I’m a journalist and a tinkerer. I’m fascinated not only by how things work but by how small levers can move mountains. Growing up in the workshop of my grandfather, an old Boston boatwright, I was mesmerized by the idea that a small rudder could maneuver a huge vessel. In college, I fell in love with how a small idea or expression could redirect a course of research or a country. As a self-taught maker of things, I appreciate how technologies empower us. I’ve chosen these books because they’re examples of how small ideas become things, lines of research, or patterns of thinking that shift human progress in unknowable ways.
I wrote
Swipe: The Science Behind Why We Don't Finish What We Start
I love Brainwashedbecause it’s a counterintuitive investigation into something we all take for granted: Football scrambles the brains of its players. Or does it?
This book fits well into my category—how technology is changing us and how we live—because among many other things it looks at how new safety technology and concussion protocols have made football much safer, not to mention challenged old ideas about players “getting their bell rung.”
It’s also a deep dive into dogma and how science can be used to serve interests unrelated to truth. It’s a terrific book.
The outcry surrounding CTE is missing something critical: the science to justify it.
When post-concussion syndrome forced star NFL running back Merril Hoge into early retirement in 1994, research on football-related head injuries wasn't a priority. At the time, football was heavily influenced by a tough guy culture, and little was known about concussions and their potentially dangerous effects.
Then the tragic death of Hoge's ex-teammate Mike Webster in 2002 launched a wave of fear after an autopsy determined he suffered from an obscure brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The media pounced. Concern over player safety soon became a…
I recommend The Inversion Factorbecause it’s a deep dive into the Internet of Things from some of the people who made the IoT possible: the geniuses at MIT.
The book’s take on commerce alone is fascinating, the idea that in the future, demand will be driven not by companies deciding what to make and sell but by a flow of consumer data coming from connected devices telling companies, “Here’s what you need to make next.”
Plus, the descriptions of the IoT home and services, tempered though they are by realities like the fact that self-driving cars aren’t very good yet at not running people over, are gripping. Great book.
Why companies need to move away from a “product first” orientation to pursuing innovation based on customer need.
In the past, companies found success with a product-first orientation; they made a thing that did a thing. The Inversion Factor explains why the companies of today and tomorrow will have to abandon the product-first orientation. Rather than asking “How do the products we make meet customer needs?” companies should ask “How can technology help us reimagine and fill a need?” Zipcar, for example, instead of developing another vehicle for moving people from point A to point B, reimagined how people interacted…
I love gutsy books by outsiders, and Ms. Saxena, as a woman of color working in the Ivy League and the worlds of artificial intelligence and Big Data, is very much an outsider.
That makes her deep knowledge and insights into how AI and Big Data are changing business even that much more interesting. Plus, this is one of the only books I’ve read that explains how artificial intelligence works in a clear, direct way that doesn’t assume the reader already knows about things like machine learning and neural nets.
Have you heard about artificial intelligence (AI) and big data but felt they are technologies too big or too complicated for you or your business? Do you imagine AI as a Hollywood science fiction stereotype or something in the far and distant future?
Take heart. AI is none of those things. It's part of our everyday lives, and it has the power to transform your business.
This book will put AI, big data, the cloud, robotics, and smart devices in context. It will reveal how these technologies can dramatically multiply any businesses-including yours-by strategically using your data's latent, transformative potential.…
Eventually, I had to have a mainstream book, right?
This book is a masterpiece thanks to Ms. Skloot’s extraordinary writing and her clear empathy for her subject, the Lacks family. This is so much more than the revelation of a medical marvel—the Lacks cells that have led to so many medical discoveries.
This is a story about racial equity in the healthcare system, about personal privacy, and about the crusade by a family to have their ancestor’s contribution to medical science recognized…to have Henrietta memorialized not just as a one-of-a-kind aggregate of genetic material but as a woman.
With an introduction by author of The Tidal Zone, Sarah Moss
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta's family did not learn of her 'immortality' until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences . . .
Rebecca Skloot's fascinating account is the story of the life, and afterlife, of one woman who changed the medical world for ever. Balancing the beauty and drama…
I adore books that go deep into fascinating minutiae, and Longitudeis a master class in that.
Sobel looks at John Harrison’s quest to solve a problem that had bedeviled mariners and scientists for centuries: How do you keep accurate time at sea so you can determine your longitude—where you are, east to west?
Sailors and scientists had tried and failed to solve the puzzle, but Harrison finally did it, and the story of how he did it is both prosaic and world-changing in its detail and scope.
Plus, it’s just a ripping good yarn of failures, setbacks, and seafaring stuff, which, as a longtime sailor, I relish.
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem."
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in…
Swipe is the first book to look scientifically at the question of why people disengage from pursuits or priorities that were initially so important to them, including goals, jobs, even family relationships.Because of our immersion in smart devices, we’ve become conditioned to change our experience with the flick of a finger or the swipe of a screen when we become uncomfortable, bored, or discouraged. But now we’ve taken that into the real world.
When we “swipe,” we hit the panic button and quit on that first novel, workout program, music lesson, home project, or important talk with our kids…often to our everlasting regret. Swipeis about why we do that, and how we can make it to the finish line.
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will they destroy each other? And more importantly, how will humans tolerate their own creations, the robots, on this planet?
In this, his latest speculative fiction novel, Shane Joseph, returns to the “what if” questions facing humanity that he raised in After the Flood, a book that won him the…
With Chatbots and Large Language Models changing the world of writing and publishing dramatically, what happens when we introduce a sentient robot capable of feelings into the mix?
Phil Kruger, inventor, and serial womanizer, believes he has the answer in his creation, Victoria, the first sentient robot in the world, imbued with beauty, knowledge, and strength and on a crash course to acquire human feelings through massive infusions of data. Arrayed against him are independent trade publisher Artemius (Art) Jones and his rebellious and sexually starved daughter, Paula, an editor herself, who is determined to take her father's failing press,…
