Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
(Vladimir Nabokov, translated by his son Dmitri, 31:43)
This hasn't been as fun as I'd supposed. I've been gnawing on this for months. I still have 5 hours left. I was surprised that his early stories sound almost gothic (one is about an artist who can inhabit a painting). There's plenty of (deserved) grudges against the Soviets.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

How we decide
(Jonah Lehrer, 9:40)
Excellent discussion of decisionmaking. Initially, I was put off by the opening chapter, which discussed football quarterbacks, but once I made it over this hump, there was a trove of fascinating and incisive information. He's the anti-Gladwell, since rather than reach for the compelling analogy, he does the flat-footed work to understand the actual science.