My Top Longreads of 2011 (Non-fiction)
In this, my first full year with Instapaper, I found that…I still don’t have the time to read that much. That said, I did read a little bit here and there, so here are my top longreads I read in 2011 (in no order…and none are particularly long):
by Ettore Sottsass (Terrazzo, Number 5, Fall 1990)
“Everything we did was entirely absorbed in the act of doing it, in wanting to do it, and everything we did stayed ultimately inside a single extraordinary sphere of life. The design was life itself, it was the day from dawn till dusk, it was the waiting during the night, it was an awareness of the world around us, of materials and lights, distances and weights, resistance, fragilities, use and consumption, birth and death…”
Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’
by Robert Krulwich (March 18, 2011)
“When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence ‘picked up [Komarov’s] cries of rage as he plunged to his death.’”
Deep Intellect: Inside the mind of the octopus
by Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine, Nov/Dec 2011)
“But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.”
Traces of humanity: What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space
by Samuel Arbesman (Boston Globe Ideas, August 7, 2011)
“On Earth, most of human history has involved unconsciously leaving traces of our existence, from garbage to aqueduct ruins. But when we go into space, we can begin to make choices about what we leave to posterity.”
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger
by Daniel Coyle (New York Times, February 5, 2006)
“Yet Robic does not excel on physical talent alone. He is not always the fastest competitor (he often makes up ground by sleeping 90 minutes or less a day), nor does he possess any towering physiological gift. On rare occasions when he permits himself to be tested in a laboratory, his ability to produce power and transport oxygen ranks on a par with those of many other ultra-endurance athletes. He wins for the most fundamental of reasons: he refuses to stop.”
Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal
by Junot Díaz (Boston Review, May/June 2011)
“But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance, practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.”
The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything
by Linda Holmes (NPR - Monkey See, April 18 2011)
“It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.”
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
by Jared Diamond (Discover Magazine, May 1987)
“…recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”
