I mostly wanted to post tonight to apologize for still not writing up The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I’ve been BARTing most of the week, so home time is replaced by three hours of commute time. Instead of blogging, I’ve almost finished reading Built to Last, the first book by the Good […]
Month: August 2005
Priceless, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling
Amazon link Tstop recommended this to me in a comment on one of my posts. Here’s the summary: Using cost-benefit analysis is misleading because costs are easily quantifiable in terms of dollars, and benefits (in the case of human life, health, the environment or the future) are difficult, if not impossible, to put in those […]
Why Girls are Weird, by Pamela Ribon
Amazon link I stopped by the library yesterday to pick up some light reading to offset my Amazon nonfiction pile. While poking around, I saw this book, and the title amused me, as did the descriptions, so I borrowed it. Ribon is apparently an online diarist, who put together a fictionalized account of the process […]
Selling the Invisible, by Harry Beckwith
Amazon link As previously mentioned, I picked this up in Portland. It’s not a fabulous book or anything, but I like the viewpoint of the author. It’s set up in the form of 200-some vignettes about marketing services, which makes it a great book to read in short chunks. Reading it straight through would be […]
Freakonomics
Amazon link and Official book website I read this NYT magazine article about Steven Levitt a couple years ago and thought it was great. Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago who spends his time trying to think up interesting ways to sift data to answer hard questions: For instance: If drug dealers […]
Cultural geography
My friend Jen pointed me at this column by David Brooks, describing the concept of cultural geography, a field he doesn’t really define, but comes across as the study of how and why different communities believe different things. Given my current belief in the idea that everybody has different realities, she thought I would find […]
Conflicting Realities
In my ongoing explication of the “everybody lives in a different reality” theme, today we’re going to discuss the smart-aleck question that everybody always brings up, which goes something like “Well, in my reality, it’s okay for me just to take whatever I want without paying; how come the police come and arrest me if […]
Business books
[n.b. This post has absolutely nothing to do with yesterday’s post. Lots of interesting discussion happening out there, though – Mary Hodder was kind enough to clarify her intent with a comment on my post, and put up a post collecting other feedback on the subject] Today, we’re returning to an observation I made at […]
My personal blogosphere
There’s been lots of talk echoing around my personal blogosphere recently about the aftermath of the BlogHer conference. In particular, the initial BlogHer session involved discussion over how men tend to network widely but shallowly and women tend to link narrowly but deeply. Given a link-based economy, the former strategy tends to be rewarded more […]
Writing in books
While I was up in Portland, we were looking at one of the papers on the fridge of the house that Jofish is renting. It was for a high school English class, where the students were supposed to read some Dickens novel, and then scribble in the novel to demonstrate their connection to the text. […]
