwell, nature via nurture, nature vs nurture, outliers, potentialities, process, social entrepreneurship
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