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🔗 Books 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Anarchism

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that argues the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history, and proposes universal basic income as a potential solution.

The book is an extension of a popular essay Graeber published in 2013, which was later translated into 12 languages and whose underlying premise became the subject of a YouGov poll. Graeber subsequently solicited hundreds of testimonials of meaningless jobs and revised his case into a book that was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2018.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Books 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Science

The Two Cultures is the first part of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow which were published in book form as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution the same year. Its thesis was that science and the humanities which represented "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" had become split into "two cultures" and that this division was a major handicap to both in solving the world's problems.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Books

Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis is a 2016 book by the American political economist Nicholas Eberstadt discussing the phenomenon of American men in their prime leaving the workforce. Statistically, the labor force involvement for men twenty and older fell from 86% to 68% between 1948 and 2015. The book discusses the history, causes, and implications of the phenomenon, as well as possible solutions.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter. By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how, through self-reference and formal rules, systems can acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music—but rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. One point in the book presents an analogy about how individual neurons in the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

The tagline "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" was used by the publisher to describe the book.

🔗 Crime 🔗 Books

Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors is a book written under the pseudonym Rex Feral (real name Nancy Crampton-Brophy) and published by Paladin Press in 1983. Paladin Press owner Peder Lund claimed, in an interview with 60 Minutes, that the book started life as a detailed crime novel written by a Florida housewife, and that the format was later changed to appeal to Paladin's reader base accustomed to the publisher's non-fiction books on military, survivalist, weapons and similar topics. The book portrays itself as a how-to manual on starting a career as a hit man, fulfilling contracts. However, after a number of lawsuits claiming that the book was used as a handbook in several murders, the publication of the book was stopped. It marked "the first time in American publishing history that a publisher has been held liable for a crime committed by a reader."

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Poland 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice 🔗 Ukraine

The Scottish Café (Polish: Kawiarnia Szkocka) was a café in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) where, in the 1930s and 1940s, mathematicians from the Lwów School of Mathematics collaboratively discussed research problems, particularly in functional analysis and topology.

Stanislaw Ulam recounts that the tables of the café had marble tops, so they could write in pencil, directly on the table, during their discussions. To keep the results from being lost, and after becoming annoyed with their writing directly on the table tops, Stefan Banach's wife provided the mathematicians with a large notebook, which was used for writing the problems and answers and eventually became known as the Scottish Book. The book—a collection of solved, unsolved, and even probably unsolvable problems—could be borrowed by any of the guests of the café. Solving any of the problems was rewarded with prizes, with the most difficult and challenging problems having expensive prizes (during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II), such as a bottle of fine brandy.

For problem 153, which was later recognized as being closely related to Stefan Banach's "basis problem", Stanisław Mazur offered the prize of a live goose. This problem was solved only in 1972 by Per Enflo, who was presented with the live goose in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland.

The café building now houses the Szkocka Restaurant & Bar (named for the original Scottish Café) and the Atlas Deluxe hotel at the street address of 27 Taras Shevchenko Prospekt.

🔗 France 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Continental philosophy

The Society of the Spectacle (French: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.

🔗 Books 🔗 Urban studies and planning

The High Cost of Free Parking is an urban planning book by UCLA professor Donald Shoup dealing with the costs of free parking on society. It is structured as a criticism of the planning and regulation of parking and recommends that parking be built and allocated according to its fair market value. It incorporates elements of Shoup's Georgist philosophy.

The book was originally published in 2005 by the American Planning Association and the Planners Press. A revised edition was released in 2011 by Routledge.

🔗 Books

Tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.

The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang. It combines elements of tsunde-oku (積んでおく, to pile things up ready for later and leave) and dokusho (読書, reading books). It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読).

The American author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state.

🔗 Books 🔗 Automobiles

Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile is a non-fiction book by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, first published in 1965. Its central theme is that car manufacturers resisted the introduction of safety features (such as seat belts), and that they were generally reluctant to spend money on improving safety. This work contains substantial references and material from industry insiders. It was a best seller in non-fiction in 1966.