The Avid Reader Show

For much of recorded history, people considered the heart to be the most important organ in the body. In cultures around the world, the heart-not the brain-was believed to be the location of intelligence, memory, emotion, and the soul. Over time, views on the purpose of the heart have transformed as people sought to understand the life forces it contains. Modern medicine and science dismissed what...

Whenever a person engages with music―when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or a wedding guest gets down on the dance floor―countless neurons are firing. Playing an instrument requires all of the resources of the nervous system, including cognitive, sensory, and motor functions. Composition and improvisation are remarkable demon...

Warren Buffett is perhaps the most accomplished investor of all time. The CEO and chair of Berkshire Hathaway has earned admiration for not only his financial feats but also the philosophy behind them. Todd A. Finkle provides striking new insights into Buffett's career through the lens of entrepreneurship. This book demonstrates that although Buffett is thought of primarily as an investor, one of...

For as long as we’ve studied human cognition, we’ve believed that our senses give us direct access to the world. What we see is what’s really there—or so the thinking goes. But new discoveries in neuroscience and psychology have turned this assumption on its head. What if rather than perceiving reality passively, your mind actively predicts it? Widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist...

For readers of Peggy Orenstein and Rebecca Traister, an authoritative, big think look at pornography in all its facets - historical, religious, and cultural. In the 1960s, sex researchers Masters and Johnson declared the end of the fake orgasm. Nearly two decades later, in 1982, evangelical activist Tim LaHaye foretold that the entire pornography industry would soon be driven out of business. Neit...

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has prov...

A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen. An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist f...

Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances? I went home, of course.  MURBRIDGE COMMUNITY MESSAGE BOARD FREE: 500 cans of corn. Accidentally ordered them online. I r...

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith and Lalo Schifrin learned and/or honed their craft in television before goin...

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.  Two centuries later a famous writer named Oli...

Our society has a technology problem. Many want to disconnect from screens but can't help themselves. These days we spend more time online than ever. Some turn to self-help-measures to limit their usage, yet repeatedly fail, while parents feel particularly powerless to help their children. Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies shows us a way out. Rather than blaming users, the book...

This engaging history overturns the conventional wisdom about the Second Amendment--showing that the right to bear arms was not about protecting liberty but about preserving slavery. In Madison's Militia, Carl Bogus illuminates why James Madison and the First Congress included the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights. Linking together dramatic accounts of slave uprisings and electric debates o...

This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled...

Chances are, you’ve heard this a lot lately. What might’ve once been a niche digital term has been legitimized in the discourse of presidents, politicians, and lawmakers.  But what really is cancel culture? Blacklisting celebrities? Censorship? Until now, this has been the general consensus in the media. But it’s time to raise the bar on our definition— to think of cancel culture less as scandal o...

This deep dive into the wonderful world of insects teaches us to love the tiny, seemingly terrifying creatures all around us. For many people, cockroaches are the most pesky of pests. Not so for entomologist Frank Nischk. In this funny and fascinating book, Frank reveals his love and admiration for so-called "nasty" creatures like cockroaches, crickets, and more. He shows us that even seemingly te...

Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As he dismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substitute their mathematical models for reality and eq...

With increased compression, every word, every sentence matters more. A writer must learn how to form narratives around caesuras and crevices instead of strings of connections, to move a story through the symbolic weight of images, to master the power of suggestion. With elegant prose, deep readings of other writers, and scaffolded writing exercises, The Art of Brevity takes the reader on a lyrical...

The Hidden Rules of Architecture: how to build world-class, award winning, creative, innovative, sustainable, livable and beautiful spaces that foster a sense of place and well being Leading architect Reinier de Graaf De Graaf punctures the myths behind the debates on what contemporary architecture is, with wit and devastating honesty. Architecture, it seems, has become too important to leave to a...

Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions: Our Universe, from the Quantum to the Cosmos  Co-authored with Geraint Lewis Do you ever look up to the stars and wonder about what is out there? Over the last few centuries, humans have successfully unraveled much of the language of the universe, exploring and defining formerly mysterious phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and m...

A short guide to living well by understanding better what you really value--and what to do when your goals conflict What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money--or work for justice? To run marathons--or sing in a choir? To have children--or travel the world? The things we care about in life--family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals--often conflict, preventing us from...

Martin Riker's poignant and startlingly original novel asks how to foster a brave mind in anxious times, following a newly jobless academic rehearsing a speech on John Maynard Keynes for a surprising audienceIn a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a d...

From the OR to the ICU, Dr. David Alfery brings you into a hidden world of medicine that has never before been seen. You will witness the exhilaration a physician feels when a life is miraculously saved, the terror when a life is on the line, the shock of an unexpected demise, the grace patients evidence when facing the end of life, the anguish one suffers when a family member is perilously close...

On Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill's apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal. Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case f...

A front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from a career maître d’hotel who manned the front of the room in New York City's hottest and most in-demand restaurants.  From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number w...