Cav > Books: Read‎ (934)

"...I will explore questions you probably never knew you wanted answers to: How did hamburgers soaked in blood and formaldehyde save the cattle industry? What do honeybees have to do with your search engine? And why would you dress a termite in a cape? Many of the discoveries I’ll discuss have already led to tangible applications. Some of them haven’t yet. Others might never have an application. And that is exactly the point—we can’t predict the future.
Science is not tidy. It’s not neat, and it’s not linear, despite what we learned in school. At times, it begins with an odd observation, sparking a trail of curiosity that leads deep into uncharted territories. Inspiration may strike as we study nature’s finely tuned mechanisms or when we are driven to rethink and reinvent established ideas. Occasionally, fortune smiles, presenting a golden opportunity out of the blue. The recipe for scientific breakthroughs often includes all these elements and even more."

"As an animal physiologist, I work in the world of basic research. This branch of science is driven by curiosity and the observation of nature, not by immediate demands for application. Though a product isn’t the end goal, amazing applications have stemmed from basic discoveries in this field.
Take, for example, the invention of Geckskin, a reusable, glue-free adhesive that can hold up to 700 pounds on a smooth, vertical surface. This product came from decades of research on the anatomy and mechanics of gecko toepads. These scientists weren’t trying to figure out how to build a super sticker; they simply wanted to know how geckos can walk upside down.
Through basic research, biologists discovered that gecko toepads are covered in millions of tiny hairs that create a strong adhesive force, but hundreds of studies were performed before a product was ever conceived, created, and sold."

"..I acknowledge that there are complexities around whether and when we should consider some conditions as “dysfunction” as opposed to a type of neurodiversity that society has wrongly become intolerant to—cases of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression are all examples. That said, for each of these conditions, a subset of diagnosed individuals suffer in ways that can benefit from treatment. For those individuals, when our existing treatments fall short, we need better ways to help them. With this empathetic spirit, I use the terms “dysfunction” and “disorder” to refer to the conditions of individuals who need better solutions than the ones we can offer them today."

"I am a neuroscientist, and I have been engaged in brain research for over two decades. For a long time, I’ve been convinced that I have the best of all possible jobs: I get paid to think up new questions about how the brain works and answer them. A large part of what inspires my research is my intense curiosity about how the brain gives rise to the mind, and to ourselves. To answer these questions, I focus on memory. I investigate questions like: When we have the experience of remembering that we’ve seen something before, what is happening in our brains? How do our brains manage to remember so much? And how do our brains curate what we remember and forget?
My work is not driven just by curiosity; I believe that a foundational understanding of how memory works will contribute to future treatments and cures for memory dysfunction, including age-related dementias such as Alzheimer’s. In fact, part of my research program focuses on transforming what we’ve learned about memory into the earliest stages of developing a new treatment for memory impairment. Ours is but one example of what is known as the bench to bedside approach, where fundamental research discoveries are the first step toward developing new clinical treatments."

"Hands down, the most profound and important insight I’ve had while writing this book is that the end goal of treating brain dysfunction amounts to one of the most formidable of all possible challenges: controlling a complex system. Not in the creepy or cartoonish sense of “mind control,” but in the sense that treatments require shifting the brain from an unhealthy to a healthier state. This challenge is so formidable that there are questions about whether it can even be done in principle (much less in practice). The answer depends on exactly what type of complex system we’re dealing with.
To illustrate, let’s look at what happened when we tried to control another complex system: the weather. Today, we don’t try to influence the paths of hurricanes. Why not? It’s not because we haven’t tried. Often forgotten about the history of weather research is that we did try, only to realize that it probably won’t work. Thus, we need to ask ourselves: What makes us think that the brain will be any different? After all, an epileptic seizure or psychosis might be likened to a tornado or a hurricane insofar as it’s a complex system gone awry. Under what conditions can we effectively control a complex system?"

