Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

cache (KASH), noun Something hidden or stored. Everyone was jealous when they learned of Moira’s CACHE of acceptances to the finest schools. caducous (kuh-DOO-kuss), adjective Transitory; short-lived; perishable. “Some thing, which I fancied was a part of me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was CADUCOUS.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist, and transcendentalist calumny (KAL-um-nee), noun The act of libel or slander; to besmirch a person’s reputation by spreading false statements and rumors. “CALUMNY will sear virtue itself.” –William Shakespeare cannonade (CAN-non-ayd), noun A continuous, relentless bombardment or effort.

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“We all have these places where shy humiliations GAMBOL on sunny afternoons.” – W. H. Auden, Anglo-American poet gamesome (GAYM-suhm), adjective Playful and frolicsome. “[Nature] is GAMESOME and good, / But of mutable mood,— / No dreary repeater now and again, / She will be all things to all men.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist, and transcendentalist gamine (gah-MEEN), noun A girl with a boyish demeanor and mischievous nature who is somehow still appealing. Her GAMINE behavior and looks only made her that much more attractive to teenage boys her age. gamut (GAM-utt), noun The full spectrum of possibilities or choices.

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“Proponents of GLOBALIZATION insist that, as trade and investment move across borders, economic efficiencies raise the standards of living on both sides of the exchange.” – Arthur Goldwag, American author globule (GLAHB-yewl), noun A small globe or ball. “In yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a GLOBULE of sap ascends.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist, and transcendentalist Gnosticism (NAH-stih-sih-zim), noun The religious belief that salvation is attained through secret knowledge rather than through prayer, ritual, faith, divine grace, or good works. Many of the key principles of Christianity were formed as a direct response to GNOSTICISM.

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations by Garson O'Toole

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, en.wikipedia.org, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, ought to be enough for anybody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra

Many of the examples above conform to the following flexible phrasal template: “X is a journey, not a destination.” Linguists refer to such a phrase as a “snowclone.”16 Notes: Thanks to Jack Herring for his query on this topic. This question was constructed by QI based on his inquiry. Also, thanks to Dan Goncharoff for noting the relevant quotation due to Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essay II: Experience,” in Essays: Second Series, 2nd ed. (Boston: James Munroe, 1844), 65. Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/gQHb0V. 2. Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro, eds., The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 142.

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The saying appeared on a quotation-filled page titled “Thoughts on the Business of Life” that has appeared in every issue of Forbes for decades.10 In 1980 the president of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, attributed the saying to Ralph Waldo Emerson:11 Cal Poly president Hugh La Bounty said at the awards banquet that some lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson best summed up the Scolinos philosophy and the team performance that exemplified it: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” In 1989 the bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey included the quotation and attributed it to Oliver Wendell Holmes.

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SIMILAR NAMES An ascription can jump from one person to another person who shares a similar name. This mechanism is distinct from alphabetic ambiguity because the mistake is not caused by the misreading of a list of quotations. A gas station attendant with the nickname Socrates has the same name as the famous philosopher Socrates. Harrington Emerson might be confused for Ralph Waldo Emerson; the songwriter Poe could be mistaken for the horror master Edgar Allan Poe. CONCOCTIONS It is difficult to prove that a misquotation or misattribution was forged deliberately. The majority of quotation errors in this book emerged via multifarious accidents. Most of the time, the culprit is only inattentiveness or ineptitude.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski

business climate, Charles Babbage, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “How the Pencil Is Made” from The Pencil : Its History, Manufacture, and Use by The Koh-I-Noor Pencil Company. Reprinted courtesy of Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc. Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Caroline Sturgis quoted by permission of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association and of the Houghton Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petroski, Henry. The pencil: a history of design and circumstance/by Henry Petroski. — 1st ed. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-77243-5 1. Pencils—History. I.

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Without it he could not label his blotting paper pressing leaves or his insect boxes holding beetles; without it he could not record the measurements he made; without it he could not write home on the paper he brought; without it he could not make his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods. According to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau seems always to have carried, “in his pocket, his diary and pencil.” So why did Thoreau—who had worked with his father to produce the very best lead pencils manufactured in America in the 1840s—neglect to list even one among the essential things to take on an excursion? Perhaps the very object with which he may have been drafting his list was too close to him, too familiar a part of his own everyday outfit, too integral a part of his livelihood, too common a thing for him to think to mention.

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He certainly designed and built his own cabin at Walden, and examples of a more mechanical bent in Thoreau exist in the Concord Free Public Library in his drawings for a barn and stanchion for cows and for a machine designed for making lead pipe. So it certainly seems that the younger Thoreau was not without the talents or inclination to “practice engineering” by working out the details of a solution for a machine to produce finer graphite. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son, Edward, who was a young friend of Thoreau, the solution consisted in having a “narrow churn-like chamber around the mill-stones prolonged some seven feet high, opening into a broad, close, flat box, a sort of shelf. Only lead-dust that was fine enough to rise to that height, carried by an upward draught of air, and lodge in the box was used, and the rest ground over.”

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

How I Became an Emersonian For several months I have been camping out in the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a companionable, familiar, and yet endlessly stimulating place and, since his mind is stronger than mine, I keep deferring to his wisdom, even his doubts, and quite shamelessly identifying with him. All this started when I idly came across in a local bookstore the new, two-volume edition of his Selected Journals, published by the Library of America, and decided to give it a whirl. Some 1,800 pages later, I am in thrall to, in love with, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. If this sounds homoerotic, so be it. I think of a peculiar passage about love in his journals that says that in embracing the worth of someone he admires, “I become his wife & he again aspires to a higher worth which dwells in another spirit & so is wife or receiver of that spirit’s influence.”

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My profoundest belief as a teacher is that many solutions for would-be literary nonfiction writers can be found in the library. To that end, I have included here a long list of exemplary books old and new. I have also included a series of literary case studies—Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Baldwin, and Edward Hoagland—to explore how nonfiction theory works in practice. Some of these pieces were commissioned or requested; they may have gotten their start as conference talks, contributions to anthologies, even columns for Creative Nonfiction magazine. But they all speak to the same urgent question, of how to write intelligent, satisfying, engaging literary nonfiction.

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Pre-Darwin, he is saying that we still have the instinctual makeup of apes and cavemen. Note, too, the term “prejudice.” Despite the consensus of opprobrium attached to that word today, I take it as a given that personal essayists must examine their prejudices and instinctual aversions as starting points for any honest analysis of their characters and views. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a notebook entry for October 14, 1834, wrote, “Every involuntary repulsion that arises in your mind give heed unto. It is the surface of a central truth.” The “central truth” that Hazlitt explores in the next long (three-page!) paragraph is that hatred seems to provide an essential flavoring, or spice, that we need in order to keep life from becoming intolerably bland.

Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Mark Zuckerberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Domino Project is powered by Amazon. Sign up for updates and free stuff at www.thedominoproject.com This is the first edition. If you’d like to suggest a riff for a future edition, please visit our website. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803—1882 Self-Reliance / Ralph Waldo Emerson p. cm. ISBN: 978-1-936719-10-5 Self-Reliance RALPH WALDO EMERSON I reread Self-Reliance a few times a year. It’s always on my bedside table and I’ve done it for many years. Emerson’s clear and true words ring like a bell. It keeps me on track. It’s hard to follow your path or even to know what it is. There are constant distractions.

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The Domino Project team consists of Amber Rae, Willie Jackson, Michael Parrish DuDell, Lauryn Ballesteros, Amy Richards, Ishita Gupta, Alex Miles Younger and your host, Seth Godin. Thanks also to the very self-reliant folks in Seattle, including Mary Ellen Fullhart, Sarah Gelman, Terry Goodman, Victoria Griffith, Megan Jacobsen, Galen Maynard, Lynette Mong, Sarah Tomashek, and Alan Turkus. Ralph Waldo Emerson may be long dead, but he’s a role model for many of us (not the dead part, of course). The idea that one can make a living doing work that resonates—spreading ideas that matter—is new again, and we’re glad to highlight him as an example. This book is dedicated to anyone willing to step up and avoid the hobgoblins.

Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

British Empire, classic study, George Santayana, Howard Zinn, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, trade route, white picket fence

This belief, which may have begun with his horror at the way polling places were conducted, led him to favor a strong federal government, and he eventually helped Alexander Hamilton—another man who was disturbed by drunkenness—draft The Federalist Papers. By the 1750s the stage was set for an explosion that would be “the shot heard round the world,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. England was ruled by King George III, who took the British throne during the Seven Years’ War (which included the French and Indian War) over the control of colonial lands in North America, India, Portugal, and other places. In North America, the campaign began with the seizure of a British encampment (later Fort Duquesne) by the French in the disputed Ohio Valley.

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This seems to have been the case for both Ethan Allen, who sauntered into the bedroom of a commandant and ordered him to surrender, and for Paul Revere, who, after being captured by the British, talked them into letting him go and persuaded them that the small, ragged militia waiting for them on Lexington Green was actually a few hundred well-trained and well-armed men. “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson are both poems that sacrifice the actual facts to the constraints of rhyme and the possibility of entertainment. This is just as well, since liquor figures in both stories. Historical poems by men like Longfellow and Emerson were the movies of the nineteenth century. They were amusing, and a lot more fun than reading dry old history books, but extremely inaccurate and often embellished.

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There are generally two kinds of people in an alcoholic family: the alcoholics who are sloppy, unreliable, infuriating, yet sometimes charming; and the nonalcoholics who in response can become hypercompetent, compulsive, and often furious. They are rarely charming. Rage runs in alcoholic families. Depression and sadness also run deep in families—especially alcoholic families. When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the gloomy misanthropist John Quincy Adams was so difficult and angry that he seemed to have put sulfuric acid in his tea,93 he was describing a classic reaction of the nonalcoholic in an alcoholic family. John Adams himself suffered from sharp spells of melancholy. Although John Adams’s friend and colleague Benjamin Rush, with astonishing prescience, had written that alcoholism was a disease and not a failure of willpower, John and Abigail Adams were baffled by their sons’ alcoholic behavior, by Abigail’s brother William’s behavior, and later by their grandson John Adams’s behavior, which was so heinous that his letters were removed from the family archives.

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The fixation with owning their homes is a physical expression of the English belief in privacy. Are the three things – the insularity of the nation as a whole, a collective belief in domesticity and an individual preoccupation with privacy – differing expressions of the same phenomenon? And if so, where did it come from? In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘English Traits’ I came across a meteorological explanation of the Englishman’s character. ‘Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest,’ he writes, ‘domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.’9 I wondered whether the English weather might really be the key.

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César de Saussure was so scandalized by the open drunkenness, the ‘mighty swearing’, the shirts-off wrestling (the sight of women taking part particularly shook him) and general licentiousness that he concluded that ‘the lower populace is of brutal and insolent nature, and is very quarrelsome’.12 To add a sense of superiority to this natural coarseness was very dangerous. By Victorian times the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson had noted the way in which the general arrogance of the English towards foreigners expressed itself among many young people: ‘There are multitudes of young rude English who have the self sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, with their disdain for the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manner.’13 Every time that English soccer fans rampage through a city centre, overturning the tables of sidewalk cafés, bloodying the noses of anyone unlucky enough to be in their way, the London press and politicians agonize about what it all means.

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Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power, p. 172. 2. Alexander Kinglake: Eothen, pp. 200–202. 3. Max O’Rell: John Bull and his Island, p. 18. 4. Michael Lewis: ‘Oh, not to be in England’, in the Spectator, 23 May 1992. 5. Hermann Muthesius: The English House, p. xv. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘English Traits’, in Collected Works, Vol. V, pp. 59–60. 10. George Santayana: Soliloquies in England, p. 14. 11. Samuel Johnson: The Idler, No. 11. 12. Bill Bryson: Notes from a Small Island, p. 278. 13. Johnson, op. cit. 14. Prof. C. G. Collier, letter, 29 October 1996. 15. André Maurois: Three Letters on the English, pp. 261–2. 16.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, p. 221. 4. For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010). 5. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. Carlos P. Otero (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), p. 34. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 525. 7. For discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1964). See also Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8.

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One of your strongest influences was the educator John Dewey, whom you’ve described as “one of the relics of the Enlightenment classical liberal tradition.”5 One of the real achievements of the United States is that it pioneered mass public education, not just elite education for the few and maybe some vocational training, if anything, for the many. The opening of land-grant colleges and general schools in the nineteenth century was a very significant development. But if you look back, the reasons for this were complex. Actually, one of them was discussed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was struck by the fact that business elites—he didn’t use that term—were interested in public education. He speculated that the reason was that “you must educate them to keep them from our throats.”6 In other words, the mass of the population is getting more rights, and unless they’re properly educated, they may come after us.

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff

California gold rush, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, new economy, New Journalism, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, South of Market, San Francisco, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman

., they were known as the Fireside Poets: a set of nationally loved northeasterners who wrote frequently for the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly, the country’s most prestigious literary magazine. To King, they provided a gold standard against which the young aspirants of the Far Western frontier could be judged. New England had dominated American letters for decades. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson had started an intellectual movement in Massachusetts that molded America’s first generation of literary greats. Emerson and his descendants failed in one major respect, however. They gave the young nation much to be proud of—yet they never quite overcame the postcolonial inferiority complex that, since the Revolution, had kept American writers in thrall to their European elders.

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Harte induced nearly as much swooning at the Saturday Club, a monthly gathering of all the big-name Brahmins. He attended on February 25, 1871, his first full day in town. In an oak-paneled room on the second floor of a Boston hotel, the wizened monuments of American letters lined up to meet him: Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Even Twain would have been intimidated by such company. But if Harte felt the slightest bit starstruck, it didn’t show. On the contrary: he “had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked,” Howells observed.

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Fields, October 29, 1862, HUNT. These weren’t unusual Fireside Poets: James H. Justus, “The Fireside Poets: Hearthside Values and the Language of Care,” in A. Robert Lee, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (London: Vision Press, 1985), pp. 146–165. New England had dominated “We have listened . . .”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley, eds., The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin, 1981 [1946]), p. 70. The New York Bohemians “solemn Philistines”: quoted in Roy Kotynek and John Cohassey, American Cultural Rebels, p. 17. In October 1863 Harte’s story was called “The Legend of Monte del Diablo.”

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

ACT THE WAY YOU WANT TO FEEL Five to ten accomplishments or experiences that will make me feel this way: Three things I will do today to generate these feelings: Three things I will do this week to generate these feelings: Three things I will do this quarter to generate these feelings: Three people to collaborate with who help me feel this way: The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way. —African proverb When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Often just asking a question put changes in motion. Even if you don’t have the answer, a good question stirs up reality. This is why the master poet Rilke implores us to “Live the questions themselves, live them now!” That starts with asking more questions of one another and ourselves. Ceaselessly. 1.

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Try to appreciate the position that the other person is in. Giving honest criticism is no fun for most people, and it’s often a case of “This is going to hurt me as much as it might hurt you.” There’s a decent chance that your critic fretted over how best to deliver the feedback to you. Consider the source. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, to succeed is “to earn the appreciation of honest critics.” So, first, you need to consider your source and their motivation. If you feel you’re being inaccurately criticized, then you need to say so in no uncertain terms. This is tricky because you may be perceived as being defensive.

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(The answer to this is very rarely “everyone.” There are two ways to approach this: values + lifestyle, and “types” of people.) Who needs what you’ve got? (Even though they may not know it yet.) Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. —Ralph Waldo Emerson If it looks good, you’ll see it. If it sounds good, you’ll hear it. If it’s marketed right, you’ll buy it. But if it’s true, you’ll feel it. —Kid Rock If you’re working in the marketing department of a major blue-chip firm crafting eco-friendly slogans to cover up your toxic waste, or at an ad agency devising sexy images about how cans of liquid sugar are going to make us feel groovy, then give me a minute of your time.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

So its performance created intellectual as well as economic independence, and therefore the possibility of citizenship. If you were independent in this twofold sense, you couldn’t be coerced or duped by the wealthy men who lived off the labor of slaves and serfs. You were your own boss, as we would put it today: you answered to nobody. Centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln spoke this same language. In “Man the Reformer,” a lecture first given at a library founded by mechanics’ apprentices in 1841, Emerson introduced what he called the “doctrine of the Farm.” He sounds like an innocent ancestor of Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, or Matthew B.

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.: National Printing Office, 1966), 40. Chapter 2 1. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:183–84. 2. From a letter to a Russian friend, P. V. Annenkov, in December 28, 1846, appendix to Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 181. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A Lecture Read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841,” in Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: J. Munroe, 1849). Chapter 3 1. Thomas Edsall, “Is the Safety Net Just Masking Tape?,” New York Times, December 17, 2013; italics mine. 2. David Ellerman, “Rethinking Common vs.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

No matter who you are or what you’re trying to do, you’re about to discover a useful new way of looking at business that will help you spend less time fighting your fears and more time doing things that make a difference. You Don’t Need to Know It All As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ESSAYIST AND POET One of the beautiful things about learning any subject is the fact that you don’t need to know everything—you only need to understand a few critically important concepts that provide most of the value. Once you have a solid scaffold of core principles to work from, building upon your knowledge and making progress becomes much easier.

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Using Leverage is playing with fire—it can be a useful tool if used properly, but it can also burn you severely. Never use Leverage unless you’re fully aware of the consequences and are prepared to accept them. Otherwise, you’re putting your business and personal financial situation at risk. Hierarchy of Funding Money often costs too much. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ESSAYIST AND POET Imagine you’ve invented an antigravity device that can levitate solid objects without requiring much power. Your invention will revolutionize the transportation and manufacturing industries, making many new products possible. Demand for your invention is a given—all you need to do is create enough devices to fill the demand.

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Understanding how we take in information, how we make decisions, and how we decide what to do or what not to do is critically important if you want to create and sustain a successful business venture. Once you have a clear picture of how the human mind works, it’s easy to find better ways to get things done and work more effectively with others. SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/human-mind/ Caveman Syndrome Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have lived 100,000 years ago. Your senses are on full alert as you walk along the banks of a river, scanning for food: fish swimming in the stream, edible plants, or animals to catch. The sun is nearing its apex, and you’ve already walked six miles today—your callused feet will take you six miles more before the day is done.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg

bread and circuses, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, feminist movement, fixed income, global village, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, New Urbanism, place-making, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, wage slave, young professional

Atkin, “A Designed Locale for Laughter to Reinforce Community Bonds,” in Chapman and Foot, Ibid. 15. Georg Simmel, in On Individual and Social Form, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). 16. George Malko, “The Biltmore for Men Only,” Holiday Magazine (January 1969), 16. 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968), 161. 18. See the discussion of neutral ground in Chapter 2. 19. Harry Carmichael, Most Deadly Hate (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1974). 20. Thomas S. Langner and Stanley T. Michael, Life Stress and Mental Health (New York: The Free Press of Clencoe, 1963), 284–287. 21.

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Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), Chapter 9. 10. Richard West, “The Power of 21,” New York (5 October 1981), 33. 11. Michael Daly, “Break Point,” New York (5 October 1981), 45. 12. Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), Chapter 11. 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Journals (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 158. 14. Richard Goodwin, “The American Condition,” The New Yorker (28 January 1974), 36. 15. William Wordsworth, “The Art of Conversation,” in Wordsworthian and Other Studies, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 181–206. 16.

