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Cuddy has a TED talk that is a reasonable introduction to the content in this book.

This book talks a fair bit about body language, but instead of what it tells others, the primary focus is about using body language to communicate with yourself, and uses her own academic work, along with some others, to allow yourself to behave with confidence and set yourself up to project your genuine belief in yourself of your ideas to others. The TED talk might be sufficient for you, but if you want to go a touch deeper and get basic information about the research and methodology this is a sold read.

Edit: I have followed this up with Behave by Robert M Sapolsky and it completely puts this book to shame. I still don't think this book is awful, but the fact that there's a book that basically covers everything this book does, is better structured and written, gives a better idea of what's well backed vs speculation, and does it in more depth knocks a star off here for me. Maybe it's unfair because it's a couple years newer and didn't exist when this book was written, but there's really no reason to read this book over behave. Even at significantly longer length, it manages to be an easier, more coherent read.

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This one is interesting. There's a lot here backed by evidence, and overall the book takes an interesting look at how various changes to brain structure/development (from early malnutrition or abuse to genetics to physical trauma) tend to result in a higher rates of criminal behavior, with the focus on violent and sexual crimes. But it's intermixed with bits here and there of jankiness that's less supported. When he gets to the final subject discussing the ethics and future steps, he goes off the rails a bit for me. “Your brain made you read this book” is a weird argument that free will is nonsense even if he comes around a little later, and his argument that we should treat the person with a clear tumor basis for wildly out of character behavior the same as someone with a slightly smaller brain region is really uncomfortable. Then I'm not entirely sure he's not advocating a Minority Report style precrime intervention system when he uses it to raise questions.


Overall, though, I am convinced by the case that we should be focusing on proper nutrition and mental health access and that the better we take care of our kids, as a society, the less likely they are to turn to violence. I think even with its flaws, it does encourage you to think about things that we should probably think about.

This is a good introduction to some big ideas in science and technology. Hawking touches on a bunch of subjects from a super quick overview of a variety of future looking ideas, including AI, space travel, aliens, and black holes. Because it's so brief on a lot of the topics, it wasn't really the book for me, but I do think it would be worth it to someone who isn't looking for the same depth I want.

I did find the afterword which was a tribute from Lucy Hawking to her father pretty moving.

“Still, nothing is as wildly age-inappropriate as a toy that Tesco, the UK retailer, released in 2006: the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a pole-dancing play set marketed to females under ten—as something that will help them “unleash the sex kitten inside.”

This is the most disturbing example of marketing gone to a gross extreme in this book, but it's far from the only one. Lindstrom tells the story of how marketing takes advantage of understanding the brain to push your buttons and sell products. He starts with research indicating that you can start to form brand attachments by babies in utero and continues with efforts grooming kids into perfect little customers, and influencers of parent purchases, before getting into how they target adults.

Then, while this book is about a decade old at this point, he starts to discuss all the ways big companies are tracking you with technology. Many more people are aware of some of the ways big data is used for advertising now, but it's likely you'll learn things about how deep those tentacles go reading this book as well, even though it's starting to slow its age a little.


Finally, he discusses an experiment where he set up a family in a new neighborhood to test the efficacy of guerrilla word of mouth marketing to friends and neighbors. This also serves to demonstrate why astroturfing is such big business in the tech driven world of today.

As it's partly driven by his personal involvement in the industry, not every claim is sourced to academic research, but a decent bit is. For additional science backed information on the subject, Influence or Presuasion by Robert Cialdini are the way to go, but Lindstrom's insider perspective is worth reading as well.

Very good book. You'll find it disturbing, but knowing is the only way to protect yourself from manipulation.

Did you know men and women are physically different? Why don't doctors get taught that? Why don't vehicle safety tests take that into account? Why is medical and drug research heavily biased towards male subjects with minimal effort to evaluate the physiological differences that do show up?

The Invisible Woman takes a look at all the small (and big) things that get overlooked when women's input isn't considered. It discusses UI, personal protective equipment, company policies, city design, medicine, and more, with much of the discussion supported by some academic tier research.

I don't universally agree with all her positions on political/policy changes to address the issue, but she does make a compelling case that this is something people need to be aware of and make deliberate effort to mitigate.