"..I believe we are at the beginning of a similar revolution. We are realizing that humans are not the only beings with sophisticated minds.
Demonstrations of cognitive and emotional sophistication are all around us, even in the most unexpected characters. This monumental shift in perspective provides a radically new understanding of diverse animal minds, not only helping to reshape the way we think about animals, such as the octopus, but also the way we treat them.
The more we reveal the octopus’s secrets, the more empathy and compassion we can feel, which in turn fuels a need to protect these enigmatic critters and their fragile ecosystems. Secrets of the Octopus is the perfect guide through this transformative journey."

"The light-sensitive cells in the octopus retina contain only one pigment. Ours have three; dogs, two. Researchers believe that octopuses must use entirely different systems from our own to perceive and match the colors of their complex world. Octopuses’ electric skin, along with the chromatophores and the nerves erecting the papilla, contain proteins normally found in eyes. In 2015, evolutionary biologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working with patches of skin harvested from California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides), reported that the skin is sensitive to light and can detect changes in brightness. In other words, octopuses may be able to feel light—or see with their skin."

"...I had the good fortune of attending graduate school at a time when new noninvasive brain imaging methods had just become available, providing a golden opportunity to address big anthropological questions with the methods of modern neuroscience. After subsequent postdoctoral training in neuroimaging, I began investigating the neural basis of human behavioral specializations such as cooperation and language. Sometime later, it occurred to me that paternal caregiving was also a human specialization and a neglected and worthy topic of investigation. Spurred on by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, I redirected my research focus to investigating the biology of fatherhood. In the midst of that Templeton grant, my wife gave birth to our first child, a delightfully plump boy named Toby. Raising him while researching and learning about fatherhood presented me with a remarkable opportunity for my home life to inform my research and vice versa. My daughter Mia was born five years later and provided a whole new set of lessons that helped to shape my knowledge of fatherhood beyond the mere academic. They are now twelve and six years old, and I feel I have learned enough about fatherhood over those twelve years, both at home and at work, to have some useful knowledge to pass on to others. This book is my effort to do so."

"Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-tung all shared at least one thing in common: they hated their fathers. All three men had abusive and strongly authoritarian fathers. Mao Tse-tung’s father beat him when he did not work hard enough. When Mao later took merciless revenge on his political enemies, he told the men who were torturing them that he would like to have seen his father treated similarly.1 Joseph Stalin bitterly resented his father, a violent alcoholic who beat him severely.2 Hitler’s father ruled the family “with tyrannical severity and injustice,” and he viewed him as the enemy.3 Remarkably, all three seemed to have loved their mothers, and at least Hitler and Mao saw themselves in alliance with their mother against their father.4
It would be foolish to conclude that these fathers were responsible for the devastation and suffering their sons unleashed on the world. Most people who were abused by their fathers as children do not become tormenters, and some even thrive. There are surely a host of genetic, environmental, historical, and sociopolitical factors that collectively conspired to produce these horrific developmental outcomes. Yet we can still ask how things might have been different if each of these men had been raised instead by a warm, nurturing father who provided strong moral guidance and set appropriate limits without harsh discipline."

"...These elements indeed include things like moral values and the economic value of an option, but they also include the consequences of your past choices, your mood, the opinions of the people around you, and so much more. A reward can be money, but it can also be friendship. It can be seeing something good happen in the world for others, achieving a small goal, or having enough energy and strength to finally run a marathon. There are many things that our brains value, many ways our brains can find reward—but as we find ourselves making the same choices again and again, it doesn’t always feel that way. Getting takeout trumps saving for retirement; hitting deadlines trumps professional development; the Internet vortex trumps spending time with the people we love. In this way, the choices the brain hands down don’t always align with what we might explicitly think of as the thing we value most."

