Kohr presents his theory that the larger (physically) a government the worse it is. He laments how size has been ignored by political scientists, and that the pursuit of political unity is actually the pursuit of tyranny. He argues the ideal political structure is the sovereign city state, especially with regard to democracy. It’s not the best writing, but it completely changed my perspective on government.
The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō (1906)
Essays on tea, its history, and its relation to Japanese aesthetics. Also includes commentary on art, and the cultural relationship between East and West.
Pokes a big hole in the popular post-apocalyptic stories of humanity.
2. Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Pittman and Karle
This book genuinely changed my life this past year or so. If you're dealing with anxiety in any form, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Clear, easy to read, understand, and apply.
3. One Small Step Can Change Your Life--the Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer
I actually re-read this little gem of a book in 2020. It's practical and clear. I've given it as a gift to many people.
Ghosh changed my perspective on climate change. He argues that the modern novel struggles as an art form to describe and grapple with the concept of climate change which lowers our awareness of it. Further the book gives an rare non scientific view on climate change from a third world perspective.
I spent a good four months immersing myself in this magnum opus. It's a 720-page tome, and has an "avalanche of information", as Sapolsky himself calls it. As ever, the patient reader gets handsomely rewarded.
The narrative structure of the book is extremely appealing—Sapolsky starts off by examining a behaviour in the present moment and gradually zooms out. Starting with exploring what happened one second before the said behaviour occurred—the realm of neurobiology[+]. Then slightly zooms back to the prior seconds to minutes, and then back to what happened hours to days before—territory of hormones and endocrinology[+]. Followed by what events from days to months that shaped the behaviour; adolescence, and all the way back to evolutionary factors from a millennia ago.
[+] The appendices in the book contain a helpful primers on neuroscience, endocrinology, and protein basics. Don't skip them!
• • •
Six hundred pages later, Sapolsky restates the central thesis: "the biology of human behaviours that interest us, in all cases, is "multifactorial". What does it mean? There's a dizzying array of factors that influence our behaviour; too many enumerate, but a quick few: blood glucose levels; the socio-economic status of your family of birth; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid [a key stress-signaller] levels; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture, and so on.
• • •
My theory for forgiving this: Kahneman's admission (Feb 2017) and the public release of Behave (May 2017) were way too close for Sapolsky to have noticed it in time. Otherwise, I bet he would've put in a word of caution. On what basis do I make this bet? Elsewhere in the book, Sapolsky cautions when studies did not replicate.
• • •
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148588
[2] https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...