The introduction is a bit rough, barraging you with numbers that in my opinion don't work particularly well to introduce you to the topic, but it's worth powering through.

I also, as someone broadly interested in intelligence on the individual, collective, and artificial levels, took it more broadly as a cautionary tale of making decisions without making effort to understand a variety of positions, and the dangers of treating groups of people as one homogenous entity. In some ways, while the subject matter is different, there are a lot of parallels to David Epstein's Range. You can't make effective decisions without some understanding of several distinct perspectives on a problem.

So, from multiple angles, this book is worth reading. It does get a little dense at times and makes some points strongly, but if you let yourself you should learn a lot.

This book is a lot. It starts with cosmology and the Big Bang, goes into particle physics to explain what dark matter is, touches on theories of the origin of life, finally gets to the fossil record and what that tells us about mass extinction events, goes into some concepts of probability theory and statistical significance, then describes large scale features of the Milky Way and our solar system's traversal through it.

All of this is used to illustrate her idea (which she is very careful to describe as speculative and a “thought experiment”) that there is a disc of dark matter, much thinner than the distribution of normal matter, through the central plane of the galaxy, and that the spike in gravity caused by this disc is responsible for knocking objects out of the orbit of the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system every 30-35 million years and sending big spikes in the number colliding with Earth, causing mass extinction events including the death of the dinosaurs.


Randall is very clear, though out the work, that some ideas are not established yet and should not be taken as factual, but she does heavily reference other academic work on the variety of fields involved. As a nonexpert I am unable to verify all of the background material, but provided there are no glaring omissions or misrepresentations I believe she makes a compelling case for her theory.

Overall this book is densely packed with a lot of science and will take some thought to follow, but the frame of her “dark matter killed the dinosaurs” hypothesis allows the book to flow reasonably well.

I wanted to like this, but it just never really grabbed me. The coverage of the physics seems too surface level, the overarching narrative was basically “this guy thought imaging a black hole would be good but it costs money and he thought he was more important than anyone else”, and it really didn't even explain the questions they thought the images would answer particularly well.

It's not terrible. Most of the science is accurate enough and it does show some of the technical difficulties of capturing distant space objects. But I can't recommend it unless you're really interested in black holes, and if you are I'd look at Hawking's Black Hole book (which I haven't read yet) or the Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind (which I have and enjoyed) first.

It's hard for me to evaluate this book. As a biography of Einstein and Schrödinger and their interactions of the years, it's interesting. As a look at how politics and life events can affect the ability of scientists to do their best science, it's enlightening.


In terms of the actual science, I still mostly don't get it. I think the coverage of Schrödinger's cat and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is presented well, but I was already comfortable with those subjects. A lot of the other science is hard to follow. Now, that's not the prime purpose of this book, and it's a hard subject, so to some extent that's reasonable, but it seems weird to me to carry the science well past their deaths when I don't think it's covered with sufficient depth to be truly educational to most.

That said, it's not a bad book. The primary subject of Einstein and Schrodinger is presented in an interesting way with enough of the big picture timeline of the science to follow. But I wouldn't expect to learn that much of the science even if it's presented through the book in a way implying you can.

Where do new ideas come from? Is the most effective way to create one to sit and stare at a problem until you figure it out?


Pang uses a mix of stories with research to explain that no, staring at a problem won't magically solve it and after a certain point, is counterproductive. When you rest your brain, there is still background activity going on that is working on your problem. That means sleep, but it also means doing other things in between sessions of work. He discusses the benefits of naps, exercise, a consistent schedule, and leaving work in progress instead of continuing through burnout. He also discusses the benefits of longer rest, full days off, and hobbies that engage your brain but in different ways.


My primary critique would be that the introduction felt a little long and convoluted, and he takes a while to get into the meat and the evidence behind it. But it's worth pushing through. After reading this, you should not feel guilty about setting boundaries with your time or enjoying hobbies or leisure activities. It makes a strong case that you're doing yourself and your productivity a disservice if you don't.

The core premise here is that innovation often comes from applying old ideas in new ways. Whether tools are physical or mental, having a variety of tools in your toolkit allows you to approach problems more different ways. Epstein uses historical examples of groundbreaking ideas born from familiar concepts in one field being transferred to another to solve a big problem, examples where hyper-focused ideologies led to disaster, and various pieces of scientific evidence to support the premise that, while we need subject matter experts, we also need well rounded thinkers who can think abstractly about problems and apply old ideas in new ways.

