Style: Non-fiction
Why Don’t Students Like School? – Daniel T Willingham
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Students don’t like school because of the range of difficulties that must be presented in class which means some students get the information right away and then are stuck repeating work that is boring, while others are struggling to keep up. They also aren’t that into school because of some of the technology that is…
Sideways – The City Google Couldn’t Buy – Josh O’Kane
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This is a book about the hubris of Google thinking that despite what all levels of government told them about the Toronto Waterfront project, they would not be able to simply assume their way into more land and more tracking of people. It’s a good look at how Big Tech companies get us to believe…
The Wild and Free Family – Ainsley Arment
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Ainsley Arment spends this book encouraging you to drop your family out of much of the rat-race of modern life to live a calm life that prioritizes your children having time to run free and play without structure. She also strongly emphasizes you dropping out of the rat-race so that you have more time to…
Antinet Zettelkasten – Scott P Scheper
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While there are some points I agree with the author on, overall Scott is reaching hard to create branded content that he can sell you in his newsletter. He spends so much time talking down on anyone that would use a digital note system that he eclipses any good ideas he has about how to…
Creating Innovators – Tony Wagner
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I think the best summary of this book comes from the title of the blog post I wrote about it: “The Rich Person’s Guide to Creating an Innovative Child“. Wagner highlights how a bunch of families that could afford second homes and private schooling, or the time to homeschool, raised children that created what Wagner…
The Case for Books
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In this book Robert Darnton tries to explore the impact of Google’s Project Gutenberg on the book industry. While we may have a different perspective on the impact of that project from our perspective years after it happened, Darnton does a good job of laying out the possible impacts if Google was successful with it.…
The Lost Art of Reading
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This is a book examining the cultural significance of reading. We’ll pull out a few highlights. David Ulin talks about the purveyors of fake news working hard to normalize that which should never be normalized. We see it both in the content the anti-Semitic content that Elon Musk shares on his social media site, and…
Nurtureshock
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The title of this book refers to the author’s idea that sometimes parents don’t “just know” how to raise a child and thus they are lost trying to figure it out. The goal of the book is to show us what science says about how children should be raised. One thing recommended here that we’ve…
Starlight Tour
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I feel struck by the tragedy of the death of Neil Stonechild and the callousness that the Saskatoon Police had in dealing with the death of a first nations person. Really how they dealt with all the first nations people spoken with in the book. The police often talk about a single bad officer, but…
On Work
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This is a collection of essays from the author all about the culture of work. Thompson covers our move from religious accomplishment as a defining factor of our lives in previous generations, to how we’ve supplanted that need for accomplishment with workism, the worship of work. The biggest benefit to reading this short book was…