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Henry Sedgwick, The Art of Happiness (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930), Chapter 17. 18. Brian Jackson, Working Class Community (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), Chapter 4. 19. “The English Department,” Playground Daily News (25 November 1982). 20. John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1967 Reprint), 214–215. 21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Uncollected Lectures (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1932), 36. 22. Op. cit. 23. Laurence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), Chapter 11. 24. Op. cit. 25. Op. cit. 26. Henry Miller, Remember to Remember (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1952), 12. 27. Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Corner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976). 28.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

If you can see where the roots of global English and its predominantly American culture are planted, how and why they evolved and what contributed to its special character, you might feel more confident about the world we are in, and be at peace with it. 5 Writing merely of the English language, the celebrated American critic Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that it was ‘the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven’. In the new millennium English and the numberless manifestations of its culture surround us like a sea; and like the waters of the deep, it is full of mysteries. Why do some Germans idolize Shakespeare? How did a soccer trophy sponsor peace among warring factions in Iraq?

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In the eighth century as much as the fifth, an island with the promise of minerals would always be attractive to invaders. For the next three hundred years the English experienced another foreign occupation in which their culture would be forced to adapt or face annihilation. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Mixture is a secret of the English island.’ This time, the enemy from the sea was symbolic of a wider European phenomenon. 5 The mass movement of the Scandinavian peoples between the years 750 and 1050, one of the great migrations of European history, began as seasonal plunder-raids and ended as conquest and settlement.

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This inculcation of Standard American English was an early consequence of independence, and culturally for the American people every bit as important. 5 Noah Webster’s was just one practical response to the challenge of independence. Throughout American society the idea of radical innovation was expressed in all manner of ways, both homespun and high-flown. The mood of can-do enthusiasm reached up even as far as the great American critic, the ‘Transcendentalist’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard University of 1837, defined the American way as a ceaseless quest for originality as well as for a liberation from the burden of the past, especially in its European manifestations. The American scholar, Emerson declared, ‘plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation … He is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

,” Commentary, September 1, 1948, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-own-mass-culture. “I do not wish to expiate but to live”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 263, 262. “a new degree of culture”: Emerson, “Circles,” ibid., 408. “Some fetish of a government”: Emerson, “The American Scholar,” ibid., 64. “make the gallows as glorious as the cross”: See James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1888), 2:597. When the self-reliant Emersonian: Cf. Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 396–421.

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Because they were more attuned to the psychic discords of American national identity, the producers of America’s demotic culture were able to play a leading role in articulating conflicting desires, fears, and dreams that were barely expressible in the realm of electoral politics. Consider, for example, the paradoxical convergence in antebellum America of popular interest in the northern states in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the minstrel show—a cultural convergence that helped set the stage for the Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery. Emerson became the architect of a popular philosophy for the new nation by lecturing on the Lyceum circuit of organizations that sponsored public events meant to promote “the universal diffusion of knowledge” to the general public.

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A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS American distrust of popular passions; the tempering influence of commerce in eighteenth-century America ||| 1776: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence ||| the ambiguous place of democracy in America during the revolutionary era ||| modern democracy from France to America: the democratic-republican societies of the 1790s ||| the American dream of a commercial democracy ||| America’s first great demagogue, Andrew Jackson ||| Tocqueville celebrates the Fourth of July in Albany, New York, 1831 ||| Tocqueville on democracy as an egalitarian form of life ||| the strange insurrection over the right to vote in Rhode Island, 1842 ||| Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American struggle over the franchise ||| demotic culture in America: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, minstrelsy ||| Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and the fantasy of a democracy still to come FOUR. A STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY The Chartists and the London Democratic Association; the first Chartist Convention and first Chartist petition, 1839 ||| Karl Marx’s ambivalence about democracy; communism as the realization of individual freedom and social equality ||| conflict as the paradoxical essence of nascent modern democratic societies ||| Mazzini and his democratic faith in cosmopolitan nationalism ||| the Paris Commune of 1871 ||| the Commune as revolutionary icon ||| the rise of mass political parties; the case of the German Social Democratic Party ||| the Russian general strike of 1905 and the St.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious. Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems. No one has ever said that better than Ralph Waldo Emerson: Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to . . . their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers.

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Observe the ideas of the present day . . . see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons. . . . It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas . . . would cause the most striking changes of external things.7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

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Thanks to David Holmstrom of Santiago, Chile. 5. For an example, see Dennis Meadows’s model of commodity price fluctuations: Dennis L. Meadows, Dynamics of Commodity Production Cycles (Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press, Inc., 1970). 6. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “War,” lecture delivered in Boston, March, 1838. Reprinted in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. XI, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1887), 177. 8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Chapter Seven 1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1927). 2.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

But during that momentous summer he radiated a sense of tranquility and equanimity. He had reached a rock-like place of inner certainty. Here, nothing could touch him. 1 TheTrueHOOHA Ellicott City, near Baltimore December 2001 ‘Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of one’s own mind.’ RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ‘Self-Reliance’, Essays: First Series In late December 2001, someone calling themselves ‘TheTrueHOOHA’ had a question. TheTrueHOOHA was an 18-year-old American male, an avid gamer, with impressive IT skills and a sharp intelligence. His real identity was unknown. But then everyone who posted on Ars Technica, a popular technology website, did so anonymously.

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Lon was an officer in the US coast guard; Snowden spent his early years in Elizabeth City, along North Carolina’s coast, where the coast guard has its biggest air and naval base. He has an older sister, Jessica. Like other members of the US forces, Snowden Snr has strong patriotic views. He is a conservative. And a libertarian. But he is also a thoughtful conservative. Snowden’s father is articulate, well-read and quotes the works of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advocated a man adhering to his own principles against the dictates of a corrupt state. On joining the coast guard, Lon Snowden swore an oath to uphold the US constitution and the Bill of Rights. He meant it. For him the oath was not just a series of empty phrases: it underpinned the solemn American contract between a citizen and the state.

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A creative body of work stretching back over several years, it includes dozens of photos of herself, and some of her E. ‘To delete or not to delete?’ she tweets. She doesn’t delete. 3 THE SOURCE Gavea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil December 2012 ‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’ RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-reliance and Other Essays From the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the city of Rio de Janeiro appears as a precipitous swirl of greens and browns. In the sky, black vultures turn in slow spirals. Below – far below – is downtown and a shimmer of skyscrapers. Fringing it are beaches and breakers frothing endlessly on a turquoise sea.

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

“Fortunate are they”: Joseph Jastrow, Plotting Your Life: The Psychologist as Helmsman (New York: Greenberg, 1930), 361. In 1734: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (Philadelphia: McCarty and Davis, 1821), 17. In 1750: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), 58. In 1831: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 75. “A new idea”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 113. She asked him to clarify: Katharine Briggs to C. G. Jung, August 23, 1927, Hs 1056:1083, C. G. Jung Papers Collection, ETH-Bibliothek (Zurich, Switzerland).

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In 1734, Alexander Pope had started his poem “An Essay on Man” with the command “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is Man.” In 1750, Benjamin Franklin, one of Katharine’s heroes, had quipped, “There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.” In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet whose work had inspired William James’s theory of a personal religion, urged each person to “know thyself” so that he might find the “God in thee.” Katharine’s article was just the most recent node in a long intellectual tradition that stretched across the Atlantic and back. But in the pages of the New Republic, the idea of meeting yourself was presented in a tone of definitive, cheerful accessibility that made the journey to self-discovery seem accessible—fun, even.

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It took only three days on Lake Zurich for Murray to diagnose Jung’s “cathexis for women”: his “adoration, adulation” of his female patients and the female sex more generally. Nevertheless, he took Jung’s advice and decided to take his life into his own hands. He and Christiana Morgan became lovers, and together they reread Jung and Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, and discussed how they could make Jung’s language of the self the cornerstone of modern personality psychology. “To go on with what Jung has begun would be the biggest thing that could be done at the present time. Is there a bigger whale or whiter whale than the chains of the outworn attitude which fetter and hinder the spirit?”

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

For research supporting the general idea that becoming accustomed to something as the norm interferes with our ability to derive enjoyment from lesser versions of that sort of thing, see Christopher Hsee, Reid Hastie, and Jinquin Chen, “Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (2008): 224–43. 47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 78. 48. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, III, p. 28. 49. Ibid., p. 27. 50. Seneca, “Consolation of Helva,” in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 117. 51. Epicurus, “Fragments,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, p. 51. 52.

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As Wordsworth succinctly put it: One impulse from a vernal wood Can teach you more of man, Of moral evil, and of good, Than all the sages can.12 But probably the best-known modern example of an individual choosing to live in rustic simplicity, away from the artificiality and sophistication of urban society (and its accompanying expenses), in order to be closer to nature is Henry David Thoreau. In 1845 Thoreau built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson close to Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for a little over two years. The literary fruit of this experiment in living was Walden; or, Life in the Woods, a strange combination in one book of memoir, naturalist observations, philosophical reflections, and social commentary.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Lifting up one another should never be considered weakness. Leaning on one another almost always makes us stronger. OceanofPDF.com 2 Where’s Walden? It is the age of the first person singular. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE PEBBLY SHORE thrummed with people: a medley of humanity. It was January 2020, before the pandemic made such a thing lethal, on Walden Pond. I was close to the homes of two patron saints of self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his best friend, Henry David Thoreau. The two were famous Transcendentalists, that literary and philosophical school of thought that helped define the middle of the nineteenth century.

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Schreiner Jr.’s book The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006). “suddenly well and strong . . . [Thoreau is] as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree”: This letter from Emerson is reprinted in Jeffrey S. Cramer, Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2019). He inherited $11,600 in 1834: From Albert J. von Frank’s An Emerson Chronology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994), 91. Emerson’s second wife, Lidian: This detail is from the fine and Emerson-loving biography by Richard D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Google, the world’s most sought-after employer Katie Little and Denise Garcia, “The 40 Most Attractive Employers in America, According to LinkedIn,” CNBC, June 20, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/​2016/​06/​19/​the-40-most-attractive-employers-in-america-according-to-linkedin.html. seeing only the price of fish Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Sully and Kleinteich), 9:9. “strut about so many walking monsters” This from Emerson’s lecture “The American Scholar,” delivered to a class at Harvard College in 1837; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and English Traits (New York: P. F. Collier, 1909). digital fabrication will be “so powerful” Stephanie Shipp et al., Emerging Global Trends in Advanced Manufacturing, IDA Paper P-4603 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, 2012).

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So this is punk manufacturing. Suddenly, thanks to cheap hardware, cheap software, and the Internet, all of us can make stuff. If this movement launches a slew of small businesses like mine, I think it will have an impact every bit as great as the Internet.” The nineteeth-century philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously spoke out against the strictly utilitarian criteria of value, whereby one was judged not by one’s character but by one’s productivity, which he compared to gazing into the ocean and seeing only the price of fish. His insight was that the emerging corporation and its factory system had atomized work and robbed workers of their humanity.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“the physical resources”: RBF, “Margaret Fuller’s Prophecy,” in BFR, 41. “I accept the universe”: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Modern Library, 1994), 47. “I must start with the universe”: AMS, 12. “Chiefly the seashore”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Civilization.” “The line of beauty”: Ibid., “Beauty.” “Swedenborg approximated”: Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 297. “The genius which”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Swedenborg,” Representative Men. “This man, who appeared”: Ibid. “a freak”: Samuel Rosenberg, The Confessions of a Trivialist (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 76. RBF recalled discussing Sidis with the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, another former prodigy of the same era at Harvard (Amy Wallace, The Prodigy [New York: E.

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One of her listeners recalled, “I felt that the whole wealth of the universe was open to me.” The allegorical frontispiece to Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Public domain Margaret Fuller became known as the most widely read person in New England, and she had a tumultuous friendship with the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom she said, “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” Emerson was “astonished and repelled,” but he granted that she was the country’s finest conversationalist. Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, had reservations: “It was such an awful joke,” said the author of The Scarlet Letter, “that she should have resolved—in all sincerity, no doubt—to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age.”

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At his facility in Tomales Bay, California, Dederich oversaw the Game, a form of group therapy based on verbal abuse, and punished members for infractions by ordering them to shave their heads. Dederich also used tensegrity models to represent a perfect society built on “vectors and valences,” as the residents spent hours “gluing their fingers into tortured geometrical configurations,” and Fuller himself was praised as a great thinker on the level of Lao-tzu and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1968 a writer named David Cole Gordon had urged Fuller to pay a visit to Synanon. “Chuck has installed a hobby-size workshop on one end of the large table he uses for a desk,” Gordon wrote, “and is building tensegrity systems and coming to grips with your geometry.” Fuller agreed to tour the center, where he was impressed by how its use of dance “allowed for individual expression while cultivating a group consciousness.”

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

“Expressive individualism,” as exemplified by Walt Whitman, advocates cultivating and “celebrating” the self (as the poet put it in the first line of the first edition of Leaves of Grass). This view has inspired America’s ongoing search for identity and meaning. Though these two strains of individualism promote different values and agendas, together they offer Americans a well of cultural resources for putting the self before society. We draw from them often. Consider Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s first public intellectuals. In his powerful essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson warned that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” and he offered advice for those seeking relief: “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”12 Emerson’s neighbor Henry David Thoreau made the case for self-reliance in more dramatic fashion, moving into a cabin he built near Walden Pond.

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On their prevalence, see Euromonitor International, “Single Living: How Atomisation—The Rise of Singles and One-Person Households—Is Affecting Consumer Purchasing Habits,” 2008. 11. The statistics on living alone are from the 2006–2008 American Community Survey Three-Year Estimates, published by the U.S. Census Bureau. 12. See Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Chelsea House, 1985); David Potter, “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century,” in Ronald Gross and Paul Osterman (eds.), Individualism: Man in Modern Society (New York: Dell, 1971). On Franklin as the “quintessential American,” see Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 [1981]). 13.

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Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 [1981]. Belle, Deborah. “Gender Differences in Children’s Social Networks and Supports,” in Deborah Belle (ed.), Children’s Networks and Social Supports, pp. 173–90. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 1989. Bloom, Harold. Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Borgegård, Lars-Erik, and Jim Kemeny. “Sweden: High-Rise Housing for a Low-Density Country,” in Richard Turkington, Ronald van Kempen, and F. Wassenberg (eds.), High-Rise Housing in Europe: Current Trends and Future Prospects, pp. 31–48. Delft, Netherlands: Delft University Press, 2004.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

The urge to rebuild a nation that had yet to celebrate even one centenary became almost a fetish among some philosophers, writers, and clergy even as they worried that their idealism might be seen as all talk and no action. “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” wrote Thoreau’s friend, transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1840, and “not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”17 Many experiments were attempted in Emerson’s neighborhood, most notably the famous effort at Brook Farm. Brook Farm The utopian community of Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was typical of its time.

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Children addressed their teacher Sophia Ripley by her first name, and as Blair recollected, “She seemed to permeate her pupils with a joyous confidence in their individual ability to tread the path so clearly and pleasantly indicated by her.”29 Most profoundly, the children were seen as having an absolute right to education—“not doled out to him as though he was a pupil of orphan asylums and almshouses—not as the cold benefice and bounty of the world—but as his right—a right conferred upon him by the very fact that he is born into this world a human being.”30 Unlike other utopian experiments in the nineteenth century, Brook Farm did not require participants to abandon their nuclear families or sever all ties with the outside world, so the happenings at Brook Farm were breathlessly reported in the popular press of the time. One Farmer would later note that “there were thousands who looked upon us as little less than heathens, who had returned to a state of semi-barbarism.”31 Many of the leading lights of the transcendentalist movement, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Parker, passed through the commune. Early feminist and writer Margaret Fuller was also a frequent visitor and resident. Frederick Pratt recalled “the jolly time we children had together, and the use made of our boys’ wheelbarrows or wagons in carrying the girls about; 15 or 18 years afterwards, my brother John married Annie Alcott.

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Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that binary opposition (male/female, good/evil, hot/cold, conservative/liberal, human/animal, body/soul, nature/nurture, and so forth) is one of the simplest and most widespread ways that humans come to terms with complexities in the natural world.85 Unsurprisingly, this tendency to categorize is also applied to social life, demarcating the difference between us and them, between friend and foe. Friendship is a fundamental category, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was onto something when he said, “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.”86 Yet scientists have tended to neglect the role friends have played in the life of our species. An extreme focus on kinship and marriage has obscured the more numerous relationships people have with unrelated friends.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

I knew from then on that I could have the courage to fail on my own terms. From that moment, I decided that if I was going to succeed or fail, it was going to be up to me. I was changed forever. If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson I love this quote because it is all about defeating fear. Every great and extraordinary accomplishment in this world was done through courage. Hell, you don’t even get to be born unless your mother has the courage to have you. I repeat this phrase when I’m anxious or nervous about something.

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Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? I have a few of them: “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream of things that never were and say ‘why not?’”—Robert Kennedy “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”—C. S. Lewis “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case you fail by default.”

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–John Ruskin Victorian polymath, art critic, philanthropist, and social thinker “As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, leader of the 19th-century transcendentalist movement “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Humboldt was to be away from Europe for five years. On his return, he settled in Paris and over the next twenty years published a thirty-volume account of his travels, entitled Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The length of the work was an accurate measure of Humboldt's achievements. Surveying these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was to write, ‘Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties—a universal man.' Much about South America was still unknown to Europe when Humboldt set sail from La Coruna: Vespucci and Bougainville had travelled around the shores of the continent, and La Condamine and Bouguer had surveyed the streams and mountains of the Amazon and of Peru, but there were still no accurate maps of the region, and little information had been gathered on its geology, botany and indigenous peoples.

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Thomas Gray, Letters (1739): ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument' Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery' (1835): Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator—they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.' Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature' (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.' It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Desmond King, “America’s Hidden Government: The Costs of a Submerged State,” review of The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, by Suzanne Mettler, in Foreign Affairs 91, no. 3 (May/June 2012). 18. Robert W. McChesney, “Public Scholarship and the Communications Policy Agenda,” in … And Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for a New Administration, ed. Amit M. Schejter (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 50. 19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: In Two Volumes (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company, 1870). 20. Michael Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuke, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975), http://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf. 21.

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American commercial advertising deeply impressed others; Joseph Goebbels admired it and adapted it to Nazi propaganda, all too successfully.18 The Bolshevik leaders tried as well, but their efforts were clumsy and ineffective. A primary domestic task has always been “to keep [the public] from our throats,” as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described the concerns of political leaders when the threat of democracy was becoming harder to suppress in the mid-nineteenth century.19 More recently, the activism of the 1960s elicited elite concerns about “excessive democracy” and calls for measures to impose “more moderation” in democracy.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Evans, 1833), 19. 57.Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 165; Emerson quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 124–25. Earlier, Emerson had hailed manufacturing for freeing New England from the need to farm under uncongenial conditions: “Where they have sun, let them plant; we who have it not, will drive our pens and water-wheels.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, vol. IV (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 209. 58.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 115–18. 59.As late as 1853, there were over 1,800 children under fifteen working in Rhode Island manufacturing establishments, including 621 between ages nine and twelve and 59 under the age of nine.

