The Intuitive Body is an explanation of Wendy Palmer’s techniques and practices for embodiment. These are an amalgamation of several physical and spiritual traditions filtered through her own experience. The result is a healthy helping of California Aikido with some Buddhism-flavored sauce.
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2025-08-14
The Intuitive Body by Wendy Palmer
2025-08-04
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
John Green has gone down a rabbit-hole in his distinctive self-aware, obsessive-compulsive sort of way. This slender volume contains histories of Tuberculosis at different scales, from the grand sweeps of civilization to the individual, and the view is alternately bleak and inspiring (bleakspiring?). While technically a writer, Green could be described as a musician of the heart. This is a story of a disease, medicine, culture, but mostly a story of humanity, our mistakes, our struggles, our drive to do better. This is an important story, told skillfully and succinctly. I think the more people who know it, the better off we will all be.
2024-11-19
Nudge, the Final Edition by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
This is a welcome revision to a hugely influential book. If by some chance you’ve escaped its influence, this is one of the works that brought many (and the concept of) standard biases to the popular consciousness, and more importantly, explained some practical applications of that knowledge. These applications have become the defaults (see what I did there?) for many companies and governments.
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2023-04-18
Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson
I wish there were more books like this. In fact, I wish most books were like this. You can find any number of volumes about meditation, but these are mostly guides and personal stories that extoll the benefits of a certain practice. This book is different. This is a summary of meditation research written for a popular audience. It explains what exactly has been tested scientifically and what hasn’t. This is a catalog of evidence. The authors go down the list of claims made about what meditation can do and provide a simple reality check. They also provide some essential details, clarifying the differences between different types of meditation, and which types have been associated with which results; breaking up the monolith of “meditation” in the popular conversation.
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2023-04-18
I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán
This is a curious book. On the one hand, it is a pithy self-help book, riddled with acronyms and buzzwords, and continuously padded with “we’ll talk about that in a later chapter” and “like we talked about in a previous chapter”. On the other hand, it is an effortless and engrossing read. Ironically, Guzmán’s conversational tone betrays her professional expertise. Here is a journalist of high caliber; someone who is experienced and expert at talking to anyone.
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2022-12-22
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
What is most striking about these sorrows is not their obscurity but rather their specificity. Koenig has tapped the well of human experience and amassed a sizable collection of, what are usually, deeply personal moments. For each of these, he has assigned a name, generally a portmanteau of words from an assortment of languages, and composed a description of the feeling that is utterly dripping with sorrow and nostalgia and… there’s probably a word for it in here somewhere…
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2022-10-23
Noise by Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman has done some great research, and it is a tragedy that such useful research is represented by such poor writing. This book is a slog. The authors are still defining the titular “noise” come page 72. I do not know which of the three is to blame for this travesty (I’m generally inclined to point a finger in the direction of the editor), but this book is inexcusably long and laborious. I do not recall having such a hard time with “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, but as I am in no position to hold anyone directly accountable, I will not belabor blame. I will belabor the tragedy of bad writing.
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2022-09-04
Exercised by Daniel Lieberman
Exercise in the modern world has been commodified. The people talking about it the most are some of the least trustworthy. Daniel Lieberman has taken a step back from the fitness-industrial complex and asked the elephantine question: Are homo sapiens even supposed to exercise? Through the lenses of anthropology and evolution, he has untangled exercise from modern culture. The result is an enlightening journey through history, civilization, and biology.
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2022-09-04
Breath by James Nestor
History is a funny thing. We like to think that civilization advances, that progress only goes in one direction, but reality is more complex than that. New things are learned, discoveries are made, truths uncovered, but just because someone somewhere learns something doesn’t mean everyone everywhere hears about it or remembers it. In Breath, Nestor has done some invaluable detective work; looking closely at something we all do every minute of our lives but that few of us have thought much about. He has done some hard journalism in a world of mysticism. The result is some fascinating history, a few great anecdotes, a generous helping of compelling evidence, and new questions to go with every answer.
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