"We found that if parts of a person’s value system, like a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex, ramped up their activity when they saw a message about sunscreen or smoking or exercise, they were more likely to change their behavior to conform to the message—regardless of whether
they said they consciously thought the message was effective. This offered our first glimpse of how the value system was linked to relatively highstakes, real-life choices outside the lab. A plethora of other studies, by my team and others, have shown similar findings when people are deciding what to eat, what to buy, how much to save for retirement, and more.
At first we were only looking to see if activity in the brain correlated with the choices people made outside the lab. Once we saw that it did, we asked: How can we use this to help facilitate change? I believed that the answer was to somehow ramp up activity in the system, but it would take more than a decade of research to understand how.
During that time, in experiments ranging from giving people feedback about their peers’ experiences, to helping them connect with their core values as a way of becoming more open to change, to comparing how the value system responds to immediate rewards versus those that lie in the more distant future, my team and others saw how simple interventions could dial value system activity up or down, which could ultimately help someone change their behavior. We discovered how changing where people put their attention—on different past experiences, current needs, or dreams for the future—changes the value calculation. This research also made it clear that activity in the value system captures something that goes beyond people’s initial instincts about what they’ll do next and can sometimes help explain the discrepancy we observed between what people say they will do and what they actually do."

"...They’re coming from scholars, policy research institutes, journalists, and commentators, and they stem from two convictions: One is that the present world order, led by the United States and the West, has by and large been a good thing, preventing major wars and allowing for international trade, economic growth, and a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. Two is that the rise of the non-Western nations and the emergence of an alternative to the familiar American-led world order will be frightening, unpredictable, and almost surely a change for the worse. For the West at least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a stark warning about the dangers of the breakdown of the American-led world order and its replacement with a kind of Putinesque law of the jungle, a breakdown aided and abetted by an ever more powerful China."

"Would the end of US and Western dominance really be so bad?
In this book, I argue, contrary to much elite opinion, that it need not be, especially over the long run. This is not because the West’s fears about the rise of non-Western powers, including China and Russia, are always exaggerated, although sometimes they are, due to the loss of power and prestige. But it is because Western supremacy has itself contributed to plenty of instability, injustice, and disorder that might be eased by its decline. More importantly, centuries of dominance have led the West to a kind of arrogance and ignorance about the rest of the world, overlooking the ideas and contributions of other civilizations to stability and progress throughout history. We have forgotten that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West, and that many of the ideas we assume are Western inventions actually originated in other civilizations. Mechanisms and values that are central to world order—such as diplomacy, economic interdependence, freedom of seas, principles for the protection of people in war and peace, preservation of the environment, and cooperation among major powers, to name a few—emerged over millennia across the globe."

"In this book, we will shed light on seven key barriers to social connection —each corresponding to a different chapter—and offer research-based strategies for removing them. Some of these strategies might seem obvious (although we suspect that they are often easier to understand than they are to execute), but others might surprise you. (For example, did you know that meditating can help you feel more socially connected, even when you’re doing it alone?) The strategies in the book can help you live a more connected life, and they might also help you live a longer life. As we’ll see, research shows that your feelings of connection are a significant predictor of how long you’ll live!"

"...That wasn’t an isolated incident. I often had moments like these, in which I snatched dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness.
My life, after all, is and was objectively excellent: I have a solid relationship, an interesting job, and a stable place to live. But neuroticism kept me from enjoying this bounty, and it meant that when some calamity—unemployment, a health scare—did inevitably strike, I crumbled more quickly than most. My personality blinded me to the ways I could expand my life and make it even better, or even just appreciate my good fortune.
In addition to neuroticism, personality consists of four other “factors,” or traits: extroversion (which is basically sociability); agreeableness (or niceness); openness to experience (vaguely, creativity); and conscientiousness (or orderliness). Together, your levels of these five traits predict how you’ll respond to various situations—like, say, if you’ll relish your special photo shoot in a tropical paradise or have a cosmic breakdown.
I had always felt unusually neurotic, introverted, and disagreeable. Over time, I stuck those labels to myself proudly, and I mostly lived by them, even when doing so made me miserable. I avoided anything that didn’t suit my personality perfectly..."

