New Books in Big Ideas

Although it is not described as such anywhere in the book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne, 2021) is indeed a systems-thinking book—one that offers a much-needed fresh perspective. Tyson Yunkaporta stands on the shoulders of who we should consider the original systems thinkers: Indigenous elders—the keepers & teachers of ancient knowledge—to show us that by “emphasizing community and connection over individualism and fragmentation—and by cultivating respect for the land—we can address the urgent challenges we face”. Readers of systems literature will notice familiar themes such as non-linearity, complexity, cause-and-effect and the role of the observer in a system. Each chapter of this paradigm-shifting book starts with some yarning and 'sand talk'— invoking an Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. The table of contents is a beautiful compilation of Yunkaporta’s sand talk carving illustrations.Tyson Yunkaporta offers that there is much to be learned from Indigenous 'knowledge systems', but expressses worry about borrowed ideas getting "tangled and twisted in marketplace of civilization"—and suggests that "symbiotic dances" must instead occur between Indigenous and non-Indigenous systems. The result of such an "interaction of multitude of agents in a sustainable system of emergent entities" could be positive and productive. Tyson Yunkaporta is an arts critic, and researcher—and a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. This is his first book.Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Kevin is interested in complexity and paradox, and the power of systems thinking to help us understand and tackle the big messes humanity created and is now dealing with. Kevin has been an NBN host since July 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”-Isaiah 2:4The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Students of American history know that the framers of the Constitution were deeply concerned that the United States would founder on the shoals of mob rule. They designed a system meant to ensure rule by an elected elite, a republic rather than a democracy. While democratic elements have been introduced over the past two centuries, that basic structure still stands.In Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton UP, 2020), Landemore argues that it is time to create a more truly democratic system, one in which elections do not play a major role. While she thinks it unlikely that the national arena is necessarily the best place to start implementing such changes, she does see opportunities for creating local assemblies or “mini-publics” where citizens chosen by lot would deliberate on and enact policies and laws. She points out that hundreds of experiments in this direction have been initiated in the past two decades, and she lays down principles and approaches that make the likelihood of success greater. Her work is profoundly optimistic about the potential for citizens from all walks of life to participate in governing their society.Jack Petranker, MA, JD, is the founder and Senior Teacher at the Center for Creative Inquiry and the Director of the Mangalam Research Center. www.jackpetranker.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember."Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered.In Nothing Happened: A History (Stanford UP, 2021), Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her 'Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering generous thinking, a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn’t really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don’t miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to.The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee.In this episode we do go a little further into Tom’s background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas.He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn.If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.* Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.* False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.* False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.* Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.* Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.* Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.About our guestTom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he’s led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter LinkedinKimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here,About Richard Lucas Twitter LinkedinRichard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

In recent years Americans have experienced a range of assaults upon the truth. In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), Jonathan Rauch describes the various ways in which our understanding of truth has come under attack, and the mechanisms that exist to fight back. As Rauch explains, the challenge of determining truth is as old as civilization itself, with the system we use today a product of concepts formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today this system faces an unprecedented challenge created by the digital revolution, which has inverted the social incentives on which the reality-based community depends and fractured reality for millions of people. The consequences of this today can be seen today in both the numerous agenda-driven disinformation campaigns and the coercive conformity of “cancel culture” that challenges diversity of thought. Yet for all of the threats posed to the Constitution of Knowledge, Rauch argues that within it are contained the tools with which people can fight back successfully in order to maintain our social system for turning disagreement into truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

In recent years the phrase “revisionist history” has emerged as a label for politically-correct reexaminations of an unalterable understanding of our past. As James M. Banner, Jr. demonstrates in his book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (Yale UP, 2021), such a definition ignores how historical knowledge in the West has always been fluid and subject to reinterpretation by scholars. As Banner illustrates, such revisionism occurs in a variety of ways and can reflect everything from the discovery of new information to the reconsideration of the past from different perspectives the present. These approaches are evident even in the earliest works of history, and reflect the changes that have taken place in civilization over time. By addressing recent public controversies at which revisionism was at the heart, Banner shows that It is through this process that we better understand who we are today and the course we will take as a society going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution (Princeton UP, 2021) is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider’s perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

According to an intuitive view, those who commit crimes are justifiably subject to punishment. Depending on the severity of the wrongdoing constitutive of the crime, punishment can be severe: incarceration, confinement, depravation, and so on. The common thought is that in committing serious crimes, persons render themselves deserving of punishment by the State. Punishment, then, is simply a matter of giving offenders their just deserts. Call this broad view retributivism. What if retributivism’s underlying idea of desert is fundamentally confused? What if persons lack the kind of free will that would make them deserving of punishment in the sense that retributivism requires?This is the central question of Gregg Caruso’s new book, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (Cambridge, 2021). After arguing against the idea that persons can be deserving of punishment in the retributivist’s sense, Caruso develops an alternative approach to criminal behavior that he called the Public-Health Quarantine Model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas