‘What if you could not only build your “dream house”, but you could find desirable cheap land on which to build ... and design and construct it entirely on your own creative terms?’
Just as Sigmund Freud revealed to a shocked 19th-century public, the tenet of Thinking, Fast and Slow is that we are nowhere near as divorced from our instinctive, animal past as we think. Our failings turn out to be never-ending; not only are we hopeless at multi-tasking, but our decisions are inevitably biased
Entrepreneurs are the gallant adventurers of our time. They are the hard-working geniuses who propel themselves to fame and fortune and who will save the Western economy. Some even have films made about them
Steve Jobs is dead. Unless you’ve just come back from travelling through time, or have set yourself up as a guinea pig for a brand new memory-erasing procedure, you can’t have escaped the tsunami of obituary status updates that have flooded your social network newsfeeds, stating how inspiring and authentic Apple’s ‘different thinker’ was
Nathan Wolfe was a professor of human biology who worked as a professional advisor on the movie Contagion. In his book The Viral Storm he presents the nature of the pandemic and the systems that have been set in place to prevent and control them
Despite being quite a tome, this book is surprisingly accessible and perfect for curling up with in front of the fire. It presents a new perspective on the past and is, essentially, a back-to-front history lesson – a rare experience in itself. Each chapter begins in the present day and reverses back through time to unravel a tangle of trials by tribe and ducal duels
The Selfish Society opens with an arresting quote from poet Adrienne Rich: ‘In those years, people will say, we lost track/of the meaning of we, of you/we found ourselves/reduced to I’. She proceeds to explore territory revived by books such as Oliver James’s Affluenza, rallying against the rise of consumerism, an increasingly fascinating area when considered in the light of the recent rioting that took place in the UK.
An area widely explored by books such as Abbot Christopher Jamison’s Finding Sanctuary, Anglican priest Adam Ford’s approaches for quelling the hubbub of modern life by seeking silence are various and eclectic.
The Internet has provided amazing opportunities to explore and learn, and to push beyond a static conception of identity. We also know it has the potential to decentralise knowledge and control. However, an increasingly dark side is emerging, an invisible revolution in how we consume information