"...But when the noise finally stops, you do your best to return to sleep, get back to your work, or resume your conversation. Your mind moves on to more important matters—at least until the next interruption.
This is the noise paradox. Sounds can trigger a visceral, even furious response from us in the moment but barely a shrug when that moment passes. When noise isn’t in our ears, we usually don’t consider it something to take seriously.
Overshadowed by other priorities, noise remains a problem regretted in hindsight rather than properly anticipated. Countless corporations have renounced walls and privacy partitions for a collaboration boost that often goes bust, while propelling noise to the top of the list of workplace complaints. Restaurateurs eager for a modern look strip away every scrap of soft sound-absorbing material, plop kitchens into dining areas, and pump up the music until patrons must shout to be heard. Hospitals have amassed an array of patient monitors emitting alarm sounds that overload wards with frenzied beeps, freaking out patients and exhausting clinicians. Architects often treat acoustics as an afterthought, except in special cases such as concert halls, and urban designers typically consider sound only as far as regulations require."

"The harms of this sonic neglect have been habitually undersold. Noise is pigeonholed as a nuisance or personal grievance, despite increasingly robust evidence that it’s a serious and growing threat to public health. About 12 percent of American children and 17 percent of adults have permanent hearing damage from excessive noise—a loss that not only impoverishes our acoustic experiences but severs our connection to others. Hearing damage raises the risk of depression and dementia in older adults and can delay speech and language development in the very young."

"This book is an effort to answer those questions and more. It charts the rise of Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, tracing their origins from Russia’s reentry into the global economy after the Soviet Union’s collapse to the group’s implosion in 2023. Along the way, the narrative touches on the lives of the intrepid journalists, activists, information brokers, dissidents, and detectives who sought to expose the hidden tentacles of Russia’s unconventional warfare tactics and in so doing exposed the Wagner Group enterprise.
The chronicle that follows is an attempt to contextualize and explain how the merger of interests among Kremlin-connected power brokers, the castoffs of Russia’s war machine, and the foot soldiers of the country’s shadow economy forged a private army into a global juggernaut that for a moment in the summer of 2023 brought Putin’s tyrannical regime to a standstill. Putin’s reinvention of Russian power and his push for a new balance where multiple nations, including Russia, could pursue their interests unchecked by the constraints of international law was more than just a strategic pivot; it was a theatrical production with Prigozhin as its unsmiling stage manager. Or, at least, that is how Prigozhin seemed to imagine himself."

"...Instead, destiny pointed him in a different direction, first to a prison cell as a petty criminal, then hustling in the emerging capitalist markets of Russia, then into the ranks of Russia’s ultrarich, and ultimately to serve at the elbow of the country’s most powerful man. The code for deciphering his ascent to the inner circle of Russian power lies in the epochal whirl that gripped his hometown before it fully reclaimed its imperial moniker, St. Petersburg, and after the Soviet Union collapsed into memory in 1991."

"...one that regarded the well-being of what many would consider to be the ultimate concern for all people and cultures: their children. But if we take it as a given that societies, particularly those similar to our own, value children as we purport to, why was the response in American schools during the pandemic so different from that of so many nations in Europe?"

"In the span of one week in March 2020, the entire school system in America shut down. The academic year for more than 50 million students was over, blasting a hole in the calendar three months wide. 480,000 school buses, which until the week before had been carrying 23 million children each day, were parked neatly in rows on untold acres of asphalt lots. Cafeterias, which served 20 million free lunches to students each day, shuttered.
Monkey bars and jungle gyms glinted silently under the spring sun, while beds of protective wood chips lay still beneath them in 100,000 abandoned school playgrounds. A master switch had been flipped by the governors of every state in the union in scattershot choreography, a vast, unrehearsed exercise of authority."

"For the better portion of a decade before becoming a journalist I worked for Condé Nast and other publishers as a magazine fact-checker, ultimately running the research department at an ill-fated glossy. In part from my training and experience in that role, and in part because of my disposition, I’ve long held most things I’m told to be suspect until proven otherwise. As a fact-checker I was taught that news articles, websites, conventional wisdom, even quotes from interviewees are often insufficient evidence behind a claim. You must always try to get to the primary source, digging further and further down. Time and again, something that seemed true turned out not to be so. This mindset has stayed with me as a journalist and in life generally. And it informed my motivation to get to the bottom of the pandemic policies regarding schools."

