Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. Few have the ability to translate complex ideas into something readable. Even fewer have the ability to do it well. Gladwell is one of those rarities. Outliers: The Story of Success is Gladwell’s latest and arguably his best. In Outliers, Gladwell takes a look at select anecdotes [...]
September 2, 2008
Think that throwing money and resources at a problem is helpful? Think again. This book shows, in an uncompromising way, how people with the best of intentions to help others end up doing more harm than good. Specifically, Maren takes his first-hand experience, the anecdotes of others and the words and records of the organizations [...]
August 15, 2008
[NOTE: This was originally published in 2001.] [ad#posts] Cynthia Eller wields a cunning scythe. Bit by bit, she hacks away at the roots of goddess-oriented philosophy to reveal a landscape fraught with fantasy, imagination and gobbledygook. Gender studies has a new era upon it, one that must, if taken seriously, heed Eller’s accounting of the [...]
July 11, 2008
By Harriet Hall, MD Reprinted from this week’s eSkeptic. Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, by Pope Brock, is not only a rip-roaring good read, but it brings up serious issues about regulation of medical practice and prosecution of quackery. It tells the story of John [...]
March 28, 2008
Michael Shermer likes to tread dangerous waters. His latest dip into challenging the received turbulance of our times is an evolutionary explanation for the state of Modern Capitalism. Politicos, religionists and the lay masses, if they actually take a gander through Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from [...]
January 16, 2009