December 2020 Roundup: What I am Reading, Watching and Listening To
What I Am Reading
Why the ‘paradox mindset’ is the key to success
Although paradoxes often trip us up, embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership.
Revealed: British accents are the world’s sexiest
Sorry, France: in our latest global survey, accents from the UK swept the world off their feet
Why Do We See Dead People?
Humans have always sensed the ghosts of loved ones. It’s only in the last century that we convinced ourselves this was a problem
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
I’m a bit late to the party on this one but I have had over 10 people recommend this one so I finally listened to it on audio and it definitely lived up to the hype!
In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, Harari explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?
What I am Watching:
Which of these 6 time traps is eating up all your time?
There is an 8 out of 10 chance that you are one of the poorest people in the world. However, when I say you’re poor, I’m not talking about your bank account (although material poverty is indeed a pressing concern for many of us).
Rather, I mean you are time poor: You have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Time poverty affects all cultures and crosses all economic strata. Most of us feel this way.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Based on economist Thomas Piketty's best-selling book, this documentary examines wealth accumulation and its looming social repercussions.
What I am Listening To:
Why We Get Fat, How to Fix Insulin Resistance, IGF-1 and Cancer | Benjamin Bikman, PhD
Benjamin Bikman earned his PhD in Bioenergetics and was a postdoctoral fellow with the Duke-National University of Singapore studying metabolic disorders. His professional focus is to better understand the origins and consequences of metabolic disorders, including obesity and diabetes, with a particular emphasis on the role of insulin. He is the author of Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease—and How to Fight It.
Agustín Fuentes — Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being
Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities. But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? Fuentes employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief — the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea — is central to the human way of being in the world.
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