While he critiques the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, I feel the presentation of the research behind it is caught in the crossfire. Gladwell's presentation is a problem, but at times the way he presents critiques of that presentation are overly critical of the research. He could have acknowledged that in Peak, Ericsson isn't advocating putting your kid in a room with a violin 20 hours a day. He addresses that highly specialized skills don't transfer unless they can be integrated into your existing mental models. He emphasizes that a core element of deliberate practice is being able to maintain a high level of focus throughout, and that repetition without the focus isn't going to be that helpful. He doesn't advocate anything like just abandoning everything else to train one skill.


Ultimately I don't think they're that far apart. They're both selling the message that you can improve at things you want to improve at, and that it's never too late to start learning. It did sour me a little to see how he presented Anders work, but I think both works can be used to inform your efforts at self improvement. I highly encourage both.

How do the exceptional become the exceptional? Is you kid who isn't learning Calculus by age 6 doomed to a life of mediocrity? And what about this “10,000 hours makes you an expert” thing I hear about?

Peak is, at it's core, a book about how we learn. The 4 word answer to that question is “practice the right way”, and Anders Ericsson uses his own research and the work of others to provide you a path to improving your ability to learn a new subject and to, with time, achieve expertise.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour idea in his book Outliers, and there's an element of merit to it, but it's incomplete. Ericsson was responsible for that research, and goes into detail, but the short version is that the research was done in highly specialized fields with a lot of shared expertise already. He calls this deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice, as he defines it, may rely on a solidly established field with clear definitions and outcomes, but that doesn't mean there's nothing we can take away to our own areas of interest. Setting goals, finding a way to get feedback to evaluate outcomes, and ensuring that you are engaged and challenging yourself the right amount are all strategies encouraged through the book.

Overall, the message is that the human brain is incredibly adaptable and that systematically approaching new subjects (or old subjects you want to improve) can allow you to reach levels you didn't believe were possible.


This is a must read if you have interest in the brain.

Jonathan Haidt is psychologist who primarily researches how people come to ethical opinions/actions. This book takes an evidence based look at some big ideas of philosophy and great thinkers through history about how to be happy.


It uses a pretty wide array of illustrations of ideas, referencing scenes from The Godfather to demonstrate social strategies, Edwin Abbott's Flatworld, and using the Bible, Buddha, and Machiavelli to present the history of ideas, then examines some of the experiments by modern psychologists that are applicable to those ideas. It's not a perfect book and I won't claim to agree with every conclusion made, but it's fairly easy to follow the difference between citing research and conclusions drawn from that research.


I have a hard time judging the approachability of this one because I've read a disproportionately high number of books in psychology, but it doesn't seem to assume that much knowledge. It does get somewhat dense and technical at points, and I intend to give it a second read, but I believe it's something you can follow without a strong background if you know what you're getting into.

It covers a wide range of ideas from structural elements of the brain, to childhood development, the role of trauma in personal growth, religious experiences, psychedelics, and how ideas about ethical decision making differ and contribute to happiness. It's a lot, packed through with citations, but it's reasonably well structured and presented. Overall, if you read everything printed in psychology you'll recognize a lot of the research, but might think about some of it in new ways. If you haven't read much, it might be a bit daunting but even if you miss details I think you could take away a lot of understanding of how our brains work by reading this book.

I view this book as equipping you to answer the question “Where is the line between the privacy of citizens and the ability to protect them from threats (terrorism, cybercrime, the potential of a hostile state to crash the grid in the event of full out war)?”. It does this by examining the modern (WW1-around Snowden) history of signals intelligence, cryptography, and hacking, and providing examples of mass surveillance winning wars, being used by totalitarian governments to suppress human rights, and successfully and unsuccessfully using surveillance/espionage to protect citizens from extremists and cyber criminals.


It also presents the arguments (with quotes) from a variety of people connected to the cyberintelligence world, and well enough that he had me wanting to agree with several different (and conflicting) stances throughout the book. If the title sounds compelling to you or you're interested in the modern questions on data collection and use, this won't give you much technical information, but it will provide you a lot of background on how we got to today and what some of the big issues are.