Just like how humans recognise faces, bees are born with an innate ability to find and remember flowers The Conversation
Mammoths Lost Their Steppe Habitat to Climate Change The Wire
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.”
The New York Times – Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell – “No artist has explored the contradictions of humanity as sympathetically and critically as the Japanese animation legend. Now, at 80, he’s coming out of retirement with another movie.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Study shows possible bias, ‘nepotistic behavior’ in some science journals.
Related: We’re told to ‘follow the science’ — yet some of it is just plain wrong.
1. Dezeen 2021 architecture awards. Guess which countries are winning the most?
2. The power of rank information.
3. New Miyazaki movie coming (NYT).
4. Why does R vary so much in pandemics?
5. Are the logistics of these anti-virals really going to work out?
Stunning, Ultra-HD Short Films of National Parks
Kottke.org: “For the past 5 years, More Than Just Parks, an organization established by two self-professed “National Park nuts”, have been making short films about America’s National Parks and Forests. Each ultra-HD video is only 3-4 minutes long, extended trailers for the beauty and grandeur of parks like Zion, Grand Teton, and the Badlands and forests like Black Hills, Green Mountains, and Bridger Teton. You can check out all of the videos on their YouTube channel.”
Book Review: Gabe Brown’s “Dirt to Soil”
“From Dirt to Soil” is well worth a read — and very hopeful, a good thing these days
Just Because You Don’t Believe in Conspiracy Theories Doesn’t Mean You’re Always Right New York Times
Albrecht Dürer was a 16th-century Andy WarholThe Spectator
Strange Rumblings: The Prickly but Productive Friendship Between Hunter Thompson and Oscar Acosta Los Angeles Review of Books
Just as with planetary or molecular systems, mathematical laws can be found that accurately describe and allow for predictions in chaotically dynamic ecosystems too – at least, if we zoom out enough.
What an incredible year for non-fiction books! But let me first start with two picks from 2020, buried under the avalanche of Covid news then, and missed because I was less mobile than usual. These books are not only good enough to make this list, but in just about any year they are good enough to be the very best book of that year:
Edward Nelson, Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972, volumes one and two.
Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History.
Also noteworthy is Reviel Netz, Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture, which I hope to write more about.
Per usual, there is typically a short review behind each, though not quite always. As for 2021 proper, here were my favorites, noting that I do not impose any quota system whatsoever. (And yet this list is somehow more cosmopolitan than most such tallies…hmm…) I don’t quite know how to put this, but this list is much better than the other “best books of the year” lists. These are truly my picks, ranked roughly in the order I read them:
Jin Xu, Empire of Silver: A New Monetary History of China.
Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads.
Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad.
Ryan Bourne, Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning Through Covid-19.
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Amazon.
Ivan Gibbons, Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided.
Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Alan Taylor, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850.
William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, brief discussion of it here.
Roderick Matthews, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India.
Alejandro Ruiz, Carla Altesor, et.al., The Food of Oaxaca: Recipes and Stories from Mexico’s Culinary Capital.
Tomas Mandl, Modern Paraguay: South America’s Best Kept Secret.
Kara Walker, A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs To Be.
Tony Saich, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party.
Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present.
Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography.
John B. Thompson, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution.
Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy.
Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism.
McCartney, Paul. The Lyrics. A remarkably high quality production, again showing McCartney’s skill as manager and entrepreneur. Perhaps the biggest revelation is when Paul insists that if not for the Beatles he would have been an English teacher. He also claims that he and not John was the big reader in The Beatles. It is also striking, but not surprising, when explaining his lyrics how many times he mentions his mother, who passed away when Paul was fourteen. There is a good David Hajdu NYT review here.
Bob Spitz, Led Zeppelin: The Biography. They always end up being better than you think they possibly could be, and this is the best and most serious book about them.
gestalten, Beauty and the East: New Chinese Architecture. Self-recommending…
Is there a “best book” of 2021? The categories are hard to compare. Maybe the seven volumes of Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa? But is it fair they get seven volumes in this competition? The McCartney? (He took two volumes.) The Pessoa biography? Roderick Matthews on India? So much to choose from! And apologies to all those I have forgotten or neglected…