"There is perhaps no more perfect evidence that the society-wide mitigation measures were doomed to fail than the authors and directors of this guidance themselves. Neil Ferguson, the famed Imperial College modeler, argued vigorously for the necessity of society-wide social distancing. Yet he got busted for trysts with a married woman who left her family to visit him at least twice during British lockdowns in March and April 2020. He resigned from his government advisory role after the scandal broke. On the day after Thanksgiving 2020, Deborah Birx traveled to one of her vacation homes, where she congregated with three generations of her family from two different households. That month Birx had warned that the US was entering the deadliest phase of the pandemic, and urged the public in countless media appearances to not gather with extended family for the holidays.
The public rightfully was infuriated at Birx’s and Ferguson’s hypocrisy. But the bigger point is that their own behavior simply proved that the models, and the guidance based on them, were never going to work as expected. There is a reason why the mitigations they so adamantly championed are, at best, temporizing measures. The architects of the lockdowns themselves couldn’t adhere to them. Ferguson didn’t even make it past March before breaking the rules. Humans, in real life, do not operate according to models. They get bored, they get frustrated, they get lonely. We are social creatures. Unless people are welded inside their homes, eventually most of them are going to come out."

"...I was searching for the tools to develop an inner life—an inner fortitude that would serve me until the end. This wisdom would guide my intuition, how I treated people, how I navigated the world and how I coped with it all: disappointment and loss, joy and abundance. But it would work inwards too—creating meaning and a map, orienting a moral compass, and creating the ability to be calm and courageous during times of global chaos and in a chaotic personal life.
By happenstance (more of that later) I found the wisdom I’d been searching for, deep in the past, in the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of Stoicism.
The Stoics, always useful, seemed even more necessary in March 2020. They whispered from the past: ‘We’re here, we’re here . . . we’ve always been here.’
And so into the past I went. I found a time not unlike our own— full of chaos, war, plagues, pestilence, treachery, corruption, anxiety, overindulgence and fear of a climate apocalypse. Those times were populated by people questing for the answers that we crave today. In ancient Stoicism I found people, just like us, longing to find meaning and connection, to feel whole and tranquil, to love and be loved, to have a harmonious family life, fulfilling and meaningful work, intimate and nourishing friendships, a sense of contributing to your community, belonging to something greater than yourself, a wonder at the natural world, flashes of deep awe, a head full of questions
about how it all came to be, and, finally, coming to terms with letting it all go—at some point, not of your choosing."

"...‘Memento mori,’ the slave whispered into the general’s ear: ‘Remember you will die.’
The idea is to habituate yourself to thoughts of your own mortality. You can’t begin to properly contemplate death if you live in constant terror of it. By reminding ourselves regularly that we will die, we sharply bring into focus the one thing that really matters: the present moment—the time that we have. When we realise that our moments are slipping away with unceasing constancy, we come to realise how short life actually is."

"...These causes are located in three places: your world, your body, and your mind.
When you combine the causes and the places, there are nine ways to make your life better.
All of these are important, but growing resources in the mind has a unique power. It offers the greatest opportunity, since you usually have more influence over your mind than over your body or world. It also offers the greatest impact, since you take your mind with you wherever you go.
You can’t always count on the world, other people, or even your own body. But you can count on durable inner strengths hardwired into your nervous system—and this book is about growing them."

"...Here, I’d like to share my wonder at being alive at this extraordinary time on Earth. Four billion years of evolution on this planet have brought us to the brink of a new era: just decades since we first went to space, it won’t be much longer before we’re building new worlds beyond home."