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When the growth of Lowell and the planning of Lawrence presented the possibility that companies on the Merrimack would run out of water power, instead of installing steam engines the mill owners bought real estate and water privileges at the outlet of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, over sixty miles away, to direct more water into the river (outraging Ralph Waldo Emerson for what he saw as arrogance).28 The corporate arrangements adopted by the Boston textile investors allowed expansion on a scale unprecedented for manufacturing. In 1850, the mills they controlled accounted for about a fifth of all the cotton spinning in the United States. In Lowell alone, in 1857 the ten mill companies, the Lowell Bleachery, and the Lowell Machine Shop (spun off from Canals and Locks) together employed over thirteen thousand workers.29 But the Lowell model did not take full advantage of potential efficiencies that came with size.

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But for Luther, “if a cotton mill is a ‘paradise,’ it is ‘Paradise Lost,’” a site of unhealthy long hours, poorly paid workers, and tyrannical overseers.56 Critics of New England mill conditions, unlike in England, rarely claimed that factory conditions were as bad as or worse than slavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson was something of an exception when, in a bitter commentary on Lowell, he equated black slaves in the South with female mill worker “slaves” and criticized mill owners for wanting to live in luxury without working, “enjoyment without the sweat.”57 But critics still turned to slavery for metaphors of oppression.

How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher

British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, cotton gin, financial engineering, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, white flight, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Then, in 1863, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair had simplified the pricing system by categorizing the mail into first-class letters, second-class publications such as newspapers and magazines, and third-class advertisements, hardcover books, and other miscellaneous printed matter. By 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson could laud the post for its “educating energy augmented by cheapness, and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind, so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”

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“Express companies extend their business”: Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1889. “The effect of such a law”: C. A. Hutsinpillar, “The Parcels Post” (1904), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 262. “our great cooperative express company”: James L. Cowles, “A United States Parcels Post,” in ibid., p. 236. “educating energy augmented by cheapness”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1870), p. 26. “so trashy and wishy-washy”: James Britt, “Second Class Mail Matter: Its Uses and Abuses” (1911), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 470. “As long as the people”: Wilmer Atkinson, “Guessing and Figuring Having Failed, Try a Few Ounces of Common Sense” (1911), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 455.

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“Comstockery is the world’s standing joke”: George Bernard Shaw, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, September 26, 1905, p. 1. an “Irish smut dealer”: “Who’s Bernard Shaw? Asks Mr. Comstock,” New York Times, September 28, 1905, p. 9. “Shall the right to mail service”: Louis Post, “Our Despotic Postal Censorship,” in John, American Postal Network, vol. 1, p. 407. “Good men must not obey the laws”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics,” Essays: Second Series (Boston: James Munroe, 1844). Quoted in https://emersoncentral.com/politics.htm. If there’s a physical symbol of what the combination of the post at its peak: The Farley Post Office continues to play an important role in the preservation of New York City’s historic buildings.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Early American commuters were required to brave spiritual as well as physical dangers. The Transcendentalists, whose mixture of romanticism and metaphysics became fashionable in the glory decades of railroad building, reckoned train travel was bad for the soul. Their opposition to it was all the more bitter because they’d celebrated it in its infancy. When Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to pin down the zeitgeist in his seminal 1844 lecture on the ‘Young American’, he declared that the railroads had given his subjects an ‘increased acquaintance… with the boundless resources of their own soil’; had annihilated time and converted the country into a wonderland, for railroad iron was ‘a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water’.

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Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Oxford, University Press, 1985, p. 48. 68 ‘A man is not a whole and complete man’, Walt Whitman, quoted in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 50. 68 ‘in the morning there is one incessant stream of people’, Whitman, quoted in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 28. 68 ‘Property is continually tending from our city to escape’, New York Tribune 21 January 1847, quoted in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 28. 70 ‘on, on, on – tears the mad dragon’, Charles Dickens, American Notes For General Circulation, 1842, from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/675/675-h/675-h.htm. 70 ‘and the train had gone but a few miles when a “snakehead”’, Anthony J. Bianculli, Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century: Track and Structures, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2003, p. 88. 71 ‘Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind’, from ‘Ode to William H. Channing’ in The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York, and Boston, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1899. 71 ‘five times a day, I can be whirled to Boston within an hour’, Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, p. 190. 71 ‘the main distinction between which’, Dickens, American Notes. 71 ‘well stuffed, and covered with a fine plush,’ quoted in John H.

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., Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Eden, Emily, The Semi-detached House, London, Richard Bentley, 1859. Emerson, George Rose, London: How the Great City Grew, London, 1862. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘Ode to William H. Channing’, The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York and Boston, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company 1899. Engel, Matthew, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain, London, Pan, 2010. Farmer, Richard, Troy Tranah, Ian O’Donnell, and Jose Catalan, ‘Railway suicide: the psychological effects on drivers’. Psychological Medicine, Vol.22, no.2, 1992.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but rough his toil be sowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till . . . Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none . . . Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Random House, 2000), 133, 135, 139. [back] 37. “Become who you are!” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2005). [back] 38. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968, 1999), 149–234.

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“Minimum Wage Facts at a Glance.” Fact sheet. Accessible at www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage_minwagefacts. Economist. “Selling Hot Air.” September 9, 2006. Eliot, T. S. “Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton.” In Four Quartets. 1943. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: Random House, 2000. Environics Research Group. “Socio-Cultural Trends: 3SC 1992–2004.” Environmental Protection Agency Office of Transportation and Air Quality. “Light-Duty Automotive Technology and Fuel Economy Trends, 1975 through 2006.” Fact sheet.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

For Edwards, ingratitude—the refusal to acknowledge limits on human powers, the wish to achieve godlike knowledge and capacities—became the antithesis of virtue and the essence of original sin. In the nineteenth century, a time when the progress of human ingenuity seemed to promise a decisive victory over fate, Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, latter-day Calvinists without a Calvinist theology, reminded their readers that human beings did not control their own fate. They argued, in effect, that fate could be conquered only by "wonder" and virtue—by grateful acceptance of a world that was not made solely for human enjoyment. Their insistence on human limitations, it seems to me, had a good deal in common with the populist critique of -15- "improvement," even though it was couched in a philosophical rather than a political idiom.

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But neither were they seduced by the rosy visions -226- of the future that circulated so widely in the Age of Reason and its aftermath. Criticism of progress drew on a variety of sources, but the most fruitful of all was the tradition of Christian prophecy, as reformulated by Calvin and his followers and, in the nineteenth century, by moral philosophers and social critics—notably Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson— in whom Calvinism remained a powerful background presence. No longer Calvinists or even Christians in any formal sense, Emerson and Carlyle nevertheless reasserted a prophetic understanding of history and human nature in opposition not only to the reigning celebration of progress but to the Burkean alternative.

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It is a gift in the fullest sense of the word, entrusted to them for safekeeping, and their intuitive, unself-conscious understanding of this fact is what makes them heroes in the first place. Their heroism lies in their acceptance of their fate, their willingness to be used for purposes not their own. Heroism is thus the reverse of "self-expression"—voluntary, hence triumphant, submission. * Emerson in His Contemporaries' Eyes: Stoic and "Seer" Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced Sartor Resartus to the American public and made no secret of his lifelong admiration for its author. Carlyle returned the compliment. "'In the wide Earth,' I say sometimes with a sigh, 'there is none but Emerson that responds to me with a voice wholly human!'" At first, Emerson's association with Carlyle heightened popular misgivings about the fatalistic overtones in his philosophy.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

Finally, Reyce tries to dissuade Winthrop with the wilderness’s shocking lack of reading material, carping, “How hard will it be for one brought up among books and learned men, to live in a barbarous place, where is no learning and less civility?” Not so hard, it turns out. Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children’s children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox. One of the Puritans’ descendants, Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, embodied the wordy tradition passed down to him when he announced, “The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man.” As the twentieth-century critic F. O. Mat thiessen would complain of Emerson’s bookish bent, “It can remind you of the bias of provincial New England, whose higher culture had been so exclusively one of books that it had grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression.”

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Hutchinson, still swooning, spiritually speaking, for Cotton, nevertheless starts departing from her mentor’s lectures and lets rip her own opinions and beliefs. One person keeping an eye on her, both theologically and literally, is John Winthrop, who lives across the street. (The site of her home would later house Ticknor and Fields, the famous book publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, appropriately, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in The Scarlet Letter’s first chapter, misspells her first name but nevertheless honors Hutchinson by describing a rose bush in bloom said to have “sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door” and symbolizing “some sweet moral blossom.”

Retire Before Mom and Dad by Rob Berger

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, car-free, cuban missile crisis, discovery of DNA, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, hedonic treadmill, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, robo advisor, The 4% rule, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

To determine how long it will take us to reach Level 7, all we need are our Saving Rate, Investment Return, and Withdrawal Rate. Our time to Level 7 is very sensitive to changes in our Investment Returns and Withdrawal Rate assumption. Video: https://www.retirebeforemomanddad.com/Chapter11 Chapter 12 Level 7 & Saving Rate “Money often costs too much.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The beautiful thing about the Money Multiplier is that small changes can have a big effect on your journey to Level 7. And big changes can have a huge effect. Let’s first look at some big changes. Then we’ll turn to small changes. Big Changes to Saving Rate So far, we’ve assumed the following: Annual Income: $75,000 Saving Rate: 20% ($15,000 a year) Spending Rate: 80% ($60,000 a year) We know that it will take about 31 years to reach Level 7 Financial Freedom assuming a 6.3% after inflation investment return.

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Changing our habits will be painful at first. Over time, however, we may find that changes that at first seemed like a sacrifice actually saved us money and made our lives more enjoyable. Chapter 17 What if? “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson I love the game of chess—but not the occasional game with a friend. I’m talking about tournament chess with clocks and everything. I have a library filled with chess books, chess playing software, online subscriptions to chess sites, and even chess databases. Chess can be devilishly deceiving.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Maran, Pluto Confidential: An Insider Account of the Ongoing Battles Over the Status of Pluto (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2009), 4. 62. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “Exploring the Planets,” https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/exploring-the-planets/online/discovery/greeks.cfm. 63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 261. 64. In the Shadow of the Moon, directed by Dave Sington (Velocity/Think Film, 2008), DVD. 65. Virginia P. Dawson and Mark D. Bowles, eds., Realizing the Dream of Flight (Washington, DC: NASA History Division, 2005), 237. 66. Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (New York: W.W.

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Planet is derived from a Greek word that means “wanderer.” Ancient Greeks looked up at the sky and saw objects that moved against the relatively fixed positions of the stars. They called them wanderers.62 Like planets, science wanders. Upheaval precedes progress, and progress generates more upheaval. “People wish to be settled,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, but “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”63 Those who cling to the past get left behind as the world marches forward. As the story of Pluto’s demotion shows, we tend to respond to uncertainty—no matter how benign—as alarming. But the key to growing comfortable with uncertainty is figuring out what’s truly alarming and what’s not.

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. That is Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “The American Scholar,” going as usual to the mystical heart of the matter. The problem he identifies is not the alienation of the intellectual from society, but rather the estrangement of thinking from the totality of human life. And the consequence of this “divided or social state” is that people appear to one another as stunted creatures worthy of Dr.

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His place in the history of philosophical aesthetics is marginal at best, but that’s just a case of a thinker being excluded from a club in which he never sought membership in the first place. Pater belongs in the canon of English-language Victorian prose artists, along with Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, of course, Oscar Wilde, the disciple who would eventually surpass him. And at its finest, say when he was writing about the Renaissance paintings he loved and did a great deal to introduce to the modern English-speaking public, Pater’s prose does approach the condition of music, as his thoughts are borne forward on sentences of complex beauty arranged in exquisite balance: Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary.

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

I call the institutions that evolved on their own to become self-perpetuating cultural viruses. ttt 146 C hapter nine C ultur al Viruses “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson From the children’s game of “telephone,” we know that it’s difficult to copy memes with 100 percent fidelity even if we want to. When replication occurs with slight changes in the replicator, and those modified replicators are selected somehow for their fitness, then we have evolution. When a concept appears that has all the properties of a virus of the mind, then as it starts spreading through the population, the memes constituting that concept evolve.

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After a few years of thinking liberal thoughts and making decisions based on them—poof! You’re a liberal! It’s much more difficult and energy-consuming to start from scratch on every issue and really think it through than to attempt to be consistent with a particular set of beliefs. 204 Designer Viruses (How to Start a Cult) This is where Ralph Waldo Emerson comes in again, saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I often surprise people with what they perceive to be a lack of consistency in my points of view. Good! It means I’m staying off the cow paths! I wonder what would happen to someone like a Kennedy or Dole if they magically got appointed to the Senate for life and no longer had to be mouthpieces for the Left or Right.

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

(In astronomical usage, a star’s luminosity specifies the star’s total energy output per second, including all types of radiation such as vis­i­ble light, infrared, and ultraviolet. The luminosity remains in­de­pen­dent of the star’s distance from an observer, which affects the star’s brightness, designated as the star’s “apparent brightness” by astronomers.) As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “for ­every ­thing you have missed, you have gained something e­ lse.”6 Unlike the A and B stars, whose joint output makes them the third-­brightest star in the night sky (though they remain forever invisible from mid-­or high northern latitudes), Proxima Centauri’s low luminosity renders it invisible to the unaided eye, close though it may be.

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Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (New York: Walker & Com­pany, 2011); Konrad Rudnicki, “The Generalized Cosmological Copernican Princi­ple,” available at http://­southerncrossreview​.­org​/­51​/­rudnicki4​.­htm. Data available at http://­exoplanet​.­eu​/­catalog​/­hd​_­20782​_­b​/­. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation (1841). Data for Proxima Centauri b are available at http://­exoplanet​.­eu​ /­catalog​/­proxima​_­cen​_­b​/­. Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, “A Revised Estimate of the Occurrence Rate of Terrestrial Planets in the Habitable Zones around Kepler M-­ Dwarfs,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 767 (2013): L8.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

The good news is, Schumpeter was right: Nowadays, factory girls have access to the same silk stockings as queens. CHAPTER 4 Overcoming Bureaucracy and Stagnation ECONOMIC CONCEPTS TO SET YOU FREE The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (ATTRIBUTED)1 One day in the early 1980s, I was sitting in the office of a vice president at a major oil company, listening with dismay to his tales of corporate woe: bureaucracy, resistance to change, red tape, and so forth. It sounded nightmarish to me. “How in the world does someone survive here?”

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Alwis, “Spoon-Feeding in ‘Do’ Disciplines,” CDTL Brief 3, no. 2 (May 2000), p. 5. 2. The Deming Videotapes: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position (part of the MIT Video Series from the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study), copyright 1983 MIT. 3. http://www.forbes.com​/quotes/author​/mary-beard. 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, “Self-Reliance” (Digireads, 2007), p. 21. 5. W. E. Deming, The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality, ed. J. Orsini and D. D. Cahill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), p. 105. 6. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 159.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

morality to be central William Damon (1984), “Self-Understanding and Moral Development from Childhood to Adolescence, “ in William M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz, eds., Morality, Moral Behavior, and Moral Development, John Wiley & Sons. spiritual geniuses René Girard (1999), Je Vois Satan Tomber Comme l'Éclair, Grasset English translation (2001), I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Orbis Books. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841), “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series. Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (1852), Walden. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Laurel T. Ulrich (2007), Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Alfred A. Knopf. Socrates's morals Plato (360 BCE), Crito, tr. Benjamin Jowett, MIT Classics Archive.

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Some people consider their morality to be central to their self-identity, while others consider it to be more peripheral. René Girard uses the term “spiritual geniuses” to describe the most moral of people. We also describe many of them as martyrs; being differently moral can be dangerous.5 Society, of course, wants the group interest to prevail. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, SoftBank, Ted Sorensen, traveling salesman, two and twenty, urban planning

In 1838, he met the transcendentalist and illustrator Sophia Peabody, and they became engaged the following year. Two years later, just before Pierce left the Senate, Hawthorne (still unwed) ended up moving to Brook Farm, a utopian commune founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley, where he would meet the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Though Hawthorne did not agree with transcendentalism, he thought that living at Brook Farm would help him save money to marry Sophia and also give him time to write. Very quickly, though, Hawthorne realized he had made a big mistake. His designated job was to shovel and transport manure, an ordeal that left him with blistered hands and little time for writing.

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The dedication sealed his fate as an outlier if not persona non grata among his literary peers and the intellectual elite of his native New England. As Hawthorne lamented at the time, “My friends have dropped off from me like autumn leaves.” Henry David Thoreau likened Pierce to the devil and viewed Hawthorne as scarcely better. Longfellow publicly ended his connections to Hawthorne. Ralph Waldo Emerson also followed suit. When Hawthorne personally sent Emerson a copy of the book, Emerson ripped out the pages containing the gushing, heartfelt dedication, “To A Friend”: And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if you think it needs any excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal friendship between a private individual and a statesman who has filled what was then the most august position in the world.

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It was covered in ivy, fresh roses, pansies, and forget-me-nots, which Daisy had planted herself. “I think he loves it as it is now, because it has been fixed by the hands that love him.” CHAPTER 6 Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson Beshert In 1899, fifteen-year-old Harry S. Truman penned an essay on courage that opened with his favorite quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Behavior is the mirror in which each man shows his image.” For the young Harry, that quote seemed to capture his life’s mantra. It echoed the Horatio Alger myths he grew up reading, those rags-to-riches stories about humble boys working hard to achieve lives of middle-class comfort. Like Alger, Emerson affirmed a kind of pioneer positivity that Truman worshipped: the conviction that personal behavior could change the course of history; that right and wrong existed purely and unambiguously; and that by displaying a certain gutsiness, a man could create an image he’d be proud of.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“an object among other objects”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. “relate to our self in the third person”: Nancy Colier, “The Branding of the Self,” Psychology Today, August 15, 2012. “A foolish consistency”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 95. “is a machine”: Lilly Singh, “I’ll See You Soon…,” YouTube, November 12, 2018, at 2:43. “Come for the nectar of approval”: Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (London: Indigo Press, 2019), chapter 2, part IX.

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You can tweak a brand, spin it off, and refresh it—but change its fundamentals and you have yourself a dilution crisis and many indignant customers. In the absence of a stable salary (since those have largely evaporated), that displeasure can translate into a direct drop in personal income. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; in the same passage, he worried that individuals were getting stuck in “a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

., p. 526 83 ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1896), The Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins, c. 1933), p. 197 Chapter Fourteen 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Politics’ (1844), The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 430; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson & W. E. Forbes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1909–14), III, 200 2 Journals, op. cit., V, 302–3 3 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), I, pp. 412–13 4 Emerson to Walt Whitman, 21 July 1855, quoted by Justin Kaplan, ‘Introduction’, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892) (New York: Bantam, 1983), p. xix 5 Whitman, ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’, ibid., p. 451 6 ‘Thought’, ibid., p. 223 7 ‘A Backward Glance’, ibid., pp. 452–3 8 ‘To the States’, ibid., p. 224 9 ‘To the States’, ibid., p. 7 10 Quoted by W.

