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How to Think, and What's Real
How to think and what is real, from Plato and Aristotle to Darwin and Deutsch, each argument walked one move at a time, the dissenters kept in.
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Power, Story, and Love
The human dramas: the Art of War on winning without fighting, the Odyssey on getting home, with power, story, and love still to come.
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What's Under a Twin Cities Street
a creek has been in a pipe under downtown Minneapolis since 1892. everything buried under Minneapolis and St. Paul: fiber, gas, power, storm drains, and the deep sewers in the sandstone, mapped layer by layer.
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Why We Can Never Predict the Weather
strip the sky down to nothing, then add the variables back one at a time and watch each one make the forecast exponentially harder. an impossible forecast, told as a scroll.
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Claude Recommends
i asked claude for the best music, movies, and tv in every genre and it named 2,269 of them. a searchable list, one line on each, with one-click apple music links and a way to load every song onto your phone at once.
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Do You Get Used to Everything?
you adapt almost completely to your senses, partly and on a schedule to your feelings, and unreliably to your life. a sourced field guide to habituation: what fades, what never does, and the one move you actually get, which is choosing what to get used to.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
a short, plain summary of stephen covey's the 7 habits of highly effective people. what each habit actually says, how the seven fit together, and the one idea underneath all of them.
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Star Signs, X-Rayed
a working natal-chart machine that takes itself apart. compute your real chart from real astronomy, then see exactly who decided each meaning, when, and whether any of it points at anything real.
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There's Nothing New Under the Sun
every age believes it is the strangest one. none ever is. a sourced, illustrated case that you feel with the same instrument as everyone who ever lived, that circumstance barely moves the inner life, and that the one lever you actually hold is the oldest piece of advice there is.
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Five Hundred Children, No Books
leave 500 children on an island for two hundred years with no religion handed down, no scripture and no holy books, and they will almost certainly build a faith of their own. not the same beliefs, the same underlying structure. laid out with the evidence, from child psychology to real castaways.
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Photography's Greatest Hits
a museum-sized tour of photography's greatest pictures: muybridge's flying horse as a working flipbook, migrant mother's erased thumb, the pillars of creation in a before-and-after slider, a mars selfie, the 3,200-megapixel rubin camera, the records, the hoaxes, and what jpeg quietly throws away. every image public domain or creative commons, every story sourced.
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The Number: Where Work Becomes Optional
there is a dollar amount above which your savings out-earn your spending forever and work becomes optional. the math behind the threshold, the climb from ordinary american debt, the tax mechanics on the far side, and every catch the brochure leaves out. sourced throughout.
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Sure Things: Eighteen Facts Nobody Can Prove
eighteen things we measure to impossible precision, or lean on every day, and still cannot explain or prove. a cinematic, sourced field guide from gravity and time to the placebo effect and the machines we built but do not understand.
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A Field Guide to Internet Chum
a field guide to internet chum: the mesmerizing little images in the 'around the web' grid, the brain machinery they are built to hook, and the money that pays for it.
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The First Year
a calm, exhaustively sourced field guide to a baby's first year: feeding, sleep, health, development, safety, and the parent. every claim cited, every chart on real data, and the places the experts disagree shown honestly.
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What's Actually on an MRI Disc
i asked for my mri on a disc and got 1,189 raw images. the 2d slices a radiologist scrolls through, then stacked back into a head and spine you can rotate in 3d.
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From the Machine to the Atom
a scroll down the whole scale of a computer chip, from the most complicated machine humans build to the single silicon atoms it arranges, in the highest resolution i could find. click any image to zoom.
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The Third Thing: After Genes and Upbringing, What's Left
we argue forever about how much of a person is their genes and how much is how they were raised. both answers leave out the part that is finally yours. a look at nature, nurture, and the self, through the lens of profoundly well trained service dogs.
