Finance is pretty fascinating to me, and the recent financial crisis is an incredible study into how financial systems blow up under stress (if only it were a purely academic study and not a disaster for hundreds of millions of people). Probably the best complete rundown of what happened, and what to do about it, is "Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System", by Robert Pozen. Nothing I have read has been as complete and interesting as this book, and while I don’t agree with 100% of his proposed policy solutions, I agree with probably 98%. This should be mandatory reading for everybody in Congress.

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I recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In a nutshell, it’s about how improbably events (“black swans”) can be completely unexpected by people who think that events follow typical probabilities, and the mess that results. I enjoyed it, although Taleb won’t be winning award for humility anytime soon.

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• Current Mood: Productive
• Currently Listening To: "Around the World", Red Hot Chili Peppers

The past few weeks I’ve been reading “What Americans Really Want…Really” by Frank Luntz, which I picked up using one of my many Borders gift cards I received for Christmas. It’s supposed to be a distillation of what famous Republican message man Frank Luntz has found about what Americans want out of all aspects of life, from his many, many focus groups. The book started off good, but by the end I found myself somewhat disappointed.

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• Current Mood: Relaxed
• Currently Listening To: "Dream On", Depeche Mode

I’m not typically a reader of fiction. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just that I prefer non-fiction for some reason. Recently, though, I was looking for a book to read on my bus travels and I was all out, so Julia suggested I read Middlesex, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Despite it being fiction, I enjoyed it. What I liked most about it was probably its historical content: it traces a family and its offspring from before the Greco-Turkish war, spending most of its time on that journey and only occasionally returning to the present. It read more like historical fiction than a typical novel, so I felt that I was indeed learning something. I’d recommend it.

I’m now back to my old ways and reading Influence by Robert Cialdini. So far a fascinating book.

• Current Mood: Sweaty

I just finished reading “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Robert Moses (doing a lot of train/plane traveling on vacation certainly helped finish this monster of a book). It was a very good book, and one that was much easier to read than its length would suggest.

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I recently finished reading A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. You may remember this as the book that Matt Damon tells Robin Williams will “blow his mind” in Good Will Hunting. It’s a pretty different take on the history of the United States, from a point of view that typically is not seen in more traditional histories, especially those taught in school. The book is clearly, but honestly biased: Zinn believes that “objectivity” is a myth, which is something that I wholeheartedly agree with.

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• Just Watched: Rachel Getting Married