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While they came close to anarchism, the writers Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau expressed most keenly the libertarian ideal. Their independent stance directly inspired later anarchists and their combination of ‘Transcendental Individualism’ with a search for a creative life close to nature finds echoes in the counter-culture and Green movements of the late-twentieth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson was the elder guru of the Transcendentalists of New England. After Harvard University, he entered the ministry, only to abandon it and sail to Europe, where he became a friend of Carlyle. He returned to Massachusetts and was soon installed as ‘the Sage of Concord’, attracting a literary-philosophical coterie.

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., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 (Montréal: Black Rose, 1974) Dolgoff, Sam, The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (Montréal: Black Rose, 1976) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Journals, eds. E. W. Emerson & W. E. Forbes, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1909–14) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Complete Essays and other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1940) Faure, Sébastien, Autorité el liberté (Paris: Aux Bureaux de la Révolte, 1891) Faure, Sébastien, La Douleur universelle, philosophie liberatire (Paris: Savine, 1895) Faure, Sébastien, L’Encyclopédie anarchiste, 4 vols.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Nupedia was too much process, too little volunteer output, and not enough money. And it most certainly wasn’t fun. Something had to change. Chapter 3_ WIKI ORIGINS “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” —Eric S. Raymond (1998) “Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Nupedia was at a standstill at the end of 2000, even though it had gathered a sizeable set of volunteers. Larry and Jimmy knew their concept was not working, because after a year’s worth of work, all the finished articles bound together would have produced only a booklet. Still believing the project had to be centrally edited, they were stuck for new ideas.

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It would prove later to be a rich resource for Wikipedia, as that nascent community started to run into issues that MeatballWiki had documented and discussed at length. One of the folks who stumbled across the new WikiWikiWeb creation was Ben Kovitz, who was working as a programmer at the time. Remember him? He would provide the lifeline to Nupedia. Chapter 4_ WIKI INTRODUCED “Every artist was first an amateur.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “History is too serious to be left to historians.” —Ian Macleod After both Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales found out about WikiWikiWeb software and its use for collaboration, both were keen on it helping kick-start Nupedia’s lackluster pace. Nupedia was simply not working, because people were not collaborating efficiently and articles were not being generated fast enough.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In the next chapter we will look in a little more detail at why people in the developed world are so sensitive to inequality that it can exert such a major effect on the psychological and social wellbeing of modern populations. 3 How inequality gets under the skin ’Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life How is it that we are affected as strongly by inequality and our position within society as the data in the last chapter suggest? Before exploring – as we shall in the next nine chapters – the relations between inequality and a wide range of social problems, including those in our Index of Health and Social Problems, we want to suggest why human beings might be so sensitive to inequality.

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Instead of accepting each other as equals on the basis of our common humanity as we might in more equal settings, getting the measure of each other becomes more important as status differences widen. We come to see social position as a more important feature of a person’s identity. Between strangers it may often be the dominant feature. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, said, ‘ ’Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it.’19 Indeed, psychological experiments suggest that we make judgements of each other’s social status within the first few seconds of meeting.20 No wonder first impressions count, and no wonder we feel social evaluation anxieties!

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

Beyond anti-party suspicion The assertion about the ultimate withering away of the party, accompanied by the cognate thesis of the withering away of the nation-state in times of globalisation, echoes a long history of anti-party suspicion – one informed by the rejection of party authoritarianism and totalitarianism – which has acquired new strength in neoliberal times. Personalities as different as George Washington, James Madison, Heinrich Von Treitsche, Moisei Ostrogorski, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Simone Weil vocally criticised the political party.24 They alerted to the fact that political parties militated against individuals’ independent judgement, calling for obedience and uniformity, and highlighted that rather than pursuing the general interests of society, they mostly ended up defending the narrow interest of a faction.

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Many of these critical interventions on the political party can be found in the collection Perspectives on political parties: classic readings, edited by S. Scarrow (New York: Springer, 2002). Also see Simone Weil, On the abolition of all political parties (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014). 25. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in his journals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p.78. 26. Simone Weil, On the abolition of all political parties (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014), p.49. 27. A great deal has been written about totalitarian parties, a topic that is important for its general implications on the theory of the political party.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

But the longer this Crisis of Authority persists, the more it runs the risk of metastasizing into something that could threaten what we most cherish about American life: our ability to self-correct, to somehow, even seemingly against all odds, make the future better than the past. Chapter 2 MERITOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS The existence of an upper class is not injurious, as long as it is dependent on merit. — RALPH WALDO EMERSON WHETHER WE THINK ABOUT IT MUCH OR NOT, WE all believe in meritocracy. It is embedded in our very language: to call an organization, a business, or an institution “meritocratic” is to pay it a high compliment; to call it bureaucratic is to insult it. On the portion of its website devoted to recruiting talent, Goldman Sachs tells potential recruits that “Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy.”

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Fractal inequality means that status is never fixed, no success ever final. It means always looking at the next rung up on the social ladder, a posture that makes it very difficult to empathize with those on the rungs below. Twenge’s long-term data show a marked increase in precisely this psychological profile. Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that “each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it.” In twenty-first-century America, this basic human instinct has been cultivated into a guiding ethos. Our culture is overrun with lists and rankings: the most beautiful people, the most influential politicians, the top 500 wealthiest moguls.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Imagine two brothers eating lunch alongside a dock in Dublin, Palermo, Bombay, or Formosa and looking wistfully out to sea. One of them had the balls to get on a boat and the other one didn’t. Guess whose kids are the Americans? American mobility far precedes the automobile. Before Lewis Mumford declared that “our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf,”1 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “everything good is on the highway.” Soon after him, Walt Whitman waxed: “O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you—yet I love you. You express me better than I can express myself.”2 But it is an easy out to say that wayfaring is an inescapable part of our DNA, and ignore the other factors that make cities in the United States different from those in Canada or Australia—two other countries that at least started the way ours did.

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., 92. 22. John Holtzclaw, “Using Residential Patterns and Transit to Decrease Auto Dependence and Costs.” 23. “2010 Quality of Living Worldwide City Rankings,” Mercer.com. 24. Newman, Beatley, and Boyer, 99. STEP 1: PUT CARS IN THEIR PLACE 1. Dom Nozzi, http://domz60.wordpress.com/quotes/. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (1844), quoted in Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 16; Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road” (1856). 3. Seiler, 94. 4. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries, 8. 5. Patrick Condon,“Canadian Cities American Cities: Our Differences Are the Same,” 16. 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Witold Rybczynski, City Life, 160–61. 8.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But at this point Westesson was late for his next meeting, and becoming a little restless. I had the sense he wasn’t late often. He walked me to the elevator. “Well, we’ve only just scratched the barest surface,” he said. But it seemed we had actually gone quite far. In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson crosses “a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky.” And yet even that ho-hum journey brings him “a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.... I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” On a journey to the center of the Internet my bare common turned out to be the router lab.

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In London, I’m grateful for the time and assistance of Tim Anker of the Colocation Exchange; Pat Vicary at Tata; John Souter, Jeremy Orbell, and Colin Silcock at the London Internet Exchange; Nigel and Benedicte Titley; Dionne Aiken, Michelle Reid, and Bob Harris at Telehouse; and Matthew Finnie and Mark Lewis at Interoute. James Tyler and Rob Coupland at Telecity spent the better part of a day showing off their impressive pieces of the Internet. In his essay, “Nature”: Stephen E. Whicher, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 24. Google announced the purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue: Rich Miller, “Google Confirms Purchase of 111 8th Avenue,” Data Center Knowledge (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/12/22/google-confirms-purchase-of-111-8th-avenue/).

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

Anton Chekhov, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, means of production, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

, Willa Cather, 0-553-21358-X THE CANTERBURY TALES, Geoffrey Chaucer, 0-553-21082-3 STORIES, Anton Chekhov, 0-553-38100-8 THE AWAKENING, Kate Chopin, 0-553-21330-X THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins, 0-553-21263-X HEART OF DARKNESS and THE SECRET SHARER, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21214-1 LORD JIM, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21361-X THE DEERSLAYER, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21085-8 THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21329-6 MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21355-5 THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21011-4 INFERNO, Dante, 0-553-21339-3 PARADISO, Dante, 0-553-21204-4 PURGATORIO, Dante, 0-553-21344-X THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin, 0-553-21463-2 MOLL FLANDERS, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21328-8 ROBINSON CRUSOE, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21373-3 BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21223-0 A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21244-3 DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21189-7 GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21342-3 HARD TIMES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21016-5 OLIVER TWIST, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21102-1 THE PICKWICK PAPERS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21123-4 A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21176-5 THREE SOLDIERS, John Dos Passos, 0-553-21456-X THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21216-8 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21175-7 THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21444-6 THE IDIOT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21352-0 NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21144-7 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL I, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21241-9 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL II, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21242-7 SISTER CARRIE, Theodore Dreiser, 0-553-21374-1 THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, W. E. B. Du Bois, 0-553-21336-9 THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, Alexandre Dumas, 0-553-21350-4 THE THREE MUSKETEERS, Alexandre Dumas, 0-553-21337-7 MIDDLEMARCH, George Eliot, 0-553-21180-3 SILAS MARNER, George Eliot, 0-553-21229-X SELECTED ESSAYS, LECTURES, AND POEMS, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 0-553-21388-1 TEN PLAYS BY EURIPIDES, Euripides, 0-553-21363-6 APRIL MORNING, Howard Fast, 0-553-27322-1 MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert, 0-553-21341-5 HOWARDS END, E. M. Forster, 0-553-21208-7 A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster, 0-553-21323-7 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, Anne Frank, 0-553-57712-3 ANNE FRANK'S TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX, Anne Frank, 0-553-58638-6 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND OTHER WRITINGS, Benjamin Franklin, 0-553-21075-0 THE YELLOW WALLPAPER AND OTHER WRITINGS, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 0-553-21375-X FAUST: FIRST PART, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 0-553-21348-2 THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, Kenneth Grahame, 0-553-21368-7 THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, The Brothers Grimm, 0-553-38216-0 ROOTS, Alex Haley, 0-440-17464-3 FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21331-8 JUDE THE OBSCURE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21191-9 THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21024-6 THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21269-9 TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21168-4 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 0-553-21270-2 THE SCARLET LETTER, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 0-553-21009-2 THE FAIRY TALES OF HERMANN HESSE, Hermann Hesse, 0-553-37776-0 SIDDHARTHA, Hermann Hesse, 0-553-20884-5 THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER, Homer, 0-553-21399-7 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Victor Hugo, 0-553-21370-9 FOUR GREAT PLAYS, Henrik Ibsen, 0-553-21280-X THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Henry James, 0-553-21127-7 THE TURN OF THE SCREW AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Henry James, 0-553-21059-9 A COUNTRY DOCTOR, Sarah Orne Jewett, 0-553-21498-5 DUBLINERS, James Joyce, 0-553-21380-6 A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce, 0-553-21404-7 THE METAMORPHOSIS, Franz Kafka, 0-553-21369-5 THE STORY OF MY LIFE, Helen Keller, 0-553-21387-3 CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21190-0 THE JUNGLE BOOKS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21199-4 KIM, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21332-6 LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, D.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal facts of the matter (dead animal for dinner) and the dining-room table set with crisp linens and polished silver. In this, CAFO meat may be just an extreme instance of the general case, which has never been pretty. “You have just dined,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” The problem is not a new one, and we flatter ourselves if we think we’re the first people to feel moral or spiritual qualms about killing animals for our supper.

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If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it’s not hard to imagine you’re looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact. Part IV EARTH FERMENTATION’S COLD FIRE “God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “The taste for partial spoilage can become a passion, an embrace of the earthy side of life that expresses itself best in paradoxes.” —Harold McGee “No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers.” —Horace Ferment I. Vegetable Consider, just for a moment, the everyday proximity of death.

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Probably because it is the model for the state of altered consciousness, or one of them. (Dreams would be another.) And because the fastest, most direct route to altered consciousness is an intoxicant, the most widely available one for most of human history being the molecule manufactured by S. cerevisiae. The poet, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaks “not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.” Put another way, new perceptions and metaphors arise when the spirit of Dionysus breaks Apollo’s tight grip on the rational mind. “As the traveller who has lost his way throws the reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instincts of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.”

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Also see discussion of this letter in Cocks, “Malthusian Theory in Pre–Civil War America,” 344–45. 88. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 193. 89. Gibson, Americans versus Malthus, chap. 2 90. Alexander H. Everett, New Ideas on Population (London: John Miller, 1823), 9. 91. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Plato; Or, the Philosopher,” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), 478. 92. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 80. 93. William Diamond, “Nathaniel A. Ware, National Economist,” Journal of Southern History 5 (November 1939): 511–12. 94. Ibid., 518. 95. Nathaniel A.

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Crunching the numbers on the American land-to-person ratio after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, these early statisticians concluded that ease of emigration to the western frontier would allow the states to enjoy the benefits of increased population density in older areas without the social drawbacks Europe 30 chapter 1 endured.89 Diplomat Alexander Everett criticized Malthus for failing to see that every additional person is a producer as well as a consumer,90 and Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that ancient philosophers “saw before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus.”91 Antebellum writers who claimed that the Malthusian model was inapplicable to their wide-open, thinly populated, and democratic land often espoused an early version of American “exceptionalism,” the conviction that America is the apple of God’s eye.92 A determination to develop a political economy shaped by America’s unique climate, high birthrate, and huge land mass rather than by European experiences reinforced this exceptionalism.

Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

“Give it time to turn in upon itself, satisfy its restless search for knowledge, and it will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to everything which invigorates the body while it’s advancing by every step the capacities of the soul.” Through the 1860s, self-help writers argued that intellectual labors provided excitement and ambition “of a nature calculated to cheer the mind, and to give the animal spirits a salutary impulse” as the critic Lindley Murray wrote in the Clarksville (Tenn.) Chronicle. No less a sage than Ralph Waldo Emerson saw animal spirits as the key to persuasive power: “A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation,” Emerson wrote. “But they who speak have no more,—have less. ’T is not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody’s facts.

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“imparts a much greater degree”: “Ripe Bread,” Christian Reflector 10 (May 13, 1847), 76. “The mind is like”: Willis, Somerset Herald and Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Register, Oct. 12, 1847, 3. “of a nature calculated”: Lindley Murray, “Employment Essential to Health,” Clarksville Chronicle, March 9, 1860, 1. “A cold, sluggish blood”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (1870), 11. “something invisible”: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Beacon Press, ed. 1955), 14. “I am too old”: Horace Smith, “The Wisdom of Laughter,” Evergreen 1 (Jan. 1, 1840), 24. 4. FEVERISH FINANCE, REVIVAL RELIGION, AND WAR “a houseful, a hole full”: Frederick Jackson, cited in Ann Fabian, “Speculation on Distress: The Popular Discourse of the Panics of 1837 and 1857,” Yale Journal of Criticism (1989), 135.

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“The public began to take”: Eunice Beecher, quoted in Ladies’ Home Journal (1891), cited in ibid., 217. “It is perfect”: Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching (1872), I, 73–74. “Mary Hallock, sit still!”: Mary Hallock Foote, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972), cited in Applegate, Beecher, 366. “men who are self-trusting”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, cited by Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters, I, 301–3, cited in ibid. “The greatest part of a seed”: Henry Ward Beecher, “The Life of Christ:—Within,” preached Oct. 8, 1865, in Sermons, vol. 1 (1869), 141. “this vitality of a Christian soul”: Henry Ward Beecher, “Sermon: The Life Force in Men,” Christian Union 15 (April 4, 1877), 305.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

It would take decades before the battery would emerge in any significant role outside the lab, and even then, it came in an unpredicted area—that of communication via the telegraph. 4 Science, Showmanship, and the Voltaic Pile “More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits From the perspective of our technologically jaded age in which scientific and technical breakthroughs often rate little more than a perfunctory nod of acknowledgment, it is difficult to imagine the excitement science provoked among the general public during the early part of the nineteenth century.

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Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation, And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage? A friend of William Wordsworth, Davy persuaded the poet that natural philosophers were akin to poets in their search for meaning, and later edited Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, while Coleridge attended scientific lectures in search of metaphors. And in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson, starting his first journal after leaving Harvard in 1820, listed Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy as a book he intended to read. Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps the most romantic of the Romantic poets, was himself an enthusiastic amateur natural philosopher for much of his short life.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Energy from fossil fuels replaced the energy from lightning and the microbes’ metabolism in the planet’s nitrogen-cycling machinery. The far-ranging significance of the pivot from human muscle and animal brawn to fossil fuels as a prime source of energy caught the attention of American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Coal lay in ledges under the ground . . . until a laborer with pickax and windlass brings it to the surface. We may call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization.” Written in 1860, decades before the black diamonds paved the way for a resolution to the nitrogen bottleneck, these words were more prescient than Emerson likely thought.

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A review of the economic and ecological constraints on animal draft cultivation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Soil and Tillage Research 27:195–210. El-Sharkawy, M. 1993. Drought-tolerant cassava for Africa, Asia, and Latin America. BioScience 43:441–451. Emerson, R. 2003. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Conduct of Life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Erisman, J., M. Sutton, J. Galloway, Z. Klimont, and W. Winiwarter. 2008. How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience 1:636–639. Feller, C., L. Thuries, R. Manlay, P. Robin, and E. Frossard. 2003. “The principles of rational agriculture” by Albrecht Daniel Thaer (1752–1828): An approach to the sustainability of cropping systems at the beginning of the 19th century.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

William Jewett Tucker, a theologian who would later serve as the ninth president of Dartmouth College, wrote an eviscerating review of Carnegie’s first ‘Wealth’ essay, suggesting, ‘I can conceive of no greater mistake most disastrous to the end of religion if not to society than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice’.16 Tucker’s views bear a trace of the earlier writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in essays such as ‘Self-Reliance’, spurned what he saw as the infantilizing effect of charity, the tendency for giving to entrench a relation of inequality between individuals where shared appreciation of their equality and individuality should flourish. In a stunning denunciation of Christian morality, Emerson scorns Samaritan notions of one’s duty to strangers, to one’s immediate brethren, to fellow countrymen.

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As he points out, abolition inroads were first made not by English or American abolitionists but by Jacobin revolutionaries and the black peasantry of Saint Domingue (later Haiti). Robin Blackburn, ‘Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of Democratic Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 4 (2006), 643–74. 19Quoted in Michael Lopez, ‘The Conduct of Life: Emerson’s Anatomy of Power’, in Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246. 20Baudelaire’s short story, ‘Counterfeit Money’, first published in 1869, is excerpted in full as an appendix in Jacques Derrida’s Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 21Mareike Schomerus; Tim Allen, and Koen Vlassennott, ‘Kony 2012 and the Prospect for Change’ Foreign Affairs (March 13, 2012). 22Michael E.

