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Philosophy

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My Favorite Sites for Book Recommendations

I am continually looking for books to read and Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” carousel doesn’t cut it. Because I am living in Italy, I cannot simply pad down to the nearest bookstore and lose myself for a bunch of hours—there are a couple stores where I can lose myself for a half-hour, forty-five minutes every once in a while. So online it is. My go-to sources for book recommendations are Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings site, Ryan Holiday’s email book list, and James Altucher’s and Tim Ferriss’ podcasts.

Brain Pickings
Maria Popova

Maria Popova’s love of literature, of books, of physical books, is palpable. A post on her Brain Pickings site will usually focus a single book. She interacts with it, gives her own impressions, and lets us know what books, articles, essays, stories, it reminds her of. She brings in other writers to elucidate and complement the topic. A post will usually include up to 10 links to other subjects she’s written on, all potential rabbit holes of reading. I find it hard to keep up with her impressive output.

Her posts tend toward the timeless, rather than the quick-hit rise-and-fall stories most of the internet presents us with. She spend, by all accounts, incredible amounts of time in the public library, finding worthy books we may be overlooking.

In an interview with the Guardian, she says:

If something interests me and is both timeless and timely, I write about it. Much of what is published online is content designed to be dead within hours, so I find most of my material offline. I gravitate more and more towards historical things that are somewhat obscure and yet timely in their sensibility and message. We really need an antidote to this culture of “if it’s not Google-able, it doesn’t exist”. There’s a wealth of knowledge and inspiration offline, ideas still very relevant and interesting.

You can get a weekly email notification with a round up of the week’s posts, but start by simply going to her site and getting yourself lost.

 

Books I’ve read (or am currently reading) on Maria Popova’s recommendation:

Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Agnes de Mille
A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner
The Journals of Andre Gide
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday is a voracious reader. Part of the success of his books—in particular, The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy—comes from Holiday’s huge email list of people interested in his book recommendations who then became fans of his books.

Holiday writes:

“I’ve always devoured books. Why, exactly, I’m not sure. Obviously a big reason to read is because it’s fun. As Petrarch, a famous book lover observed some 700 years ago, “books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones.” But if I was honest, I would say the real reason that I’ve spent so much time with my nose inside this book or that book is because I have been searching for something: a way to life. There is a Latin expression: liber medicina animi (a book is the soul’s medicine). That’s what I’ve been after.”

You should sign up for his monthly reading recommendations, but the best place to start is with his Books to Base Your Life On list.

Holiday’s recommendations tend toward the edifying. Marcus Aurelius tops the list. Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180, the book Meditations was not meant for publication but was written as an evening journal for his eyes only.  Here’s Holiday’s take on the book:

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. To me, this is not only one of greatest books ever written but perhaps the only book of its kind. Just imagine: the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, admonishing himself on how to be better, more just, more immune to temptation, wiser. It is the definitive text on self-discipline, personal ethics, humility, self-actualization and strength.

 

Books I’ve read on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
48 Laws of Powerand Mastery by Robert Greene
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh

The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is the Columbo of podcasting. He often comes off a little ditzy, claiming to not know much of anything, coming forward continually with his mistakes and failures, except . . . he has terrific guests and he asks terrific questions. He’ll really get down to details on things like what Dan Harrisfelt like while having a panic attack on Good Morning America, discussing authenticity with Wynton Marsalis, or the Apollo 8 mission with Robert Kurson, author of Rocket Men.

 

Books I’ve read on James Altucher’s recommendation:

10% Happier by Dan Harris
Own the Day, Own your Life by Aubrey Marcus
But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

Tim Ferriss
The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast
Tribe of Mentors Podcast

 

Tim Ferriss entered the internet’s consciousness with his book The Four-Hour Work Week. His mission is to hack learning and his main way to do that is to interview, via his podcast, high-performing individuals and learn their secrets. In his podcasts, he seems humble and appreciative of his progress in life. He will often ask his guests about significant failures and how the failure was leveraged to bring about personal growth.