"Looking at the oldest light tells us not just about when the Universe came into existence, but also about the earliest matter: after 380,000 years the Universe consisted of mostly hydrogen and some helium atoms. In fact, the Big Bang is the only process we know of that produces hydrogen in significant amounts in space. Therefore, the water molecules making up more than half of your body contain hydrogen atoms (constituting around a tenth of your mass) that are almost 14 billion years old!
Though the beginning of the Universe may feel so very far away, there is something magical in the knowledge that we are all bathed in faint, ancient light from the beginning of time. That within each of us lives the entire history of our Universe."

"All of us have an abundant microscopic menagerie, collectively known as the microbiota or microbiome.1 They live on our surface, inside our bodies, and sometimes inside our very cells. The vast majority of them are bacteria, but there are also other tiny organisms including fungi (such as yeasts) and archaea, a mysterious group that we will meet again later. There are viruses too, in unfathomable numbers – a “virome” that infects all the other microbes and occasionally the host’s cells. We can’t see any of these minuscule specks. But if our own cells were to mysteriously disappear, they would perhaps be detectable as a ghostly microbial shimmer, outlining a now-vanished animal core."

"This book will open the door fully. We are going to explore the incredible universe that exists within our bodies. We’ll learn about the origins of our alliances with microbes, the counter-intuitive ways in which they sculpt our bodies and shape our everyday lives, and the tricks we use for keeping them in line and ensuring a cordial partnership. We’ll look at how we inadvertently disrupt these partnerships and, in doing so, jeopardise our health. We’ll see how we might reverse these problems by manipulating the microbiome for our benefit. And we’ll hear the stories of the gleeful, imaginative, driven scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding the microbial world, often in the face of scorn, dismissal, and failure."

"...It can be weird to consider existences that play out in an intestine or in a single cell, or to think about our body parts as rolling landscapes. And yet, they assuredly are. The Earth contains a variety of different ecosystems: rainforests, grasslands, coral reefs, deserts, salt marshes, each with its own particular community of species. But a single animal is full of ecosystems too. Skin, mouth, guts, genitals, any organ that connects with the outside world: each has its own characteristic community of microbes.4 All of the concepts that ecologists use to describe the continental-scale ecosystems that we see through satellites also apply to ecosystems in our bodies that we peer at with microscopes. We can talk about the diversity of microbial species. We can draw food webs, where different organisms eat and feed each other. We can single out keystone microbes that exert a disproportionate influence on their environment – the equivalents of sea otters or wolves. We can treat disease-causing microbes – pathogens – as invasive creatures, like cane toads or fire ants. We can compare the gut of a person with inflammatory bowel disease to a dying coral reef or a fallow field: a battered ecosystem where the balance of organisms has gone awry."

"It’s commonly said that the average person contains ten microbial cells for every human one, making us rounding errors in our own bodies. But this 10-to-1 ratio, which shows up in books, magazines, TED talks, and virtually every scientific review on this topic, is a wild guess, based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation that became unfortunately enshrined as fact.7 The latest estimates suggest that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones – a roughly even split. Even these numbers are inexact, but that does not really matter: by any reckoning, we contain multitudes."

"Imagine we’re ten, twenty, maybe thirty years into the future. You see a doctor. You’ve been feeling anxious, so she prescribes a bacterium that’s been shown to affect the nervous system and repress anxiety. Your cholesterol is a little high, so she adds another microbe that makes and secretes a cholesterol-lowering chemical. The levels of secondary bile acids in your gut are unusually low, leaving you vulnerable to a C-diff infection – best to include a strain that produces these acids. Your urine contains molecules that are signs of inflammation, and since you also have a genetic predisposition to IBD, she adds a bug that releases anti-inflammatory molecules. She chooses these species not just for what they can do, but because she predicts that they will interact well with your immune system and your existing microbiome. She also adds a supporting cast of other bacteria chosen to prop up the therapeutic core, and she suggests some dietary plans that will nourish them effectively. And off you go, with a bespoke probiotic pill – a treatment designed to improve not just any old microbial ecosystem but yours in particular. As microbiologist Patrice Cani told me, “The future will be à la carte.”

