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May 11, 2021
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Anyone looking for their next book? I can't recommend Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants strongly enough. In an accessible and engaging narrative, Bryson explains everything you've ever wanted to know about, well, you. I mean, did you know this about your liver?
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Altogether the liver takes part in some five hundred metabolic processes. It is essentially the body’s laboratory. Right now, about a quarter of all your blood is in your liver...Perhaps the most wondrous feature of the liver is its capacity to regenerate. You can remove two-thirds of a liver and it will grow back to its original size in just a few weeks.
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New Posts on E2B
I posted a series of book recaps, covering the books I read this past January:
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Stories Worth Sharing
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Life Lessons
Paul Graham
Published in January 2020
Short read
"It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word 'noob' is certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something encouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.
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For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel less of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works differently. And yet you'll know more if you move. So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual ignorance."
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The Obligatory Morgan Housel Note
Morgan Housel (Collaborative Fund)
Published in February 2020
Long read
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"But specific events that shape history are always low-probability events. Their surprise is what causes them to leave a mark. And they were surprising specifically because they weren’t inevitable. A lot of things have to go right (or wrong) to move the needle in what is an otherwise random swarm of eight billion people on earth just trying to make it through the day."
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Stuff You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know
Elif Batuman (The New Yorker)
Published in April 2018
Long read"
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"On the subject of the real daughter, the rental daughter had a lot to say: as someone in her early twenties, she could tell that Nishida hadn’t spoken correctly, or expressed himself in the right way. He’d made it hard for his daughter to apologize and it was up to him to create an opening. “Your daughter is waiting for you to call her,” she told him. To me, this sentence had the eerie ring of something uttered at a séance. Nishida himself seemed uncertain about how and for whom the rental daughter had spoken. “She was acting as a rental daughter, but at the same time she was telling me how she felt as a real daughter,” he said. “And yet, if it was a real father-daughter relationship, maybe she wouldn’t have spoken this honestly.”"
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The Sporting Beat
Michael LaPointe (The Paris Review)
Published in May 2020
Medium read
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"By 1962, the state had seventeen tracks with some four million people betting over $175 million per year; and by 1987, Smith would’ve been happy to know, greyhound racing ranked sixth among American sports in spectator attendance, behind basketball and ahead of hockey. The high-water mark of greyhound revenue was reached in 1991, when betting receipts across the United States totaled $3.5 billion."
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Excerpt of the Week
From David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments:
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"Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Expect on TV." - E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993)
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