He does not hoard information but shares it, loves sharing it, sharing it has become, in fact, his mission. He seems like a very likeable every-man. He’s had his personal issues—including a very relatable brush with suicide. His Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors books are a great collections of productivity hacks from his guests, who are amongst the best in their fields, as filtered by Ferriss.

 

Books I’ve read because of Tim Ferriss:

The Obstacle is the Wayby Ryan Holiday
Principlesby Ray Dalio
The Art of Learningby Josh Waitzkin
The Gifts of Imperfectionby Brené Brown

If you like Ferriss’ podcast, sign up for his weekly email, 5-Bullet Friday.
Here’s his description:

“Every Friday, I send out an exclusive email with the five coolest things I’ve found (or explored) that week. . . It might include books, gadgets, experimental supplements, articles, new hacks/tricks, and — of course — all sorts of weird stuff I dig up around the world.”

Here’s two of the five from a recent week:

What I’m listening to —
Malemolência by Céu (@ceumusic). This has been one of my favorite songs for 2-3 years, and the entire album is stellar (Lenda is another standout for me). The sexiness of the vocals is otherworldly. The album cover pic ain’t so bad, either. Oh, and her videos, too.

Quote I’m pondering —
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” – Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet.

 

I love finding this in my email on Friday. Amongst all the crap I delete and unsubscribe from, I always read this. It takes no more than a minute to read. Sometimes, I follow a link and check out the song, or quoted author, and sometimes I don’t. I look forward to reading this on Fridays.

If you have a favorite source for books, please share the link in the comments section. Thanks!

Two friends have recently reported chance encounters with friends in unlikely places. Cindy ran into an old friend at the Keflavík airport in Iceland, and Megan ran into a friend while traveling in Jordan.

Cindy asked in her post, “What are the chances of meeting a dear friend at an airport in Iceland?” Just this side of impossible to calculate, I’m guessing. The number of the variables alone would explode exponentially in no time. The odds of running into someone are different if you’re at the Keflavík airport, the Guggenheim Museum, or walking on the Great Wall. We might very well have been within a few feet of each other at Grand Central Station, but the sheer number of people there surely diluted our chances of meeting. And what number of friends, dear or otherwise, would you choose to plug into such an equation?

 

To sum up what happens to make these unlikely meetings possible:

  1. You are at the same place—which ideally is wildly out of the context you know them in
  2. You’re there at the same time—and the longer it’s been since you’ve been at the same place at the same time, the better.
  3. At least one of you needs to be aware of their surroundings—if you both have your noses pointed toward your phones, forget about it
  4. You need to be able to recognize each other—how long has it been after all?
  5. You both want to be seen—some of us aren’t so keen on getting a blast from the past

 

So being away in an exotic locale and running into an old friend happens pretty rarely. But I’m wondering how many times we just miss one of these chance encounters.

How many times are we just a block away from each other? Or maybe one of us was there in the same place, having their photo taken in front of the same landmark, an hour earlier.

Map DetailIf we were to expand our range from “same place, same time,” to “same block, same hour,” then the chances must go up considerably. The odds that there could be someone we know with a block or an hour of us, would have to
be greater than the odds of running into them—since this happens only occasionally—and it would stand to reason that more often we just miss people we’d like to run into. Maybe we’ve walked right by each other because at least one of us is looking at a map or a view or a Kandinsky.

Louis Pasteur once wrote that “Chance favors the prepared mind,” so maybe we can look at what we can do to improve our chances of running into an old friend somewhere.

Short of having Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map (it would have to be specially enchanted to filter out creepy intentions) to identify friends in the immediate vicinity, or neurotically checking in to places on Facebook, we’ll just have to count on luck—which makes for better magic anyway.

Our best chances then lie with noticing people already in the same place at the same time.