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, carbon footprint, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, liquidity trap, litecoin, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Satoshi Nakamoto, the medium is the message, Vitalik Buterin

That is nearly 1% of the value of all fiat currency. The gap between those values is only partially indicative of the addressable market for Bitcoin should it continue to develop and improve into decidedly better money. 8.3 Bitcoin Versus Gold “The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Writer & Philosopher As the previous backbone of the world’s monetary system, in addition to being a scarce and beautiful asset, gold retains a significant amount of value and is a globally recognized symbol of wealth. Today, all the known gold in the world is estimated to be valued at over $8 trillion USD.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Knox Beran

anti-communist, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, fulfillment center, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, old-boy network, phenotype, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, éminence grise

As for Lizzie Borden (she of the forty whacks), Henry Judd Gray (the double-indemnity murderer), and Theodore “Ted” Bundy, they were not the sort of people with whom WASPs were on visiting terms, however many genetic haplogroup markers they might have had in common. WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a “tendency to suicidal mania.” Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of his horror when, in June 1853, he heard the “dismal tidings” that young Susan Sturgis Bigelow had swallowed arsenic: three of Susan’s sister Ellen’s children (one of whom was to marry Henry Adams) would also go on to kill themselves. The Gardners too: Joseph Peabody Gardner, in whom was concentrated the blood of a dozen old Massachusetts families, blew his brains out in 1875.

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‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands’; (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) ‘You let it flow from you, you let it flow…’ In his early poems, Eliot, though not out of his twenties, compresses a quantity of WASP morbidity—the dowagers with their footmen and housemaids, the spinsters who live through the pages of the Boston Evening Transcript, the lonely men in shirtsleeves leaning voyeuristically out of windows—into brief images of despair, like those in the Inferno. For the poetry of the WASPs is, Eliot thinks, inadequate, and their prophets are false. Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to liberate potential, but their books now rest on glazen shelves: “Matthew and Waldo” are for Eliot guardians of a faith that has failed. Yet he sees, too, that the rebellion of younger WASPs is as unfruitful, and he makes fun of “Cousin Nancy,” who “smoked/And danced all the modern dances,” as she vainly rides to hounds over barren hills and muddy cow-pastures

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“never went out at night”: Michael Knox Beran, “The Aristocracy and Its Discontents,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2009. “that bitch”: Ibid. 2. A DYING RACE “tendency to suicidal mania”: Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 210. “dismal tidings”: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1852–1855, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977), 177. “the family disease”: John Sedgwick, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 9–10. “queerness”: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 21.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

True expert knowledge in life and investing does not exist, only varying degrees of ignorance. This is not a problem to solve; it is simply how the world works. We cannot know everything, but we can work hard to become just about smart enough to make above-average decisions over time. That is the key to successful compounding. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” Learning and accepting help from others creates value far beyond our individual capabilities. Look at every interaction as an opportunity to learn from the people you meet. You will be amazed at how quickly you grow and how much better you become, both as a professional and, more important, as a human being.

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Love people and use things, because the opposite never works. Love is caring without an agenda. Love isn’t something we fall into; it’s someone we become. CHAPTER 10 LIVING LIFE ACCORDING TO THE INNER SCORECARD To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The path to true success is through authenticity. —Guy Spier According to Warren Buffett, there are two kinds of people in life: those who care what people think of them, and those who care how good they really are. Buffett always remains true to himself and never compromises on his values.

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Buffett has always ranked temperament higher than intellect as a prerequisite for successful investing. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Don’t let exuberant markets get to your head. Don’t let pessimistic markets get to your heart. Volatility of the mind is far riskier than volatility of the stock price, and an objective mind is key to investing success. Remember, disruptions may be accelerating, but human nature and investor psychology have not changed in centuries.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

Instead of causing us to rebel because traditional avenues are closed, the protagonists in our favorite stories may inspire originality by opening our minds to unconventional paths. 7 Rethinking Groupthink The Myths of Strong Cultures, Cults, and Devil’s Advocates “In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.” Ralph Waldo Emerson Standing on stage in front of a captive audience, a technology icon pulled a new device out of his pocket. It was so much smaller than competing products that no one in the room could believe his eyes. The founder’s flair for theatrical product launches wasn’t the only source of his fame.

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no-ist. reading Harry Potter can improve: Loris Vezzali, Sofia Stathi, Dino Giovannini, Dora Capozza, and Elena Trifiletti, “The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 45 (2015): 105–21. 7: Rethinking Groupthink “In fact, the only sin”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893). Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid: Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti, “Capabilities, Cognition, and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging,” Strategic Management Journal 21 (2000): 1147–61; Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Milton P.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

A part of this impulse must surely arise because, deep in our bones, we understand the need to belong to particular places. Landmarks, because they locate us, are integral to the fulfillment of that need. CHAPTER 3 LOOKING FOR ROUTES HOW WE TRY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHERE WE ARE BY NOTING WHERE WE HAVE BEEN The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. RALPH WALDO EMERSON In an ancient Greek legend, King Minos of Knossos commanded his brilliant engineer, Daedalus, to build a safe confinement for the Minotaur, a hideous beast born of an illicit union between Minos’s wife and a white bull thrown from the sea by Poseidon. Daedalus built a labyrinth—an enormous cavern filled with passages of vast complexity and almost impossible to navigate.

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Although our minds may be predisposed to detach us from real space, much more than a psychological predisposition has been at work in driving us from Eden to Gotham. Jane Jacobs blames our tendency to insulate ourselves from nature on an impulse born of the European romantic movement, perhaps transported across the Atlantic in the guise of the New England transcendental movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.2 At first, the connection between intellectual movements that cherished emotional contact with wild nature and the current difficulties in our relationship with the environment may be difficult to discern, but Jacobs’s argument was that by raising wild places onto a pedestal, we convinced ourselves that life in our cities had nothing to do with the natural world.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

We mean that literally. Within the limits of space, time, materials, and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new feedback loops, new behavior, new knowledge, and new technology, but also new institutions, new physical structures, and new powers within human beings. Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized this profound truth 150 years ago: Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers.

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Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000). 8. Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1944), 398-399. Chapter 8. Tools for the Transition to Sustainability 1. Donald Worster, editor, The Ends of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11-12. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lecture on "War," delivered in Boston, March 1838. Reprinted in Emerson's Complete Works, vol. 11 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 177. 3. Examples of networks known to the authors and in their field of interest are the Balaton Group (www.unh.edu/ipssr/Balaton.html), Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), Center for a New American Dream (CNAD; wwwnewdream.org), Greenlist (www.peacestore.us/Public/Greenlist), Greenclips (wwwgreenclips.com), Northern Forest Alliance (wwwnorthernforestalliance.org), Land Trust Alliance (wwwlta.org), International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA; wwwisaga.info), and Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD). 4.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

International Energy Agency, Medium-Term Oil and Gas Markets 2011, (St. Petersburg, Russia: International Energy Agency, 16 June 2011). CHAPTER 6 Old Coal Still Burning Brightly Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use. —Nineteenth-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson For the Panama-flagged coal ship Pasha Bulker, there was nowhere to hide from the violent storm known as an “east coast low,” that overwhelmed it one winter’s morning in June 2007. The 77,000-dwt Panamax-class ship, which had been launched in Japan only a year earlier, had spent the previous two weeks in the coal queue that forms off the Port of Newcastle on the Australian east coast.

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Media release, “Wood Mackenzie Says That Iron Ore Suppliers Will Not be Able to Meet Market Demand Until at Least 2015,” Sydney/Edinburgh/Houston, 20 July 2011. CHAPTER 11 U.S. Energy Hail to the Shale The resources of America and its future will be immense only to wise and virtuous men. —Nineteenth-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works, Volume VIII, Letters and Social Aims, “Resources” essay, 1876 A s the second decade of the twenty-first century unfolds, it is clear the United States will have to cede some of its Asia-Pacific regional influence to China and learn to live in a world where there are two superpowers.

Fred Schwed's Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: A Modern-Day Interpretation of an Investment Classic by Leo Gough

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, book value, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, disinformation, diversification, fixed income, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, short selling, South Sea Bubble, The Nature of the Firm, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, young professional

OTHER TITLES IN THE INFINITE SUCCESS SERIES Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness Carl von Clausewitz’s On War Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling George S. Clason’s The Richest Man in Babylon Karl Marx’s Das Kapital Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance Robert Collier’s The Secret of the Ages Samuel Smiles’s Self-help Sun Tzu’s The Art of War FRED SCHWED’S WHERE ARE THE CUSTOMERS’ YACHTS? A MODERN-DAY INTERPRETATION OF AN INVESTMENT CLASSIC BY LEO GOUGH Copyright © Infinite Ideas Limited, 2010 The right of Leo Gough to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell

British Empire, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois

Seneca On the Shortness of Life Marcus Aurelius Meditations St Augustine Confessions of a Sinner Thomas à Kempis The Inner Life Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince Michel de Montaigne On Friendship Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract Edward Gibbon The Christians and the Fall of Rome Thomas Paine Common Sense Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World John Ruskin On Art and Life Charles Darwin On Natural Selection Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am So Wise Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents George Orwell Why I Write Confucius The First Ten Books Sun-tzu The Art of War Plato The Symposium Lucretius Sensation and Sex Cicero An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies Baldesar Castiglione How to Achieve True Greatness Francis Bacon Of Empire Thomas Hobbes Of Man Sir Thomas Browne Urne-Burial Voltaire Miracles and Idolatry David Hume On Suicide Carl von Clausewitz On the Nature of War Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus Hannah Arendt Eichmann and the Holocaust Plutarch In Consolation to his Wife Robert Burton Some Anatomies of Melancholy Blaise Pascal Human Happiness Adam Smith The Invisible Hand Edmund Burke The Evils of Revolution Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death John Ruskin The Lamp of Memory Friedrich Nietzsche Man Alone with Himself Leo Tolstoy A Confession William Morris Useful Work v. Useless Toil Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History Marcel Proust Days of Reading Leon Trotsky An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction George Orwell Books v.

Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, index card, indoor plumbing, Johannes Kepler, life extension, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Thales of Miletus, walking around money, white picket fence, Winter of Discontent

As David was leaving, the sheriff turned to the inventory officer and lowered his voice. “Any sign yet of Jay?” “Nothin’, Sheriff. I’ll let you know as soon as he shows up.” CHAPTER 13 Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS SHEL lost track of Dave. The victims, still choking on tear gas, lay broken and bleeding in the roadway. The crowd began to disperse. There were scattered voices, people saying they deserved it, maybe next time they’ll know better, got no choice. They wandered back into Selma.

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No matter what you saw up ahead, about me, I’ll always be here.” CHAPTER 26 There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” IT would be an overstatement to say that Aspasia and her plays were getting substantial attention from the mass media. Sophocles was not exactly a subject to boost ratings, but the mystery surrounding the appearance of plays thought lost for two thousand years did interest a couple of the cable news show hosts.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

My contacts now know that I don’t respond to emergencies, so the emergencies somehow don’t exist or don’t come to me. Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others. Cultivating Selective Ignorance There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882) From this point forward, I’m going to propose that you develop an uncanny ability to be selectively ignorant. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

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—RON POPEIL, founder of RONCO; responsible for more than $1 billion in sales of rotisserie chicken roasters As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON The Renaissance Minimalist Douglas Price was waking up to another beautiful summer morning in his Brooklyn brownstone. First things first: coffee. The jet lag was minor, considering he had just returned from a two-week jaunt through the islands of Croatia. It was just one of six countries he had visited in the last 12 months.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Taken as a whole, the evidence, including the video-gaming evidence, suggests it has the opposite effect. MEMORY IS THE GRAVITY OF MIND July 14, 2011 As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves. —Ralph Waldo Emerson A FASCINATING AND UNSETTLING study of the internet’s effects on memory has just come out in Science. It provides more evidence of how quickly our minds adapt to the tools we use to think with, for better and for worse. The study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” was conducted by three psychologists: Betsy Sparrow, of Columbia; Jenny Liu, of the University of Wisconsin; and Daniel Wegner, of Harvard.

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Not only does it sound fusty and arcane, as if it had been extracted from the nether regions of a moldy physiology handbook, but it seems fatally tainted with political incorrectness. Only the rash or the drunken would dare launch the word into a conversation at a cocktail party. It wasn’t always a pariah. In an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, Ralph Waldo Emerson chose the adjective to describe the experience of reading: “I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was.” For Emerson, the best books—the “true ones”—“take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.”

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

., it was night again, and, depressed, I walked into a café called the Hoechst. At a table, there was a woman my age who looked like Veronica Lake; it could have been a movie except she was reading The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and doodling. I sat near her—not so much to meet her as to get away from all the other Germans sitting there with dogs. I was so lonely that I tried to make small talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she looked up, unsmiling: “How did you, an American, find the Hoechst?” Why did she think I was an American? “Your yellow legal pad,” she said. “You only get those in America.” I explained I was here to study the Germany model.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

He built his philosophy low to the ground, from reading history and literature and from direct observation—focusing relentlessly on what he would call “the living world.” As Paul Fussell observed, he confuted all determinism. He rejected the notion that behavior is shaped by impersonal iron forces. He always focused with his searing eye on the particularity of each individual. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later observe that “Souls are not saved in bundles.”16 Johnson fervently believed in each individual’s mysterious complexity and inherent dignity. He was, through it all, a moralist, in the best sense of that term. He believed that most problems are moral problems. “The happiness of society depends on virtue,” he would write.

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Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (Norton, 1986), 236. 11. Bate, Samuel Johnson, 218. 12. Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, 114. 13. Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, 2. 14. Fussell, Johnson and the Life of Writing, 163. 15. Fussell, Johnson and the Life of Writing, 51. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings (Beacon, 2004), 216. 17. Fussell, Johnson and the Life of Writing, 147. 18. Percy Hazen Houston, Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth Century Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 1923), 195. 19. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press, 2010), 21. 20.

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town by Lamorna Ash

Apollo 11, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hive mind, invisible hand, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tragedy of the Commons, Year of Magical Thinking

When she did come home, she would go straight down onto the beach. ‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ she says when I ask her what that return was like. ‘I felt relieved, like I could breathe again. It’s the stretching of the eyes; it’s looking out at the horizon again.’ ‘The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of the healing powers of nature. ‘We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.’ Mum and I continue walking purposefully along the beach, feeling ourselves open up, becoming more malleable, more forgiving of one another. Now and then we break from our conversation to acknowledge the extraordinary things the sea has done since we were last here: the jagged rocks by the estuary we had seen last spring have been hidden by a layer of sand, the shell line has been replenished and a large tree branch has been blown back by the wind so it arcs back into the sand as graceful as a dancer.

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For the Deep Scattering Layer, see the ship’s log of the USS Jasper, quoted in ‘Blue-sea thinking: technology is transforming the relationship between people and the oceans’, in The Economist Technology Quarterly, 10 March 2018. LOCAL For Synge, see The Aran Islands. For Woolf, see her diary of August 1905 in A Passionate Apprentice. For Plath, see ‘Ocean 1212-W’. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, see Nature (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836). A FEAST OF SEABIRDS For Pam Lomax and Ron Hogg, see Newlyn Before the Artists Came (Penzance: Shears and Hogg Publications, 2010). For Sebald, see The Rings of Saturn. ROSEBUD I am grateful to Michael Sagar-Fenton, who lives in Penzance, for telling me the story of the Rosebud.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Aware that restive Northerners were opposed to a new Fugitive Slaves Act that required them to aid in the capture and return of an escaped slave, he bluntly demanded what right they had “as a question of morals and of conscience . . . to endeavor to get round this Constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them?” The purpose of his speech was to defend the Union, but it did so, as Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out derisively, by treating “the Union as an estate, a large farm,” in effect as a property. Instead of giving priority to the sense of justice that, as John Locke argued, provided the basis of private property, Webster proposed that property itself was so sacred that an individual’s conscience should be sacrificed to the priority of protecting it.

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Walton, 14 Georgia 185 (1853). “property in persons”: Daniel Webster’s much-quoted speech in defense of the Union was delivered in the Senate March 7, 1850. Emerson’s response came in a lecture, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” delivered in the Tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. (Fireside Edition. Boston and New York: 1909), http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27. “We have a right of protection”: Senator Albert Brown’s speech quoted in A People & a Nation: A History of the United States by Mary Beth Norton et al.

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Elman, Benjamin A. On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Elton, G. R. England Under the Tudors. London: Methuen, 1974. Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. Fireside Edition, Vol XI. Boston and New York, 1909. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27. Emmons, Terence. The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

One visitor in 1848 noted that “on the outskirts of the town . . . the highways were impassible, except in winter when frozen, or in summer when dry and pulverized into the finest and most penetrating of dust. At all other seasons they were little less than quagmires.”7 Horses had to struggle knee-deep in mud and water, so it could take a day to travel less than a dozen miles.8 Conditions like these were a trial for even the most leisurely travelers. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Chicago in the winter of 1853, he began to wonder whether he should have made the trip at all. “In the prairie,” he wrote, “it rains, & thaws incessantly, &, if we step off the short street, we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in mud. . . .”9 All places in the region suffered these seasonal inconveniences to some degree, but mud was an especially serious problem in Chicago for reasons dating back to the Ice Age.

…

Although the second sentence tries to cover the earlier reference to laborers by generalizing to the apparently more collective “men,” the bias of the first sentence remains: wild nature was less an unpeopled landscape than an unworked one, and the “poet’s” relationship to it was intrinsically that of a leisured class. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature in Essays and Lectures (1983), 42; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973). 14.Garland, Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley, 183. 15.Charles Dudley Warner, Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (1889), 185. 16.Waldo Frank, Our America (1919), 117. Later, on p. 120, Frank wrote of the Chicago stockyards that “Dante would have recognized this world.

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Aside from the inherent dangers to ships of winter storms on the lakes, the critical locations where ice closed the shipping lanes were the Erie Canal and the Straits of Mackinac. Cf. Chicago Building & Loan Association, Statistical and Historical Review of Chicago, 37. 7.Peyton, Over the Alleghanies, 327. 8.Cleaver, History of Chicago, 80. 9.The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (1939), 4:342. 10.Hough, “Prehistoric Great Lakes,” 84–109; and Hough, Geology of the Great Lakes. 11.Carter, “Facts and Incidents,” 40. For other descriptions of the problems Chicagoans experienced with mud, see Charles Cleaver, Early-Chicago Reminiscences, Fergus Historical Series, no. 19 (1882), 28–31.

Simple Matters: Living With Less and Ending Up With More by Erin Boyle

big-box store, Indoor air pollution, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sharing economy

They have likened what he did at the edge of the woods in Concord to a young child packing a bandanna, tying it to a stick, and running away . . . to the end of the driveway. Yes, Thoreau went to the woods to find the essentials. But when he was wanting for creature comforts, he did not hesitate to make a beeline for his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dining table, smack in the center of town. A single stem of forced cherry blossoms acts as a simple bit of decoration on a wooden crate. I don’t find this inconsistency troubling, nor hypocritical. I find it encouraging. We can, each of us, seek out a simpler mode of doing things. We can do so without abandoning our life as we know it.

Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

As the national poet Walt Whitman explained, our conquests “take off the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good.” With the conquest of half of Mexico in mind, he asked rhetorically, “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico…to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?” His thoughts were spelled out by the leading humanist thinker of the period, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that the annexation of Texas was simply a matter of course: “It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun that trace, and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done.”

