The holidays are a great time to read new
books.
Here’s a few of my favorites.
Educated by Tara Westover.
It's interesting that she's a such a good
writer.
I mean to go from growing up in Idaho,
homeschooled and “I'm just gonna do what
my dad says,"
to being a Cambridge PhD.
She not only found a way out,
she found her way out with a lot of self-respect
and immense capability.
Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st
Century.
He’s a really strong thinker.
He makes it clear that big problems,
they’re not solvable by a single country.
The human mind wants to worry about the dilemmas
we face today.
This book is a better framework for all this
worrying that people are doing.
Andy Puddicombe's Meditation and Mindfulness.
Well, when you meditate,
they sometimes say empty your mind,
but that really never happens.
So, his analogy is ideas
they're like clouds coming across your head.
You should just push them away gently.
If he gets people doing 10 minutes daily meditation,
I think that's fantastic.
Paul Scharre's Army of None
It's a very thoughtful book.
It's about what armies are going to look like
in the future
now that we have amazing software.
Should a drone be able to go out and find
enemies and attack them?
And should the U.S. have these autonomous
weapons?
Should the software be letting the humans
make the decisions or not?
You know, he's very cautionary
that we need to hold back and not go all the
way to robotic warfare.
We should not give up human involvement in
these weapons.
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.
This is a thriller with a tragic ending.
It’s a story of a Silicon Valley start-up,
Theranos.
They were doing diagnostics.
And people were excited because Elizabeth
Holmes, the founder,
was young, and energetic.
Yes, great diagnostics will eventually come.
They can be very cheap, not need as much blood,
read out even your DNA.
But, when it all was revealed,
they really didn't have what they were talking
about.
In fact, they'd been giving patients diagnoses
that were actually dangerous because they
were so wrong.
I am looking forward to reading over the holidays.
I hope you like the selections I've talked
about here.