So first things first, you need to put your phone away. I know, I know. But really. All the world is made apparent to us via our perceptions. It’s already being filtered through our senses and brains before it reaches us—the world isn’t going to seem bigger and more interesting if you send it through more funnels—the news as interpreted, written, edited, published, shared, and finally viewed on your phone on the steps of the Taj Mahal, while your best friend from 6th grade walks by, googling for a restaurant on her phone.

“All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.”
—Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

Map detail 2I was recently at the Linate airport in Milan, waiting to pick up my daughter. As I looked through the faces, ready to pick out hers, people coming through the gate started reminding me of friends and acquaintances—this person’s eyes, that person’s hair, the way that guy walked. One woman looked so much like a nanny the girls had a few years ago, I had to do a double take—it was not her but it absolutely could have been an older sister.

Our brains are wired to recognize faces—one of our oldest skills, in fact. “At as early as four months,” Max McClure writes on the Stanford website, “babies’ brains already process faces at nearly adult levels, even while other images are still being analyzed in lower levels of the visual system.” So even if a few decades have passed since we last saw a friend, our face-recognition ability gives us a very good chance of spotting them, but you have to put down your phone and pay attention. Even if you don’t spot anyone you know, people watching is way more interesting than anything up on the Huffpost right now.

 

 

Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian was the first philosophy book I bought (in 1980 at the University of Oregon Bookstore) for my own edification.
Illustration by Gustave Doré: Dante’s 9th Circle of Hell.

 

             — • —

I am certain the ego does not survive death.

             — • —

Consider how surprised we are when a pope acts like a follower of Christ.

             — • —

There’s nothing like the verbal contortions of the rich as they try to explain what the “camel through the eye of a needle” verse of the Bible really means.

             — • —

I can totally imagine Jesus throwing up a little bit in his mouth every time Mitch McConnell utters the words “Christian Values.”

             — • —
Yes, I know there is unlikely to be many cases of acid reflux in Heaven. Think of it, if you can, as symbolic.

             — • —
If the Republicans could rebrand Jesus, would they keep anything?

             — • —
Would the Democrats rebrand him?—or does the hippie-Jesus thing just work for them?

             — • —
The Democrats are surely as uncomfortable as the Republicans with the story of Jesus expelling the merchants and money changers from the Temple.

             — • —
Jesus has been rebranded many times, of course, as it seems unlikely that he, a jew living in Middle-East, was a pale, flaxon-haired, proto-hippy with an adorable little gentile nose.

             — • —
Think of baptism as a ceremonial washing of the brain.

             — • —
You cannot demand a literal interpretation of the Bible, and then cherry pick verses to suit your needs, all the while, praying to high heaven that no one notices the embarrassing parts you’ve wrapped in plastic and hidden in your basement freezer.

             — • —
If, in the year 325 AD, a tree fell and took out the building where the Council of Nicaea took place, killing every participant who could pronounce Christ divine, would we still have all these damned Christians around today?

             — • —
A conception considered immaculate occurs without mess or pleasure, thus considered by Christians to be optimum.

             — • —
Christianity = Victim Worship.

             — • —
The self-righteous are generally repugnant bullies, but the ones who speak threateningly about eternal hellfire might as well be dipped in shit.

             — • —
What a god-fearing man actually fears is what his neighbors will think.

             — • —
Christianity bestows power to the victim. Or at least gives them some material to mouth off with.

             — • —
If someone put a gun to my head and made me choose a religion, I would pick Buddhism—but perhaps I’d make that choice because—living in the US for most of my life—I generally have not been exposed to that many self-righteous Buddhists.

             — • —
I think reincarnation is more ridiculous than Christian Heaven, although more interesting as a literary conceit.

             — • —
The afterlife is procrastination’s big imaginary friend.

             — • —
Will Heaven lose some of its luster for the most judgmental of Christians? Or will they simply adjust their range to include what’s available?

             — • —
What kind of ratings would a reality television show based in Hell, shown in Heaven, get? Off the fucking charts, right?

             — • —
Anything lasting an eternity is bound to become hellish sooner or later.