#1343 - Penn Jillette

In 'How Music Works,' David Byrne acts as historian, anthropologist, raconteur, and social scientist to explore how music is shaped by its cultural and physical context. The book touches on the joy, physics, and business of making music, discussing how patterns and adaptations have influenced his own work with Talking Heads and other collaborators. Byrne examines the impact of recording technology, the evolution of music studios, and the changing economics of the music industry, while arguing against the distinction between 'high art' and 'low art' in music.

In this book, Steven Pinker presents a detailed argument that violence has significantly decreased over the course of human history. He uses extensive data and statistical analysis to demonstrate this decline in various domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, and the treatment of children, homosexuals, animals, and racial and ethnic minorities. Pinker identifies four key human motivations – empathy, self-control, the moral sense, and reason – as the 'better angels' that have oriented humans away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism. He also discusses historical forces such as the rise of the state (which he terms 'Leviathan'), the spread of commerce, the growth of feminist values, and the expansion of cosmopolitanism, which have contributed to this decline in violence.