Yesterday I posted my favorite fiction from 2021. The real world is also interesting and important. Here are my favorite non-fiction works I read, in no particular order.
Think Again by Adam Grant
My favorite insight from this book is that rethinking becomes more valuable as the world changes faster.
My least favorite wording of this book was calling people who can interrogate their beliefs critically, rationally, and continually “scientists.” I’ve been a scientist and I’ve worked with many scientists and people in that line of work are at least as susceptible to various biases as anyone else. Still, clearly not all politicians, prosecutors, or preachers act like the personas he invokes either. It’s a useful way to refer to a defines set of traits and behaviors.
If things like identity, polarization, consensus, disagreement, flexibility, and transformation are not on your mind these days, I suspect you are not paying attention. I like the framing – revisit your assumptions periodically, revise as needed – and the vision – it’s an increasingly important skill to be able to find out what you don’t know and be able to change your mind.
“people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time.”
― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
The Obesity Code by Jason Fung
This year I started experimenting with fasting, and this book was a piece of that journey. I still love food and don’t expect to get skinny, but I also would like to avoid metabolic disorders and more serious health problems as I get older. Living in Germany, most stores are closed on Sundays and Holidays. At first, as an American used to being able to get anything 24/7 , I found this weird and inconvenient. Over time though, I found that having some time off that you could not run errands allowed me to relax a little more deeply, make time for journeys out in nature, family and quiet.
“Hormones are central to understanding obesity. Everything about human metabolism, including the body set weight, is hormonally regulated. A critical physiological variable such as body fatness is not left up to the vagaries of daily caloric intake and exercise. Instead, hormones precisely and tightly regulate body fat. We don’t consciously control our body weight any more than we control our heart rates, our basal metabolic rates, our body temperatures or our breathing. These are all automatically regulated, and so is our weight. Hormones tell us when we are hungry (ghrelin). Hormones tell us we are full (peptide YY, cholecystokinin). Hormones increase energy expenditure (adrenalin). Hormones shut down energy expenditure (thyroid hormone). Obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. Calories are nothing more than a proximate cause of obesity.”
― Jason Fung, The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss
Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson
I have a love/ hate relationship with self help books. I was a psychology minor in college, so I like to read the latest theories. But main stream books are by definition pop psychology and anyone can publish their theories and some do not fit to my experience to the point of possibly crossing the border from bad advice to dangerous. Luckily, on the balance, this was not one of those books for me. I appreciated where insights were supported with data, which was frequent in this book.
This book is framed in terms of romantic relationships, but I thought that the insights were much more generally applicable to any intimate relationship in my life. We don’t grow out of the need to connect authentically with our loved ones. When we feel disconnected, it’s painful and we tend to resort to bickering. That happens with my kids when they don’t have enough attention too.
It was also useful to me to see examples of where our behavior is driven by our emotions even when we explain it in terms of our logical thinking. So teaching communications skills to better bicker about stuff that does not matter will never bring someone the love they want. We can only be vulnerable with someone when we are strong enough ourselves and we can trust them. That’s what intimacy is, and caricatures of it do not resemble the real thing for long.
“We have to dive below to discover the basic problem: these couples have disconnected emotionally; they don’t feel emotionally safe with each other. What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships
Nano by Dr. Jess Wade
I follow Jess Wade on twitter and love her project to include more female professors on Wikipedia. In her experimenting with different science communication media, now she has a children’s book. My daughter and I watched a video of it being read to us. At 10, she was underwhelmed, as she may be too old for it. Or it might be that she already lives with a mom scientist who has been telling her about materials since she was small. Still, I appreciate that it is a thing that exists in the world. I think I would have liked it as a kid. As a mom, I can imagine playing a game pointing out things in the world made of different materials with curious littles. It gives me more hope for the future than any of the A.I. doomsday scenario tomes I read this year.
An acclaimed physicist and debut picture-book author introduces readers to the tiny building blocks that make up the world around us. Elegant, friendly text and stylish illustrations explain atoms, the elements, and other essential science concepts and reveal how very (very) small materials are manipulated to create self-washing windows; stronger, lighter airplanes; and other wonders of nanotechnology. – Goodreads blurb