Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe (1969; NYRB Classics, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture, Virginia Savage McAlester (Knopf, 2013). One January a few years ago, I decided to learn about gardening. January, it turns out, is the perfect time to do this, because the ground is frozen and there’s no way you can be expected to actually| www.thepsmiths.com
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, Claire Hughes Johnson (Stripe Press, 2023).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, Bernard Yack (Princeton University Press, 1986). This is a book by Bernard Yack. Who is Bernard Yack? Yack is fun, because for a mild-mannered liberal Canadian political theorist he’s dropped some dank truth-bombs over the years. For example, check out his short and punchy 2001 journal article “| www.thepsmiths.com
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy, and Lose Weight, Herman Pontzer (Avery, 2022). Compare these two covers. The one on the left, with the cover design that says “this is pop science to shelve with your Malcolm Gladwell,”| www.thepsmiths.com
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian: The Original Adventures of the Greatest Sword and Sorcery Hero of All Time!, Robert E. Howard (ed. Patrice Louinet, Del Ray, 2003). Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haire...| www.thepsmiths.com
James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”| ribbonfarm