Rating: 8.4/10. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure, 2nd Edition by Randy Allen Harris Book about a period in the history of linguistics around the 1960s-1970s, when a “war” was being fought in theoretical syntax. Linguistics tries to study how form is linked to meaning, but there are many theories about…
All Book Reviews
21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph
Rating: 7.4/10. 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality by Bob Joseph A fairly short book (main text is 100 pages) recommended by my manager, about Canadian-Indigenous relations while focusing on the Indian Act. Indigenous topics have been popular in the news recently…
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rating: 7.7/10. A romance novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author. The story is set in a coastal town in Colombia in the late 19th century. The novel starts with elderly doctor Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina Daza attending a funeral; Urbino falls off a ladder while reaching for his parrot and dies; immediately…
Running Lean by Ash Maurya
Rating: 8.0/10. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya Guide on early stages of a startup, recommended by Hussein Fazal (CEO of Snaptravel). Many new founders assume building a startup is the same as building a product, but in reality, you are building a business model, with the…
Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition by VanPatten, Smith, Benati
Rating: 8.1/10. Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction by Bill VanPatten, Megan Smith, and Alessandro G. Benati Linguistics textbook about second language acquisition, covering key questions such as: Does L2 acquisition use the same processes as L1? Is input or output more important? Can L2 learners become nativelike or is there a critical…
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
Rating: 7.8/10. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef A lot of psychological research has shown how we’re prone to cognitive biases, although less has been written about how to overcome them. Many of these biases result from deciding on some opinion and holding onto it, even…
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Rating: 8.3/10. One of the most influential philosophical essays by English philosopher John Stuart Mill, written in 1859 and espousing the values of individual freedom. It has since served as a foundational work for liberalism and many of its principles have been adopted into democratic societies. Mill argues that society tends to force the preferences…
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
Rating: 7.8/10. Book about the creation and growth of Instagram, one of the largest social networks based on photo sharing. Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010. Systrom had an interest in photography and wanted to appeal to users’ desire to look good, so the app provided filters that improved low-quality…
Shadows on the Rock by Willie Cather
Rating: 8.2/10. Historical novel set in Quebec City in the year 1697, when the settlement was just a small town on the frontier. The story follows Cecile, a 12-year-old girl whose father is the apothecary (similar to a doctor). Not much plot happens, rather, the novel is based on characters: we get to hear stories…
How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene
Rating: 8.1/10. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now by Stanislas Dehaene Book by neuroscience researcher about human learning. A lot of cognition is taken for granted until we try to train AI to do it, then it becomes apparent how difficult it actually is. AI still has a long…
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Rating: 7.9/10. Autobiographical memoir by Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who lived through many important historical events in the first half of the 20th century. This book was written shortly before he committed suicide in 1942, feeling that Europe had declined irrecoverably and after living through two endless wars. The memoir starts with the author’s childhood…
The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
Rating: 8.0/10. Business book that teaches you the basic mental models you need to run a business. The author argues that MBA programs are overpriced and teach you outdated and over-specialized knowledge that’s irrelevant to most businesses, and building good mental models is more useful practically. The book is organized as short sections of advice…