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., 40–42 Liberia, 7 Lieberman, Avigdor, 156 limited liability, 30 Lippmann, Walter, 47, 122, 136 Lissakers, Karen, 72 Livni, Tzipi, 157 Llorens, Hugo, 67 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 22 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 70 Lynd, Staughton, 96 Ma’aleh Adumim, 180, 188 Madison, James, 18, 233 Mafia doctrine, 55 Maguire, Mairead Corrigan, 148 Maliki, Nouri al-, 239 Mandela, Nelson, 267 MANTECH (manufacturing technology), 88 Maoz, Zeev, 170 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 5 Mauritius, 168 Mayr, Ernst, 175 McCain, John, 209, 212 McCoy, Alfred, 203, 262 McFaul, Michael, 65 McGlynn, John, 174–75 Medicare, 227 Meir, Golda, 195 Mercosur, 70 Merkel, Angela, 270 Meron, Theodor, 148 Meshal, Khaled, 153 Mexican-U.S. border, 28–29, 31, 270 Mexico, 29, 31, 49, 60, 70, 90 “American invasion” of, 160 NAFTA and, 29, 35–36, 215–16, 270 Ralph Waldo Emerson on, 17 Walt Whitman on, 16 Meyers, Steven Lee, 154 Michael, B., 154 military, U.S., 62–63 military spending, 63–65, 84–85 Mill, John Stuart, 267 missile defense programs, 65, 86, 199. See also ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs Mitchell, George, 251, 255, 256 Monning, Bill, 66 monopolies, 77, 86–90 Monroe, James, 19 Monroe Doctrine, 53, 54 Morales, Evo, 59–60, 70–71, 115, 213 Morgan, Edmund, 18–19 Morgenson, Gretchen, 113 Morgenthau, Hans, 21, 39–40 Morris, Benny, 154 Mubarak, Hosni, 191, 192 Multi-National Force-Iraq, 130 Nairn, Alan, 224, 260–61 Najibullah, Mohammad, 245 narcoterrorism, 57.

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty by Harry Browne

do what you love, full employment, independent contractor, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, military-industrial complex, Ralph Waldo Emerson, source of truth, War on Poverty

The others are unimportant to your future—if your future is to be free. There's a beautiful world out there. Why clutter it up with relationships that don't belong in your life? It's an easy life. Why complicate it by trying to be all things to all people? Adopt the image that's most effective—your own. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON 18 Freedom from Bad Relationships WE'VE SEEN THAT IT'S FOOLISH to waste time trying to deal with incompatible people. There are plenty of people around who would want you to be as you are. That doesn't mean, however, that you're likely to find individuals with whom you'll be 100% compatible—with the exact same tastes, values, attitudes, and ideas that you have.

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Freedom from exploitation is perhaps the easiest freedom to get. All you have to do is to stop participating in any relationship—of any kind—that doesn't suit you. It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself, as for a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON 25 Freedom from the Treadmill FREEDOM IS living your life as you want to live it. Many people feel that freedom is impossible because of the many hours required for work, because of their debts, and because they can't afford to live the way they'd like to. The treadmill enslaves many people who can't conceive that life could be any different.

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

“Evidently to annoy, they obliged us to take a caboose car, hitched on to a freight train stationed at least one fourth of a mile from the depot, where we were crowded together like cattle, and to which they obliged the passengers—men, women and children—to walk and transport their own baggage, after charging extra for all over twenty-five pounds of baggage, and even weighing blankets and overcoats.”27 Despite the discomfort, the railroad proved a great spur to trade and commerce. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.” The railroad helped ferry crops and minerals east from California and manufactured goods west from the East Coast. And the effects were not limited to just the direct east-west route of the initial railroad.

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Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia 165–66. 26. Federal Coordinator of Transportation, Public Aids to Transportation, Vol. 1 110 (1940); Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, Men and Events of Forty Years 86 (1891). 27. The Congressional Globe, Vol. 41 536 (1869). 28. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2 293 (1901); Martin W. Sandler, Iron Rails, Iron Men, and the Race to Link the Nation 176 (2015); Annual Report of the Auditor of Railway Accounts for the Year Ending June 30, 1889 322 (1880). 29. North American Review, Vol. 108 145 (1869). 30. Robert T. Swaine, The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors 158 (2007). 31.

The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders

anti-work, antiwork, centre right, Corn Laws, Dutch auction, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, Ralph Waldo Emerson, traveling salesman, urban sprawl, working poor

And I said, without the least conceit…“it really is a pleasure to work with you, you receive the impression so nicely”.’10 Whilst these impressions were real, they were also radically reworked by Dickens’ imagination to create new realities, well recognized by his fellow artists. Henry James described Dickens’ type of fiction, with its real places and real street names, as having the ‘solidity of specification’; Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Dickens’ ‘London tracts’. So real were these tracts that when the American historian Francis Parkman arrived in London, ‘I thought I had been there before. There, in flesh and blood, was the whole host of characters that figured’ in Dickens – the people, the traffic: everything, he marvelled.

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Wills, 24 September 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 669; footnote: I owe this idea to Tambling, Going Astray, pp. 21–2. ‘he marvelled’: Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 1884, cited in F. O. Matthiesson, The James Family (New York, Knopf, 1947), p. 360; ‘English Traits’, in Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), vol. 2, p. 278; Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, ed. Mason Wade (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949), vol. 1, p. 221. ‘created Dickens’: J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959), p. 138; Walter Benjamin citing G.

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(London, Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1821) Elmes, James, Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in the Nineteenth Century ... (London, Jones & Co., 1829) Elson, George, The Last of the Climbing Boys: An Autobiography (London, John Long, 1900) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘English Traits’, in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870) Every Night Book; or, Life After Dark, ‘by the author of “The Cigar”’ (London, T. Richardson, 1828) The Flash Chaunter ... now singing at Offley’s, Cider Cellers [sic], Coal Hole, &c ... . (first published c.1834; London, W. West [?1865]) Fletcher, Hanslip, London Passed and Passing: A Pictorial Record of Destroyed and Threatened Buildings (London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1908) Forbes, Mrs E.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek

computer age, crowdsourcing, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, lateral thinking, Norman Mailer, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog

Spencer’s way of making letters became so popular because he imbued his letters with moral and spiritual valences that elevated his system above mere practicality. He used Lake Erie as the basis, so the “true imagery of writing is culled then from the sublime and beautiful in nature.” Living during the age of American Transcendentalism—the movement led by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—Spencer was inspired by nature. He fashioned a’s, b’s, and c’s from the shapes of rocks, branches, and lakes that he looked at every day. The inspiration for his ovals thus came from stone, the branches suggested the linking between letters, and waves lapping on the shore the downstrokes.

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income by Jeff Hunt

buy low sell high, content marketing, deal flow, Donald Trump, drop ship, frictionless, frictionless market, intangible asset, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Skype, software as a service

They understand the importance of certain metrics that are specific to websites, like traffic statistics, conversion rates, email open rates, and earnings per page view. They also understand revenue models that are frequently used by websites (such as pay per action, pay per click, subscriptions, etc.) and typical expenses and operational concerns. “No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Dealing with a broker can sometimes be easier than communicating directly with a seller because brokers fundamentally understand what information is important to the buyer of a website. They can also assist you in the sales contract, escrow, and the transition process after there is agreement on price.

A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 by Claire Hartfield

desegregation, Ferguson, Missouri, indoor plumbing, new economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, union organizing

As the Defender observed, the rage didn’t blow in out of nowhere that day on the beach: “For years [America] has been sowing the wind and now she is reaping the whirlwind.” PART TWO FIRST WHISPERS Chicago skyline. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none hut he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” THREE Freedom Fight EUGENE WILLIAMS’S MOTHER BURIED her son a few days later, some seventeen years after she had brought him into the world one spring day in Georgia. When the family moved up north, Eugene had found that some of the other children at his school had roots in New York or Philadelphia or had been born right there in Chicago.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one. From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.”

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

E l i a d e , M. ( 1 9 5 9 / 1 9 5 7 ) . The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion, (W. R. Task, Trans.). San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Emerson, R. W. (1960a/1838). The divinity school address. In S. Whicher (Ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson ( p p . 100—1 16). B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n Mifflin. Emerson, R. W. (1960b/1838). Nature. In S. Whicher (Ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (pp. 21—56). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. E m m o n s , R. A. ( 1 9 9 9 ) . The psychology of ultimate ccmcems: Motivation and spirituality in personality. Ne w York: Guilford. Emmons, R. A. (2003). Personal goals, life meaning, and virtue: Wellsprings of a positive life.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

The specific responses we have pursued to successfully overcome these challenges and restore opportunity have varied in detail, but underlying them all was a commitment to invest in other people’s children. And underlying that commitment was a deeper sense that those kids, too, were our kids. Not all Americans have shared that sense of communal obligation. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Boston Brahmin Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”70 Emerson spoke eloquently for the individualist tradition in America.

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Demography 42 (February 2005): 51–73; Jens Ludwig, Brian Jacob, Greg Duncan, James Rosenbaum, and Michael Johnson, “Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence from a Housing-Voucher Lottery in Chicago” (working paper, University of Chicago, 2010); Jennifer Darrah and Stefanie DeLuca, “ ‘Living Here Has Changed My Whole Perspective’: How Escaping Inner-City Poverty Shapes Neighborhood and Housing Choice,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 33 (Spring 2014): 350–84. 70. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series (1841). Thanks to Thomas Spragens for alerting me to this passage. 71. Yvonne Abraham, “Doing Right by the Children in Chelsea,” Boston Globe, August 31, 2014. The Stories of Our Kids 1. Some quotations have been lightly edited to remove interjections, false starts, and repetition.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

The Senate, including northerners who had once spoken for the Indian, ratified it, yielding, as Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts said, to “the force of circumstances . . . the hard necessity.” Now the Georgia whites stepped up their attacks to speed the removal. The government did not move immediately against the Cherokees. In April 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed an open letter to President Van Buren, referring with indignation to the removal treaty with the Cherokees (signed behind the backs of an overwhelming majority of them) and asked what had happened to the sense of justice in America: The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business . . . a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?

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A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?” The churches, for the most part, were either outspokenly for the war or timidly silent. Generally, no one but the Congregational, Quaker, and Unitarian churches spoke clearly against the war.

…

While insisting that the raid was too hopelessly and ridiculously small to accomplish anything . . . the state nevertheless spent $250,000 to punish the invaders, stationed from one to three thousand soldiers in the vicinity and threw the nation into turmoil. In John Brown’s last written statement, in prison, before he was hanged, he said: “I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist himself, said of the execution of John Brown: “He will make the gallows holy as the cross.” Of the twenty-two men in John Brown’s striking force, five were black. Two of these were killed on the spot, one escaped, and two were hanged by the authorities. Before his execution, John Copeland wrote to his parents: Remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppressed people from my condition of servitude which God in his Holy Writ has hurled his most bitter denunciations against. . . .

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

In short, when they have the opportunity, “the Masters of Mankind” pursue their “vile maxim . . . all for ourselves and nothing for other people,” as Adam Smith explained long ago. Mass public education is one of the great achievements of American society. It has had many dimensions. One purpose was to prepare independent farmers for life as wage laborers who would tolerate what they regarded as virtual slavery. The coercive element did not pass without notice. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders call for popular education because they fear that “This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.” But educated the right way: Limit their perspectives and understanding, discourage free and independent thought, and train them for obedience.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, follow your passion, George Santayana, Lao Tzu, large denomination, personalized medicine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the map is not the territory

Sierra Club founder John Muir (an ur-vagabonder if there ever was one) used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. Muir called these folks the “time-poor” — people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness. One of Muir’s Yosemite visitors in the summer of 1871 was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gushed upon seeing the sequoias, “It’s a wonder that we can see these trees and not wonder more.” When Emerson scurried off a couple hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen the trees in the first place. Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teale used Muir’s example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society.

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

The most literal is to invest as much time and effort on your brand’s physical presentation as your product. Otherwise there’s a danger that products won’t be appreciated as much as they could be. Unfortunately, there’s a mechanistic mindset which is deeply suspicious of presentation as a source of value. It is best reflected in the Ralph Waldo Emerson’s supposed dismissal of such fripperies: If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. Not true. Far better to listen to Ludwig von Mises, the leading figure in the Austrian School of economics, who said, “If you run a restaurant there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food, and the value you create by sweeping the floor”. 2.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest by Ted Seides

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, business cycle, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, diversification, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fake news, family office, fixed income, high net worth, hindsight bias, impact investing, implied volatility, impulse control, index fund, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Lean Startup, loss aversion, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, zero-sum game

” – Khe Hy “As an investor and entrepreneur, everything takes longer and is harder than you thought it would be at the outset.” – Dan Rasmussen “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” – Donna Snider “Change isn’t that bad if you’re the one doing it.” – Jeff Solomon “From Ralph Waldo Emerson, life is a succession of lessons that must be lived to be understood.” – Jordi Visser What matters most Keeping work in perspective makes it all worthwhile. “All of the great wisdoms are really true: Don’t sweat the small stuff; Spend time with those you love; Find your balance; Most people spend a lot less time thinking about you than you think they do

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

Even if you doubt that the switch is a group-level adaptation, I hope you’ll agree with me that the switch exists, and that it generally makes people less selfish and more loving. Here are three examples of switch flipping that you might have experienced yourself. 1. Awe in Nature In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a set of lectures on nature that formed the foundation of American Transcendentalism, a movement that rejected the analytic hyperintellectualism of America’s top universities. Emerson argued that the deepest truths must be known by intuition, not reason, and that experiences of awe in nature were among the best ways to trigger such intuitions.

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San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Ellis, J. J. 1996. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Vintage. Ellsworth, P. C., and C. A. Smith. 1985. “Patterns of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotion.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48:813–38. Emerson, R. W. 1960/1838. “Nature.” In Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. S. Whicher, 21–56. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Eskine, K. J., N. A. Kacinic, and J. J. Prinz. 2011. “A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Gustatory Influences on Moral Judgment.” Psychological Science 22:295–99. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Bush but also Gordon Brown, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner—so slow to acknowledge the need for government intervention? A large part of the explanation can be found in the sad state of modern economic theory, the subject to which we now turn. CHAPTER ELEVEN There Is No Can Opener A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. —Ralph Waldo Emerson AN ECONOMIST, a chemist, and a physicist are marooned on a desert island. Their only food is a can of beans, but they have no can opener. What are they to do? The physicist says: “Let’s try and focus the tropical sun onto the lid—it might melt a hole.” “No,” says the chemist. “We should first pour salt water on the lid—maybe that will rust it.”

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The bankers and regulators whose faith in efficient markets almost wrecked the global financial system might then have heeded Keynes’s famous dictum: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” Or suppose that rational expectations had been renamed internally consistent expectations, as some of its proponents originally suggested. An adequate refutation might then have been Ralph Waldo Emerson’s acerbic comment that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” To continue this thought experiment, try replacing perfect competition with ruthless exploitation, general equilibrium with timeless stasis, Pareto Optimality with Entrenched Privilege, Ricardian Equivalence with Barro’s False Assumption, natural rate of unemployment with deliberate job destruction, and so on.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Native customs and traditions, while tolerated in civil society, within two or three generations were forgotten, to be replaced by American versions often quite alien to those of the immigrant’s birthplace. The ideal was that a citizen was to be defined by his values, not just by his birth and not at all by his creed or color. So the mid-nineteenth-century essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson waxed about the novel American citizen in a now often-caricatured display of supposed naïveté if not cultural chauvinism: “The energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and of the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism.”1 In the most brutal of bargains, America and the immigrant took risks.

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Busiest border crossing in the world: Preeti Varathan, “The Busiest Land Border Crossing in the World Is Closed This Weekend,” Quartz, September 22, 2017, https://qz.com/1085125/san-ysidro-the-busiest-land-border-crossing-in-the-world-connecting-mexico-to-the-us-is-closed-from-sept-23-25. Chapter Two: Residents 1. Emerson, journal entry, 1845, first published 1912 in Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, Vol. IX, 119; cf. the now standard critique of such nineteenth-century melting-pot confidence as proof of white racism in Heike Paul, The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (Bielefield, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2014), 264. See also Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Papers Nos. 6 and 7. 2.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

Exponential growth is always the magic ingredient, be it the dotcom boom, China or alternative energy. Of course, some of these new fads will turn out to be genuine opportunities, but that does not mean that you can make money out of them, especially if promoters have intermediated matters and taken the best profits. ‘Do your thing and I shall know you’ Ralph Waldo Emerson So if you are picking a business partner, hiring a head of sales, or choosing a franchise formula – dig beneath the surface. Do not be taken in by froth – ask the tough questions, and be honest with yourself. Does the idea have staying power? Does your prospective partner get his or her hands dirty?

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

Why You’ve Never Heard of Charles Sanders Peirce by Jennifer Riel Bertrand Russell called him “beyond doubt … one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.” 4 So why is Charles Sanders Peirce at best an obscure footnote, while other nineteenth-century American philosophers like William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are still widely read today? Peirce has been characterized as a prickly misanthrope, which may help explain his low profile. He acknowledged it himself, contrasting his own personality with that of his friend William James: “He is so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine.” 5 Many intellectuals have had cranky dispositions, yet have gone on to great acclaim.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

Within the bosom of the Black prophetic tradition, liberation theology, and social justice advocacy, righteous indignation toward poverty is now given moral license to explode. These traditions demand that we reject violence but welcome public outrage at corporate and societal greed. As the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds, “A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.” We are steadfast in our belief that the legacy of social justice remains the last hope for American democracy. PRISONS AND THE POOR “… For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide by Luke Hart, Ryan Hart

access to a mobile phone, Jeremy Corbyn, late fees, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Skype, zero-sum game

Domestic abuse is very much something people don’t wish to see or hear about. People would rather if it stayed at home, behind closed doors. Those of us who have experienced its effects need to speak up so that it becomes normal for domestic abuse not to occur, not simply that we don’t hear about it. 5 Overcoming We acquire the strength we overcome Ralph Waldo Emerson Sinking Feeling From an external appearance, not only would we have seemed to be three children doing OK, we were actively succeeding in many areas of our life. At the time this appeared to be from harmless motivation and industriousness. Yet, we harboured a deep fear inside. As children, we were blind to our strengths and weaknesses and we looked for validation of these from the external world.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton

Anton Chekhov, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley

In the preface to a volume of his collected sermons, John Wesley explained and defended his adherence to simplicity: ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore … I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is … to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’ A handful of brave secular writers have been able to express themselves with a similarly inspiring openness, among the most notable being Donald Winnicott in the field of psychoanalysis and Ralph Waldo Emerson in literature. But these characters have been regrettably few in number, and most have also drawn upon a religious background to mould and buttress their sensibilities (Winnicott began as a Methodist, Emerson as a Transcendentalist). The greatest Christian preachers have been vulgar in the very best sense.