"...The biologist and biomechanics pioneer Steven Vogel wrote that “muscle has been our sole engine for most of our time on earth.” He pointed out that whether it’s the tiniest flea or the largest whale, what moves and propels creatures great and small is, well, “the same stuff.” Evidence of animals first flexing their muscles dates back 560 million years, to a recently discovered fossil of a cnidarian, an animal phylum that includes modern jellyfish, corals, and sea anemones. It has bundles of muscle fibers arranged in radial symmetry.
When we talk about what moves us as human beings—if you really want to get down to the heart of things, the meat of it, figuratively—it’s muscle, literally. Strongest and biggest muscles? In your heart and your jaw, and in your butt. (We’ll talk more about that later.) Smallest and weirdest?
In your ear is the stapedius, just one millimeter long, controlling the vibrations of the stapes, a.k.a. the stirrup, the smallest bone in the body. And perhaps there are muscles you’ve never heard of, teeny ones in funny places —like the arrector pili, the little muscle fibers that give you goose bumps. Maybe you have them now, just picturing them."

"This book is an invitation to explore the many ways that muscle is the vivid engine of our lives. Note that this is not an anatomy textbook; nor is it a guide to working out. What you will find, though, are stories about the stuff that moves us and why it matters.
When I reflect on why I wanted to write a book about muscle, I realize that a lot of it has to do with a longing for my dad. I found myself wanting to write about things I can talk to him about. To go deeper into the muscle inquiry and pull him back into my orbit. To recover some sense of that closeness we once had."

"...It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known.
At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.
Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow. He does not always win, but when he does, he wins big: his early, all-in bet on AI was one of the best investments in Silicon Valley history. Huang’s company, Nvidia, is today worth more than $3 trillion, rivaling both Apple and Microsoft in value."

"I found Huang to be an elusive subject, in some ways the most difficult I’ve ever reported on. He hates talking about himself and once responded to one of my questions by physically running away. Before this book was commissioned, I had written a magazine profile of Huang for The New Yorker. Huang told me he hadn’t read it, and had no intention of ever doing so. Informed that I was writing a biography of him, he responded, “I hope I die before it comes out.”

"Relevance, robustness and range are three strong reasons for applying behavioural science in your business. However, knowing you should apply behavioural science and actually applying behavioural science are different things.
When there is such a variety of biases, it can be hard to know where to start. This book aims to address that hurdle. Rather than race through a bewildering range of biases, I’ve selected the most pertinent: 16½ ideas that can both be applied easily and have the potential to make a large impact on marketing."

"...The morning of October 7, 2023, was just such a moment. That morning air-raid sirens went off all across Israel. This was no unusual thing in itself.
Certainly not in the south of the country that had for seventeen years been within rocket range of Hamas. Nor in the north of the country into which Hezbollah had fired rockets since the 1980s. But in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the sirens sounded too. People woke up that Saturday morning to the realization that something very unusual was happening."

"By late in the day on October 7, it was already clear that these acts included burning people alive, shooting innocent people, cutting off people’s heads, and raping men and women. Sometimes before killing them. Sometimes after.
Israel is a country with a population of just 9 million people. America is a country of some 333 million people. To put it in perspective, the death toll on October 7 was the equivalent of some 44,400 Americans being killed by terrorists on a single day. Or around fifteen 9/11s. The kidnap toll if it had happened by ratio in the US would have been almost 10,000 Americans taken from their homes as hostages. It would be the equivalent of some 5,000 Canadians being killed in a single day and a thousand taken hostage.
Or 8,400 French or British people being slaughtered in a single day and another 1,750 taken hostage..."

"Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than “Sieg heil” is a phrase that simply means “Hail victory.” Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an “intifada” against the Jewish state. The First Intifada (1987–93) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005) were among the bloodiest periods in Israel’s history. During those periods Israelis could not board a bus without wondering whether a Palestinian terrorist was going to detonate a suicide vest and turn the vehicle into a charnel house. Terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis for years. They often targeted people of the same age as those who spent the aftermath of October 7 calling for just such a thing."

