Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them BBC
Remains Of 1,800-Year-Old Library Discovered In Cologne
The walls of the structure, which dates to the second century, included niches for storing several thousand scrolls. Access to the ruins will be preserved when the construction project that unearthed them is complete
“In particular, [a new paper] proposes that certain literary exercises, like rewriting short stories that involve ethical dilemmas, can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face” than traditional medical ethics case studies do.
Think You Have A Book In You Yearning To Be Free? Naaah.
“A story may be things that happened, embellished for interest, but that’s not a book. Many stories don’t get good until the end. Some stories — true ones even — are hard to believe. Other stories are just too short, don’t have enough tension, or frankly aren’t that interesting. The stories we tell that enrapture our friends and families may be extraordinarily boring to those who don’t know us. Those stories are not a book.”
Publishing Revolution? More Brainy Books Are Finding Sales Success
We are turning away from glitzy but disposable stories of fame and excess and towards more serious, thoughtful, quiet books that help us understand our place in the world. Analysts at the Bookseller parsed data from Nielsen BookScan, and saw over the past five years a dramatic rise in the sales of “long-tail” nonfiction titles, often works on politics, economics, history or medicine that attempted to synthesise or challenge received thinking on the subject.
How Sydney's latte line is splitting the workforce
The imaginary line from the airport through Parramatta divides the city in more ways than just access to hipster coffee. But there is a solution to evening out the jobs in our city.
The New York Times – The Freshest Ideas Are in Small Grocery Stores
– “As big supermarkets struggle, a new crop of local groceries are
innovating to serve niche audiences and advance social causes…As referenced in this article via CivilEats, Zero-Waste Stores Ask Shoppers to Bring Their Own Everything – “When you’ve never bought a produce bag before, you kind of have to build that habit,” says [Celia Ristow, who co-founded the advocacy group Zero Waste Chicago.] “But then it becomes second nature.” After all, low-waste shopping is not a new concept—it’s what grocery shopping looked like 100 years ago…”
It's not just Sydney: The end of the global housing boom
From
London to Beijing to New York, house prices in some of the world’s most
sought-after cities are heading south. Here's a snapshot.
How superstition changes the way we make decisions
"The simple act of crossing one’s fingers or clutching a rabbit’s foot keychain flips loss aversion on its head. People become more risk-seeking in gains but more risk-averse when facing losses." (Kellogg School blog)
Why we choke under pressure (and how not to)
"We’ve shown perhaps counterintuitively that individuals who have the most ability to focus, the most working memory, the most fluid intelligence, are actually more prone to perform poorly under stress." (Freakonomics podcast)
How superstition changes the way we make decisions
"The simple act of crossing one’s fingers or clutching a rabbit’s foot keychain flips loss aversion on its head. People become more risk-seeking in gains but more risk-averse when facing losses." (Kellogg School blog)
Why we choke under pressure (and how not to)
"We’ve shown perhaps counterintuitively that individuals who have the most ability to focus, the most working memory, the most fluid intelligence, are actually more prone to perform poorly under stress." (Freakonomics podcast)
