(Part 2) Top products from r/Cortex

I will recommend my favorite nonfiction book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter Norton. It documents the period between WWI and the Great Depression when streets were converted from public spaces to car exclusive spaces from the perspectives of justice, order, and efficiency. It’s a fascinating history of how cities largely surrendered their greatest asset to the automotive lobby.

Perfect! I found it using the Hello Internet search. I misremembered that it was mentioned in Cortex. (And it was actually Brady who talked about the Microsoft guy.)

It was H.I. #83: The Best Kind of Prison:
http://podcastsearch.david-smith.org/episodes/1771#4960

And the guy was Preston McAfee. Here's his Numberphile interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kWuxfVbIaU

His book is Competitive Solutions: https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Solutions-Strategists-Preston-McAfee/dp/0691124035/

Thanks for your help!

My personal favorite non-fiction books that sound incredibly boring, but are actually really interesting:

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky It's a book about salt! The history of salt, the cultural significance of salt, salt production through the ages, all about salt. It's amazing.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky It's the history of Cod! The author spends a good portion of the book talking about how Cod is both incredibly bland and tasteless, but also how western culture loves that bland fish and all of the interesting political movements for Cod.

And for a more serious topic: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich. This is multiple personal accounts of the Chernobyl disaster, all deeply interesting, and deeply sad. I'm only an episode into the Chernobyl HBO series, but I'm pretty sure that show is following some of characters from this book. It's a high quality book that I think is worth everyone's time, it doesn't go super in depth with the technology, just the human aspect.

Well due to that quick Part 4 JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reference the author of the manga wrote a book about creating manga: https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Theory-Practice-Craft-Creating/dp/1421594072

I’ve heard good things about it and that most creative people can get something from it. My copy is still in the mail.

I think one problem people usually have is being too precious about it and end up feeling too intimidated to write as much as you want or at all. Especially with pen and paper it's easy to feel that you shouldn't ruin this beautiful physical objects with your crappy handwriting and unimportant stuffs. I think I heard Merlin on one of the All the Great Shows™ talked about this and solved this by scribbling on the first page of a notebook then it's ruined already you can feel easy. But since you're having a yearly theme of sweating the small stuff maybe this doesn't bother you at all.

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Oh and the yearly theme reminded of Chris Hadfield's book where there's literally a chapter on sweating the small stuff. Is that where it came from? If not it might be an interesting read for you

A random selection of non-fiction recommendations for /u/MindOfMetalAndWheels:

• A Crack in Creation, by Jennifer Doudna
  
• Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber
  
• One Good Turn, by Witold Rybczynski
  
• The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow
  
• The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester
  
• The Secret Lives of Colour, by Kassia St Clair
  
• The Storm Before the Storm, by Mike Duncan
  
• Gentlemen's Blood, by Barbara Holland

A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts https://www.amazon.com/dp/014311235X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_8NWuDbYZJJT2W

The author interviewed every single astronaut who went to the moon in the 90s when they were still alive and compiled basically the “definitive” history of the Apollo program. Just the sheer amount of effort put into the program is reflected here and the astronauts different personalities shine through.

Longitude by Dave Sobel

A book about how modern navigation was made possible through solving a seemingly impossible problem namely determining the longitude. At the time the solution was thought to be astronomy and the scientific community ignored the simple solution through watchmaking developed by a single man. A nice David vs. Goliath story about a guy fighting to be recognised for a simple mechanical solution to a problem thought to be impossible.

How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

This book is about the development and distribution of digital music files. It is a unique look at the true crime of warez and music piracy.