"...That early period of Western anti-Zionism is important for many reasons. One is the light it shines on what has happened in much of the West since October 7. But perhaps the best way to understand it is to go back to postwar Germany and the generation that grew up after 1945...
...the generation that grew up in Germany after World War II had pretty much only one guiding political principle by which to orient themselves. Essentially that was Don’t be Nazis. Don’t be like our parents’ generation...
...The German left that grew up in the 1950s and ’60s assumed that they were going to be able to hold fast to this principle. They were of the left, after all...
...the most interesting development was the movement’s adoption of the Palestinian cause. In the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel, something crucial shifted in the international left’s attitudes toward the Jewish state. From 1948 until 1967, Israel had broad sympathy and support from the international left. In part this was because of the leftist origins of the state itself including the kibbutznik movement. Time spent working on a kibbutz in Israel was almost a rite of passage for leftists in those days...
...Leftists supported Israel for a number of reasons, but one that has often been a baseline of leftwing politics was support for the perceived underdog. From 1948 to 1967, Israel was the plucky underdog in the Middle East. Its neighbors had attempted to wipe it out but the Israelis had seen them off.
Then in 1967, and even more so in 1973, something changed. If Israel had been David up until this moment, a number of its supporters now saw it as having transformed into Goliath. The fact that Israel was still a tiny country with a tiny population in comparison with its neighbors was not the point. It now came to be seen by many as the overdog.
The change came about in part because Israel had won those two wars with relative ease...
...At the same time the idea grew that the Arabs who lived in Israel were not to be referred to as Arabs, like their brothers and sisters in Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, but rather as “Palestinians” with a unique and long recognized identity of their own. With the turning of the Arabs into Palestinians it was now the Palestinians who were the beleaguered minority and the Israelis who were seen as the oppressive majority. So the Palestinians became the new Jews, with the Jews becoming the imperialist, brutish overlords..."

"Inside Gaza I visited the tunnels that Hamas had constructed during their eighteen years in power. One was a tunnel that had an opening within walking distance of the Erez crossing. It had been constructed by Sinwar’s brother and had become famous, in its own way, because of footage showing Sinwar himself traveling along the tunnel in a military vehicle.
When people think of a tunnel network many think of small scurry-holes. In fact, besides being longer than the entire London Underground, the network was also much more elaborate. In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas spent its years in power constructing over 350 miles of tunnels, with around 6,000 different tunnel entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilian houses, mosques, hospitals, and other nonmilitary buildings. Like storing weapons in such places, this is a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which are meant to preclude an army hiding military infrastructure in civilian buildings. Doing such a thing obviously puts civilians at risk. But this was one of Hamas’s tools of war. Where most countries would seek to protect its civilians, Hamas always had a stated aim of using them as human shields. They knew that no country would be able to tolerate the buildup of rockets and other military infrastructure to be used against it, but they also knew that whenever Israel targeted a “civilian” facility in which Hamas had put its infrastructure, the world would condemn Israel."

"An American by birth, Major “Y” went to Israel immediately after the 7th to use his expertise. What he had seen in the months since the IDF went into Gaza had shocked even him. Stories that had already emerged in the international press about Hamas explosives being found smuggled inside children’s toys were just the start. By two months into the war his estimate was that somewhere between every two to every three civilian homes in Gaza had military weapons, including AK-47s, grenades, and rocket launchers, or tunnel entrances in them. From very early in the conflict he and his team had worked out where to search whenever they entered a civilian house. If they were looking for weapons, rockets, or tunnel entrances they no longer searched the main rooms, the kitchens, or the parents’ bedroom. They now went straight to the children’s bedrooms, since that was where tunnel entrances and weapons were generally located— including under kids’ cots. While Israeli families built safe rooms to protect their children from rockets, these Gazan families actually used their families to protect their rockets..."