How to Hygge: The Secrets of Nordic Living by Signe Johansen

delayed gratification, microbiome, Ocado, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

A spritz of this cool, fresh scent is more than an olfactory joy; it’s a vital part of my connection with nature and part of a sensory map that reflects my own particular narrative in life. You will no doubt have sensory experiences that trigger a similar response, and I bet for many of you who spent time outdoors as children, teenagers and into adulthood, some of those scents will be deeply imprinted on your sensory DNA. Setting the Pace To echo Ralph Waldo Emerson, nature sets the pace across the Nordic region and ‘her secret is patience’. Everything that is compelling and vital about the Nordic countries, be it our food culture(s), great design, architecture, arguably even our social democratic traditions, is in some way grounded in a deep respect for nature and the elements.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

I wanted to know about anything that could immediately change the quality of my life and anyone else’s. But the books I read as a child made the deepest impression. They were my ticket out of a world of pain: a world with no compelling future. They transported me to a realm of limitless possibilities. I can remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, and the lines “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.” Another was a book by the philosopher James Allen, As a Man Thinketh, echoing the biblical proverb “As a man thinketh, so his heart will be.”

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If you’re looking for guidance on this, experts say you should plan to save at least a minimum of 10% of your income, although in today’s economy many agree 15% is a far better number, especially if you’re over the age of 40. (You’ll find out why in section 3!) Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce? —RALPH WALDO EMERSON By now you might be saying, “This all sounds great in theory, Tony, but I’m spread thin enough as it is! Every penny is accounted for.” And you wouldn’t be alone. Most people don’t think they can afford to save. But frankly, we can’t afford not to save. Believe me, all of us can find that extra money if we really have to have it right now for a real emergency!

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When your brain knows a real number, your conscious mind will figure out a way to get there. You now know the income you need to be financially secure, vital, and independent. So let’s see what happens when your dreams get bigger. Dare to live the dreams you have dreamed for yourself. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Let me tell you the story of Ron and Michelle, a couple I met at one of the seminars I hold every year at my resort in Fiji. They were in their mid-30s, with two small children. Successful people, they owned a small business in Colorado. Ron was great at running their business, but neither of them paid attention to their household finances.

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd

Atul Gawande, David Sedaris, demand response, gentleman farmer, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Soul of a New Machine, Yogi Berra

Kidder was trying to cajole me into a piece of work, and he cited Keats’s advice to Shelley on avoiding excesses: “Curb your magnanimity,” wrote the tactful Keats. I had the opposite problem, in Kidder’s view: stinginess. He was trying to make me flesh out a typically underdone paragraph of mine. “Unleash your magnanimity,” he said. Oh brother. It had come to this. One had heard oneself. NOTES ON USAGE In 1859 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Never use the word development. Dangerous words in like kind are display, improvement, peruse, circumstances …” Those words have survived the great man’s scorn—though he was probably right about “peruse.” Every generation has its verbal fashions and critics who deplore them. Some usages, seemingly poisonous, get absorbed harmlessly into the language; others die out.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

However to get there, you must carry out the Actions that comprise your business as this is the execution of your vision and mission statements and the core of becoming a Lifestyle Entrepreneur. Once the Planning is Done, You Must Spring Into… ACTION “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” — Leonardo da Vinci “The Ancestor of Every Action is a Thought.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Take Action On Your Mission to Realize Your Vision This is where the rubber meets the road. Vision and Mission describe your business in conceptual, abstract terms, the Actions and Product components of the V-MAP Framework are tactical and action-oriented. The second half of this book is primarily Actions and Product focused.

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, delayed gratification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Paul Graham, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, side project, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Upton Sinclair

Whether you built your empire from nothing or inherited it, whether your wealth is financial or merely a cultivated talent, entropy is seeking to destroy it as you read this. Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you? ALWAYS STAY A STUDENT Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON The legend of Genghis Khan has echoed through history: A barbarian conqueror, fueled by bloodlust, terrorizing the civilized world. We have him and his Mongol horde traveling across Asia and Europe, insatiable, stopping at nothing to plunder, rape, and kill not just the people who stood in their way, but the cultures they had built.

Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

Withness takes us beyond personal interest, accepting the risks of the other when there is no “pragmatic” reason to do so. Withness is an instrument of awareness that helps us to know where and who we are, for it locates ourselves with others, and asks through example that others relocate and reorder themselves. When Henry David Thoreau, protesting the poll tax, was asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Henry, why are you here?” Thoreau responded, “Waldo, why are you not here?”3 There was no need for Chomsky to commit civil disobedience during the Indochina war except as a citizen responsibility. It was his statement of withness responsibility with the unseen Other. Our government could not respond to the anguish of millions; its policy makers were the chief culprits.

Taming the To-Do List: How to Choose Your Best Work Every Day by Glynnis Whitwer

delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, Firefox, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, late fees, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

To begin to master your workload and goals, try to identify what false reasons might be hindering you. Myths I tell myself . . . About my regular task: About my personal goal: 6 * * * Overcoming Our Fears A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Ralph Waldo Emerson My elementary school campus was divided between lower and upper grades. First through fourth composed the lower grades, and fifth through eighth the upper grades. Not only was there an age difference but the upper grades also had separate buildings and a separate playground, rotated between classes, and ate a later lunch.

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

That kids tend to intuitively grasp and embrace the social nature of the experience is a strong predictor of this future. 18 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 21 2 A Framework for Social Web Design The AOF method for making early and crucial design decisions “ It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson If there is one disease that affects nearly all design projects, it’s feature creep. It is the deadly affliction in which design teams gradually add feature after feature, like straws on a camel’s back, until they ultimately overload their interface and make the software difficult to use. Feature creep happens when there is a lack of sustained focus on what’s most important.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Abraham Maslow, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spice trade, supply-chain management, Vilfredo Pareto

As a result, a sympathetic response to an electricity pylon remained for most of us a haphazard and unsupported impulse, an epiphany which might last for a minute on a drive along a motorway or on a walk along a moor, but to which no prestige could be attached and from which little of merit could emerge. In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty.

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

airport security, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, trade route, urban renewal

His revised world map had “America” engraved next to a landmass roughly resembling Brazil. Waldseemüller later changed his mind and dropped the name from a subsequent edition. But “America” was reprised in 1538 by the great cartographer Gerard Mercator, who applied it to continents both north and south. “Strange,” lamented Ralph Waldo Emerson, “that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickledealer at Seville, who . . . managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.” AFTER SEVERAL DAYS in Santo Domingo, I met a museum guide named Carlos who taught English as his second job and agreed to take on a third, as my translator.

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Americans started visiting the town, drawn by its warm climate and exoticism. Mostly Protestant New Englanders, they were shocked and titillated by St. Augustine’s “popery,” describing masked carnivals and a Good Friday custom known as “shooting the Jews,” when locals hung effigies and peppered them with bullets. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who traveled to St. Augustine in 1827 to recover from tuberculosis, was one of many who relished the city’s “dim vestiges of a romantic past” and ancient stones redolent of “a thousand heavy histories.” Hucksters quickly learned to trade on this nostalgia by wreathing the city in hoary fictions.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Housman’s lament for a “land of lost content” echoes in the anxieties of ambivalent urbanites in cities across the world. It glows on television in the image of a little house on the American prairie or in BBC manor-house comedies celebrating quaint country squires and their seductively simple-minded rural shenanigans. We know, writes Ralph Waldo Emerson, when seen in the streets of cities, how great are the stars above.1 We know, when imagined from the London underground, how verdant are the Devon hedgerows. And we know too, when imagined from gleaming towers set down in the sands of the bleached Dubai desert, how poignant are the longings of a Bangladeshi migrant worker for the rippling greenery of a faraway riverbank village.

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Michael Bloomberg of New York 1. Gabriel Sherman, “The Mayor of Mayors,” New York Magazine, June 11, 2012. 2. Sridhar Pappu, “What’s Next for Michael Bloomberg,” Fastcompany, August 8, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1769004/whats-next-michael-bloomberg. Chapter 2. The Land of Lost Content 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature [1836], in Nature/Walking, ed. John Elder, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. 6. 2. Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. 3. In novels like Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy could be both endearing and caustic about rural life in England, but writers like Laurie Lee (Cider with Rosie) and John Betjeman captured the romance of the English countryside without ambivalence in their poetry.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Fuller made his name designing futuristic technologies such as the threewheeled Dymaxion car and, most famously, the geodesic dome, but the roots of his interests reached deep into America’s pre-industrial past. Born in 1895, Fuller was the latest in a long line of Unitarian ministers, lawyers, and writers. His great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, had joined Ralph Waldo Emerson to cofound the Dial, the preeminent literary journal of American Transcendentalism and the first magazine to publish Henry David Thoreau. Margaret served as an intellectual model for the young Buckminster. “When I heard that Aunt Margaret said, ‘I must start with the universe and work down to the parts, I must have an understanding of it,’ that became a great drive for me,” he recalled.26 For the Transcendentalists, as later for Fuller himself, the material world could be imagined as a series of corresponding forms, each linked to every other according to invisible but omnipresent principles.

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Perhaps he is both a citizen of the earth and, as a packet of informational [ 86 ] Chapter 3 patterns, its emblem too, just as he is both a reader of the Whole Earth Catalog (a system of tools) and, potentially, a tool for others in his own right. In this dizzying string of analogies, we can hear echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Norbert Wiener, and, of course, Buckminster Fuller. But for many of the readers of the Whole Earth Catalog, the analogies were more than the stuff of Romantic or cybernetic theory. They could be lived. In keeping with Brand’s statement of its purpose, and with the collective ambitions of the New Communalists, the Catalog’s structure and rhetorical strategies worked to shape an imagined reader who was a visionary, with a view of the planet’s condition, and a local actor, with the ability to shape the larger world by shaping his local surroundings.

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

hiring and firing, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, means of production, meritocracy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

Many of Napoleon’s leading appointees came from modest backgrounds, among them his prefects at the Ministry of the Interior, his scientific advisers and a number of senators. In Napoleon’s words, hereditary nobles were “the curse of the nation, imbeciles and hereditary asses!” Even after his fall, Napolean’s ideas endured and won over influential proponents in Europe and the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a desire to see “every man placed where he belongs, with so much power confided to him as he would carry and use.” Thomas Carlyle, for his part, was outraged by the way the children of the rich squandered their money while those of the poor were denied even a rudimentary education: “What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the owners of the soil of England; whose recognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England and shooting the partridges of England?”

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

By this standard, both Buffett and Singleton intentionally ran highly unusual restaurants that over time attracted like-minded, long-term-oriented customer/shareholders. CHAPTER 3 The Turnaround Bill Anders and General Dynamics A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. —Ralph Waldo Emerson In 1989, after nearly thirty years as the international symbol of Cold War tension and anxiety, the Berlin Wall came down, and, with its fall, the US defense industry’s longtime business model also crumbled. The industry had traditionally relied on selling the large weapons systems (missiles, bombers, and so forth) that were the backbone of US post–World War II military strategy.

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

In the early 1820s a Pennsylvania Peace Society was led not by a Quaker, but by Henry Holcombe, another veteran of the American Revolution. In 1828 an umbrella group was formed to unite all the peace societies, called the American Peace Society. Peace societies became an important intellectual force in nineteenth-century America, attracting speakers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that humankind went to war because it was backward and undeveloped and that it would eventually abandon such practices. As time distanced America from its founding experience, more and more Americans dared to speak out against the official version of the Revolutionary War. In 1839, Charles K.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

Johnston attended lectures at this time at the Smithsonian Institution and “found the lecture halls jammed with capacity audiences of 1200 and 1500 people.”37 Among the lecturers these audiences could hear were the leading intellectuals, writers and humorists (who were also writers) of their time, including Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Louis Agassiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose fee for a lecture was fifty dollars).38 In his autobiography, Mark Twain devotes two chapters to his experiences as a lecturer on the Lyceum circuit. “I began as a lecturer in 1866 in California arid Nevada,” he wrote. “[I] lectured in New York once and in the Mississippi Valley a few times; in 1868 [I] made the whole Western circuit; and in the two or three following seasons added the Eastern circuit to my route.”39 Apparently, Emerson was underpaid since Twain remarks that some lecturers charged as much as $250 when they spoke in towns and $400 when they spoke in cities (which is almost as much, in today’s terms, as the going price for a lecture by a retired television newscaster).

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How by Daniel Coyle

Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, deliberate practice, experimental subject, impulse control, Kaizen: continuous improvement, longitudinal study, Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no idea how their brains function,” said Meadowmount's Skye Carman. “But it's a tiny, tiny percentage. The rest of us mortals have to work at it.” 2 Ignition Chapter 5 Primal Cues Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm. —Ralph Waldo Emerson “IF SHE CAN DO IT, WHY CAN'T I?” Growing skill, as we've seen, requires deep practice. But deep practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel, the second element of the talent code. In this section we'll see how motivation is created and sustained through a process I call ignition.

Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving With the Self-Absorbed by Wendy T. Behary

gravity well, mirror neurons, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence

To this end, the following chapters will help you sharpen your awareness, harness your courage, and maintain your enthusiasm while developing the skills you need for creating effective outcomes when dealing with the narcissist in your life. chapter 4 Overcoming the Obstacles: Communication Pitfalls, Snags, and Glitches It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. —Ralph Waldo Emerson You now have a framework for understanding narcissism: how to define it, how it affects the lives of narcissists, and how that acerbic behavior impacts those who must deal with these people (something you were probably all too familiar with already). The earlier chapters have given you a glimpse of the origins of narcissism and a conceptual understanding of these challenging people.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

For example, pursuing five different majors, each of them perfectly good, does not equal a degree. Likewise, five different jobs in five different industries do not add up to a forward-moving career. Without clarity and purpose, pursuing something because it is good is not good enough to make a high level of contribution. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The crime which bankrupts men and states is that of job-work;—declining from your main design to serve a turn here or there.” When teams are really clear about their purpose and their individual roles, on the other hand, it is amazing what happens to team dynamics. Formal momentum accelerates, adding up to a higher cumulative contribution of the team as a whole.

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

Even as I began slowly pulling away from the dayto-day minutia of my other teenage friends, I must have been doing something right. I later earned the top honor in my eighth-grade yearbook: “Most Popular.” (I also received “Most Likely to Be U.S. President,” but who cares about that?) CHAPTER 5.0 First Meeting with a VC (It’s All About the Network) My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. RALPH WALDO EMERSON For entrepreneurs, getting a meeting with a venture capitalist on the fabled Sand Hill Road, which runs through Menlo Park, and along the northern edge of the Stanford University campus, is a worthy accomplishment. If you don’t know a VC personally, it can take dozens of calls and emails to secure a meeting with someone who could fund your start-up.

Soulful Simplicity: How Living With Less Can Lead to So Much More by Courtney Carver

Airbnb, buy and hold, Inbox Zero, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell

Anytime I’ve overreacted, I wasn’t present. I was distracted, tired, or removed in another way. I wasn’t really there. For a while I thought I was creating time to do more, but what I was really doing was creating the presence of mind to show up. To show all the way up. Adopt the Pace of Nature Presence requires patience. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” By taking walks, hiking, and watching the sunrise, I see that the most beautiful, magical things in life go at their own pace. No matter how many times I tried to will other people to move faster and get out of my way so I could get on with my busy day, it never worked.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

In America, a country bursting with invention and scientific optimism, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “What shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can … render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors?”♦ Ralph Waldo Emerson had met Babbage in London and declared in 1870, “Steam is an apt scholar and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work.”♦ It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr.

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♦ “IT WOULD BE LIKE USING THE STEAM HAMMER”: H. P. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” 333. ♦ “WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE”: “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Third Series (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1889), 230. ♦ “STEAM IS AN APT SCHOLAR”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 143. ♦ “WHAT A SATIRE IS THAT MACHINE”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 11. ♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

It was one-third the cost of bottled water. 2. See the “Living Forever” chapter for more on this. THE SLOW-CARB DIET II The Finer Points and Common Questions As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The system is the solution. —AT&T This chapter answers the most common questions related to the Slow-Carb Diet, shares real-world lessons learned, and pinpoints the most common mistakes. I designate Saturday as “cheat day” in all of my answers, but, in practice, you can substitute any day of the week.

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If there is a range for cost, I have used the lower range for putting them in order. 2. Since I am not a woman, this test was found from a non-Hunter source: http://www.anylabtestnow.com/Tests/Female_Tests.aspx MUSCLES OF THE BODY (PARTIAL) THE VALUE OF SELF-EXPERIMENTATION All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. —Richard Feynman This chapter was written by Dr. Seth Roberts, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California–Berkeley and professor of psychology at Tsinghua University.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. . . . Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “NATURE” 4. Brass Tacks 1937–1939 There are times of evolutionary stress that have immensely hastened developments. Now I claim that this is, and will continue to be, such a time. —ARTHUR MCCANN, IN A LETTER TO ASTOUNDING, APRIL 1938 For readers of Astounding Science Fiction in the late thirties, the name of Arthur McCann would have been a familiar one.

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Susan Calvin—appeared in successive issues, establishing the series in the eyes of readers. Campbell cautioned him against becoming tied down to a formula, however, and when Asimov came to visit on March 17, 1941, the editor wanted to discuss an idea of his own. Campbell read him a line from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” He set the book aside. “What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Indeed, the “optative mood” is the Greek grammatical form, now lost, for expressing wishes. Purchasing options allows us to wish for outcomes and allows us to imagine what is possible and what might come true. This link between options and the desire to explore what is possible is precisely why Ralph Waldo Emerson called America “optative”—options are for people who want to imagine the outcomes that they desire. The most distinctive aspect of options is how their asymmetric nature makes them particularly valuable when environments become more risky. Because you have little to lose and much to gain, events that make outcomes more extreme are welcome.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

But the railroad did more than (substantially) create modern industrial capitalism, the modern firm, the modern communication network, the modern urban landscape, and the modern sense of time. (By "create," of course, we mean "significantly force the co-evolution of.") Particularly in the United States, the railroad became a symbol of national power, and, more subtly, instantiated and validated the American integration of religion, morality, and technology. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Daniel Webster were among those who-in an unconscious recapitulation of language and powerful cultural memes that we saw in Bacon centuries earlier and an ocean away, and now hear again in transhumanism-viewed railroads as evidence of human ascension to godlike power. In the early 1800s the Western Railroad in Massachusetts urged ministers to "take an early opportunity to deliver a Discourse on the Moral effect of Rail-Roads in our wide extended country."

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome) by Gavin Francis

Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell, traveling salesman

Spitfire pilots who were shot down often ended up with acrylic shrapnel from the cockpit embedded in the eye, and surgeons noticed that it didn’t cause an inflammatory reaction. 3 Aldous Huxley reused the phrase in his Doors of Perception. His Eyeless in Gaza took its title from Milton’s drama Samson Agonistes, written twenty years after Milton lost his sight. 4 Face: Beautiful Palsy He sees the beauty of a human face, and searches for the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Montaigne WHEN I WAS TAUGHT facial anatomy as a medical student most of the cadavers we dissected were those of old men with thick facial skin, stiffened by stubble. Their faces might have been tough as hide, but the muscles that lay immediately beneath that skin were fragile: delicate fronds of salmon pink laced through buttery subcutaneous fat.

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air freight, business process, clean water, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, pushing on a string, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Rubik’s Cube, urban sprawl, work culture

A product designed with a close fit for climbing may also be worn by snowboarders or skiers who want a looser fit. In that case, the climber, as the core customer for that product, wins (the snowboarder or casual use customer can size up if she or he wants to). Is It as Simple as Possible? Simplify, simplify. —H. D. THOREAU One “simplify” would have sufficed. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, IN RESPONSE Koshun Miyamoto once complimented his fencing teacher’s wife on the beauty of her gravel garden, a square of coarse-grained sand, set off by three stones from a nearby stream that conveyed a “powerful, evocative image of space and balance.” The fencing teacher’s wife protested that the garden wasn’t complete and wouldn’t be until she could “express the same feeling it has now using only one stone instead of three.”

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

do what you love, index card, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, rolodex

Many index cards on which I write in the middle of the night tend to be incoherent, like some incredibly bright math major thinking about oranges or truth while on LSD. Some contain great quotes that I share with my students, although I unfortunately often forget to write down whose quote it is. Like this one, for instance: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." Now, I’m almost positive Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, but with my luck some critic will point out that it was really Georgette Mosbacher. (Who was it that said, "A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded"? I have it written on an index card somewhere....) Other cards just sort of live with me, in little piles and drifts.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

According to Booth’s sister, Asia, he said, “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!” Booth’s assessment was shared, based on the sermons preached in Brown’s honor after he died, the church bells that rang in his memory across the North, the tributes written for him by the likes of the revered three-named Yankee poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Julia Ward Howe (who said Brown’s martyrdom “would make the gallows glorious like the cross”), the fact that Union soldiers turned the marching song “John Brown’s Body” into one of the top-ten hits of the Civil War. So Booth isn’t entirely misguided in thinking he’d inspire a song or poem or two himself.

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

California gold rush, Easter island, index card, Maui Hawaii, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, trade route

There men were shoehorned into grim little bunk beds infested with fleas and lice. As a sufferer of claustrophobia and seasickness, I can barely look at the creepy forecastle exhibit without dry-heaving. Most whaling ships were based out of New England, and most of those from New Bedford, Massachusetts, where, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “they hug an oil-cask like a brother.” I stopped by New Bedford on one of those perfect New England October days, when the sky is blue and the leaves are gilded and the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something. I came to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum, but really the whole town is a whaling museum.

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, elephant in my pajamas, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Jane Jacobs, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, W. E. B. Du Bois

If I’ve inspired you to give it an extra thought every time you’re about to write or say the words “only” and “just,” I feel I’ve done my job. *2  Copy editor’s addendum: “For me, it was candles ‘guttering’ and ‘tang’ used for smell; both were used so often in literary fiction, I’d begun to think they were handed out with the MFA.” *3  Also, in no particular order, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, Mahatma Gandhi, and (impudently and absurdly, given how easily traceable every word he ever wrote is) William Shakespeare. *4  “The very existence of self-help books is all the evidence you need that they don’t work,” a former colleague of mine once quipped—perhaps more cleverly than truthfully, but the quip business is built more on rat-a-tat effectiveness than on strict accuracy

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

Pursuing material satisfaction was a sign that a person had already fallen from grace, according to Francis: “When the soul finds no delight, what is left except for the flesh to look for some?” The United States has its own secular saint of asceticism in Henry David Thoreau, who famously retreated into the woods from 1845 to 1847 in order to find the joy of simplicity. More accurately, he moved to land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson on Walden Pond, a small body of water walkable of an evening from the town center of Concord, Massachusetts, where he grew up and where his mother’s cooking was still freely available whenever he felt like going back. As far as an escape from society, it seems more like a child running away from home and making it to the nearest street corner.

The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

If you would like to find out more about Michael and his work, or to connect with him, you may do so at www.michaelnicholas.com. Introduction “As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Decisions are of considerable importance in practically every aspect of life. Professionally, they are arguably the thing that makes the difference to the level of success we achieve, because they determine how well every other talent or capability that we have can be applied. Our decision-making capability also determines the size and type of problem we can solve, and is therefore strongly related to how far we can progress and how much we will thrive.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

In Coming to Our Senses, he quotes Thoreau’s back-to-nature classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.21 Kabat-Zinn compares this to his own philosophy of “living in harmony with oneself and with the world,” while “cultivating some appreciation for the fullness of each moment we are alive.” As he explains: “Thoreau saw the same problem with our ordinary mind state in New England in 1846 and wrote with great passion about its unfortunate consequences.”22 Retreating to a cabin on land owned by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau turned his back on the horrors of industrialization and injustice, focusing instead on a simpler existence and transcending the mundane through contemplation. Kabat-Zinn calls Thoreau’s experience “a personal experiment in mindfulness. He chose to put his life on the line in order to revel in the wonder and simplicity of present moments.”23 Like Thoreau and Emerson, Kabat-Zinn reels off reasons to feel disenchanted with modern life, while offering a path to re-enchantment through retreat, if not physically then psychologically — in mindfulness practice.

Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path by Erin Loechner

clean water, fear of failure, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, late fees, Mason jar, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once, I called my friend Lisa, a social worker in Indiana, asking her how she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She told me stories of foster home visits and juvenile detention ministries and broken families and how it had just seemed like she could do something—anything—about one small part of it. “It’s like that saying,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more important to be useful than to be happy.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s who said it: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” But I was still operating with the mentality that to be useful, I had to feel useful. I hadn’t yet learned that sometimes the being comes before the feeling.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

LESSON 04 SKILLS STAR PEELER, SAUTÉ UNION SQUARE ZUCCHINI + VARIATION: SQUASH PAPPARDELLE - * * * “The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON * * * “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” —DOROTHY PARKER, WHEN CHALLENGED TO USE THE WORD HORTICULTURE IN A GAME OF “CAN-YOU-GIVE-ME-A-SENTENCE?” * * * This dish is named in honor of Joe Ades, but it was inspired by one of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Amsterdam students, while in Italy.‡ We make it faster by using the peeler in lieu of a knife, and we make it slow-carb with ghee in place of butter.

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STALLING MANEUVERS: AIR SQUATS, WALL PRESSES, AND CHEST PULLS I aim for 30–50 repetitions of each of the following: - Air Squats - Wall Presses - Chest Pulls For everything imaginable related to physical performance and appearance enhancement, please consult The 4-Hour Body. Now, back to our regular 4-Hour Chef programming! THE BASICS: ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON… - * * * “As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.” — RALPH WALDO EMERSON * * * It’s helpful to think of cooking in two categories: texture changes (which typically happen below the boiling point of water) and chemical changes (which typically happen above the boiling point of water). It’s the chemical changes above 100°C (212°F) that change flavor. To get the benefits of both, you might cook a steak sous-vide, then sear it on a blistering hot grill, for instance.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

No other era in human history, either before or since, combined so many elements in which the standard of living increased as quickly and in which the human condition was transformed so completely. Chapter 9 TAKING AND MITIGATING RISKS: CONSUMER CREDIT, INSURANCE, AND THE GOVERNMENT Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 INTRODUCTION Household well-being depends not just on the level of income, but also on its volatility. This chapter is about institutions, particularly consumer credit and insurance, that allow the household to enjoy a standard of living that is less volatile over time. Consumer credit allows for the purchase of homes and consumer durables by spreading out payments over time and avoids the need to save the entire purchase price in advance.

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Eisner, Robert. (1989). The Total Incomes System of Accounts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ellis, David Maldwyn. (1945). “Railroad Land Grant Rates, 1850–1945,” The Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 21, no. 3 (August): 207–22. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1841). The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V 1838–41. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published in 1911). Emmet, Boris, and Jeuck, John E. (1950). Catalogs and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Engerman, Stanley L., and Gallman, Robert E., eds. (2000a). The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol.

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Chapter 8: Working Conditions on the Job and at Home Harvey Greene, excerpts from The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945. Copyright © 1992 by Harvey Green. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the Univeristy of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com. Chapter 9: Taking and Mitigating Risks Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1841). The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V 1838–41. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published in 1911). Chapter 10: Fast Food, Synthetic Fibers, and Split-Level Subdivisions Rybczynski, Witold. (1995). “How to Build a Suburb,” The Wilson Quarterly 19, no. 3 (summer): 114–26. Chapter 11: See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above Music by Leon Carr, Words by Leo Corday, Copyright © 1948 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation and Fred Ahlert Music Corp., International Copyright Secured.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

A replica of the trestle bridge over the narrow Concord River is part of the park, which also preserves the Wayside, home of Nathaniel Hawthorne, built in 1688. The Wayside is but a glimpse of Concord’s great literary legacy. The Orchard House, inspiration of Little Women and home of its author, Louisa May Alcott, and the prosperous-looking home of philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, are, like Hawthorne’s, open for tours (many of the town’s literary and revolutionary artifacts have been gathered at the impressive Concord Museum across the way). At the height of their fame in the mid-19th century, Concord was a center of Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that looked to the simplicity of the natural world for guidance.

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When: North Bridge center daily, year-round; Minute Man center closed Dec–Mar. CONCORD: 19 miles northwest of Boston. Visitor info: Tel 978-369-3120; www.concordchamberofcommerce.org. THE WAYSIDE: Tel 978-369-6975; www.nps.gov/archive/mima/wayside. When: closed Nov–Apr. ORCHARD HOUSE: Tel 978-369-4118; www.louisamayalcott.org. RALPH WALDO EMERSON HOUSE: Tel 978-369-2236. When: closed Nov–mid-Apr and Mon–Wed year-round. HAWTHORNE INN: Tel 978-369-5610; www.concordmass.com. Cost: from $125 (off-peak), from $250 (peak). LONGFELLOW’S WAYSIDE INN: Tel 800-339-1776 or 978-443-1776; www.wayside.org. Cost: from $125; dinner $25. WALDEN POND STATE RESERVATION: Tel 978-369-3254; www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/walden.

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., 624–25 Montana Festival of the Book, Mont., 626–27 Moravian Bookshop, Pa., 208 Mount, The, Mass., 52 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Nev., 726 Naulakha, Vt., 95 Off Square Books, Miss., 444 Orchard House, Mass., 58 Oxford, Miss., 444–45 Oz Museum, Kans., 609 Poetry Nature Trail, N.H., 71 Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Mass., 58 Robert Frost Farm, N.H., 71 Robert Frost Trail, N.H., 71 Square Books, Miss., 444 Steinbeck Center, Calif., 831 Sunnyside, N.Y., 155 Toadstool Bookshop, N.H., 77 Twain, Mark Hannibal, Mo., 12, 449–50 Mark Twain Boyhood Home, Mo., 449 Mark Twain Cave, Mo., 449 Mark Twain Days, Calif., 809 Mark Twain House and Museum, Conn., 12–13 Mark Twain Museum & Gallery, Mo., 449 National Tom Sawyer Days, Mo., 449 Walden Pond, Mass., 58 Wayside (house), Mass., 58 Wayside Inn, Mass., 58 Widener Library, Mass., 47 Yaddo, N.Y., 203 MUSEUMS Alaska & Hawaii Bishop Museum, Hawaii, 960–61, 963 Lahaina Heritage Museum, Hawaii, 957 Lyman Museum & Mission House, Hawaii, 929 Mission Houses Museum, Hawaii, 963 Pacific Tsunami Museum, Hawaii, 929 Sheldon Jackson Museum of Native Arts, Alaska, 924 Canada Art Gallery of Ontario, Ont., 1004–5 Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, N.S., 992 Heritage Museum, N.L., 982 Highland Village Museum, N.S., 988 Mackenzie Art Gallery, Sask., 1070 Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, N.S., 991 Museum of Anthropology, B.C., 1048–49 Royal British Columbia Museum, B.C., 1061 Royal Ontario Museum, Ont., 1006–7 Royal Tyrrell Museum, Alta., 1030–31 Vancouver Art Gallery, B.C., 1053 Four Corners and the Southwest African-American Museum, Tex., 766 Age of Steam Museum, Tex., 766 American Cowboy Museum, Colo., 708 Amon Carter Museum, Tex., 767 Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, N.Mex., 736 Argo Gold Mine, Mill and Museum, Colo., 715 Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Ariz., 700 Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Nev., 731 Bradbury Science Museum, N.Mex., 743 Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, Colo., 715 Charlotte Hall Museum, Ariz., 693 Colorado Ski Museum, Colo., 724 Crow Collection of Asian Art, Tex., 763 Dallas Museum of Art, Tex., 763 Denver Art Museum, Colo., 710–11 Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Ariz., 702 Dinosaur Museum, N.Mex., 746 Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, Tex., 767 Frontier Times Museum Living History Project, Tex., 759 Gallery at Wynn Las Vegas, Nev., 731 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, N.Mex., 750 Heard Museum, Ariz., 682, 690–91 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, Ariz., 691 Heard Museum North, Ariz., 691 Houston’s Art Museums, Tex., 773–74 International UFO Museum and Research Center, N.Mex., 745 Kimbell Art Museum, Tex., 766 King Ranch Museum, Tex., 786 Las Vegas Art Museum, Nev., 731 Liberace Museum, Nev., 731 Long Barrack Museum, Tex., 782 Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Tex., 787 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Tex., 766 Museum Club, Ariz., 684 Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Tex., 774 Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, N.Mex., 747 Museum of International Folk Art, N.Mex., 747 Museum of Northern Arizona, Ariz., 684 National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Tex., 767 Navajo Museum, Ariz., 690 Nevada Museum of Art, Nev., 734 O.

The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Albert Einstein, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Seymour Hersh

BACK AT PAUL AND AMANDA’S, over a celebratory dinner of Barramundi fish, washed down with the amber nectar, I explained to the collected pilots that I had recently founded The Cloud Appreciation Society. Like a B-list actor promoting his latest film, I launched into a well-rehearsed speech in defense of our fluffy friends. Life would be dull, I declared, had we nothing but blue monotony to look at, day after day. I mentioned how Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist, described the sky as ‘the daily bread of the eyes…the ultimate art gallery above.’ 4 And that the society therefore stands in opposition to ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Clouds are the face of the atmosphere, I proclaimed, enthusing on their ability to express its moods and communicate the invisible architecture of its currents.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

[Tjhere always remain in the abyss of things slumbering parts which have yet to be awakened GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ, On the Ultimate Origination ofThings (1697) Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but. . . for everything that is given something is taken. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Self-Reliance," Essays: First Series (1841) twentieth century will be remembered for three broad JL innovations: unprecedented means to save, prolong, and 246 • Billions and Billions enhance life; unprecedented means to destroy life, including for the first time putting our global civilization at risk; and unprecedented insights into the nature of ourselves and the Universe.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The focused life requires not just a robust capacity for paying attention but also the discerning choice of targets that will invite the best possible experience. Much is made of the fact that human beings are the only creatures to know that we must die, but we’re also the only ones to know that we must find something engaging to focus on in order to pass the time—increasingly, a lot of time. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was William James’s godfather, put it, “To fill the hour—that is happiness.” Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depends on how you handle it. Moses got his focus from God, and Picasso from his nearly supernatural creativity.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

call centre, crowdsourcing, drop ship, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

—George Bernard Shaw • “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” —H. S. Truman • “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” —Carlos Castaneda • “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Appendix: Online Resources Web site for this book: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com Additional stories for which we didn’t have room in the book: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/stories Book recommendations: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/books Zappos core values: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/zappos-core-values How to create committable core values for your organization: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/core-values “How Twitter Can Make You a Better and Happier Person”: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/twitter-better Follow me on Twitter (@zappos): http://twitter.com/zappos Public mentions of Zappos and our employees’ tweets: http://twitter.zappos.com Photos and videos of Zappos culture: http://blogs.zappos.com More information about Zappos: http://about.zappos.com Zappos Insights video subscription service for entrepreneurs and businesses: http://www.zapposinsights.com Zappos job opportunities: http://jobs.zappos.com Culture book (please include physical mailing address): ceo@zappos.com Tours of Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas: http://tours.zappos.com Recognized as one of the world’s most prestigious business imprints, Business Plus specializes in publishing books that are on the cutting edge.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

Just recently, I spoke in the communist “hermit kingdom” of North Korea and taught geography to a classroom of teenagers about to graduate. I have conducted an entrepreneurial mastermind seminar to more than 750 investors and business owners in Tehran, Iran. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” —ralph waldo emerson It’s Time to Live Your Dreams My adventurous life has not happened because I was born into wealth. Lacking a wealthy friend such as Tintin’s Captain Haddock, I realized that if I wanted to become an adventurer like Tintin, I would need to develop multiple pillars of income in order to afford such a lifestyle.

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

We’ve all read the unbelievable company mission statements, engraved on a wall plaque in a corridor or reception area somewhere, that make all kinds of attractive claims yet attract only dust and spider’s webs. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to walk the talk, and nowhere is it more critical than in your BrandMe™ story. Be honest and transparent, or they’ll know for sure. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.’ Don’t make the mistake of not being genuine. YOUR BUSINESSBRAND™ STORY Usage: A powerful way to establish an emotional connection with customers. Can be incorporated into sales presentations, business plans and proposals, as well as collateral material. 226 Communicating your brand Now we extend the personal brand aspects into your business.

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

It’s not that we aren’t influenced by our environment or the people around us; we simply take in the information and put it through our own filters rather than taking it at face value. We carry our safety, our values, and our energy around inside of us, which contributes to an unmistakable quality of independence and self-reliance. My guess is that whoever coined the phrase “If you want it done right, do it yourself” was an introvert! Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay includes numerous statements about the virtues of this introvert tendency. Here’s one example: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

*See the “Fish Stories” appendix at the back of the book for twenty-five more examples of how to reframe a descriptive concept as a benefit-driven story. GET PAID TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE BY MAKING SURE IT CONNECTS TO WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WANT. “Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Like many of us, Gary Leff begins his day with email. As a CFO for two university research centers in northern Virginia, he’s in touch with colleagues from morning to night. It’s a good job that he enjoys, and he has no plans to leave. But the “early early” morning email traffic comes from another source: Gary’s part-time business as a specific kind of consultant.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 2: PUT A PIN IN IT What Excites You Most? What Does Success Look Like One Year from Now? A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within. . . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” MOST PEOPLE—INCLUDING OUR CLOSEST FAMILY AND FRIENDS—DO NOT ASK US the big questions on a regular basis, if ever. They don’t typically start end-of-day debriefs with: What is working best in your life right now? What are you most excited about? What does smashing success look like one year from now?

Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life by Ken Robinson, Lou Aronica

do what you love, fear of failure, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” We’re all shaped to some degree by our own biographies and cultures and it’s easy to believe that what’s happened before determines what has to come next. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson thought otherwise. “What lies behind us,” he wrote, “and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you. “Risk” is a short poem often attributed to the writer Anais Nin.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

carbon footprint, glass ceiling, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, you are the product

There were a lot of works on Eastern philosophy that she had never read before and she wondered if she stayed in this life, and she couldn’t see why not, whether there was a way to read them all before she had to do any more teaching at Cambridge. Novels, some Dickens, The Bell Jar, some geeky pop-science books, a few music books, a few parenting manuals, Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, some stuff on climate change, and a large hardback called Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. She had rarely, if ever, been this consistently highbrow. This was clearly what happened when you did a Master’s degree at Cambridge and then went on sabbatical to write a book on your favourite philosopher.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte