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πŸ”— IQ and the Wealth of Nations

πŸ”— Economics πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Psychology πŸ”— Anthropology

IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a 2002 book by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen. The authors argue that differences in national income (in the form of per capita gross domestic product) are correlated with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). They further argue that differences in average national IQs constitute one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.

The book has drawn widespread criticism from other academics. Critiques have included questioning of the methodology used, the incompleteness of the data, and the conclusions drawn from the analysis. The 2006 book IQ and Global Inequality is a follow-up to IQ and the Wealth of Nations by the same authors.

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πŸ”— Lisp (Book) (1989)

πŸ”— Computer science πŸ”— Books

LISP is a university textbook on the Lisp programming language, written by Patrick Henry Winston and Berthold Klaus Paul Horn. It was first published in 1981, and the third edition of the book was released in 1989. The book is intended to introduce the Lisp programming language and its applications.

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πŸ”— Careless People (2025)

πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Freedom of speech πŸ”— Media

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook (renamed Meta), published on March 11, 2025. The book is a critical account of Facebook's internal culture and decision-making practices during Wynn-Williams' time there. The book is highly critical of Facebook's responses to global sociopolitical events, including its role in the Rohingya genocide and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's alleged efforts to censor on behalf of the Chinese government. Additionally, Wynn-Williams accuses several Facebook executives, including Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan, of engaging in harmful behavior in the workplace, including sexual harassment.

The book gained media coverage following reports that Meta sued to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting the book; public backlash against Meta's response has been credited with boosting sales of the book, a result known as the Streisand effect. By late March 2025, Careless People had reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Following the book's publication, Wynn-Williams was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate, where she accused Zuckerberg of having been willing to censor content in order to gain access to the Chinese market. The title of the book is a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

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πŸ”— Strategikon of Maurice

πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Classical Greece and Rome πŸ”— Greece πŸ”— Middle Ages πŸ”— Middle Ages/History πŸ”— Military history/Roman and Byzantine military history πŸ”— Military history/Medieval warfare πŸ”— Greece/Byzantine world πŸ”— Military history/Balkan military history πŸ”— Military history/European military history

The Strategikon or Strategicon (Greek: Ξ£Ο„ΟΞ±Ο„Ξ·Ξ³ΞΉΞΊΟŒΞ½) is a manual of war traditionally regarded as written in the late 6th century and usually attributed to the Byzantine Emperor Maurice. It is moreover a practical manual, "a rather modest elementary handbook" in the words of its introduction, "for those devoting themselves to generalship". This book gives a general guide, handbook, of the Byzantine military's strategies. In his introduction to his 1984 translation of the text, George T. Dennis noted "The Strategikon is written in a very straightforward and generally uncomplicated Greek."

The Strategikon may have been written in an effort to codify the military reforms brought about by the soldier-emperor Maurice. There is debate in academic circles as to the true author of the Strategikon. Maurice may have only commissioned it; perhaps his brother Peter, or another general of his court, was the true author. The dating is also debated. If it was written in the 6th century, the Strategikon may have been produced to codify the experience of the Balkan and Persian campaigns, or the campaigns may have been carried out in compliance with the manual. However, starting in the late 19th century, some historians have argued for a later date in the eighth or ninth century, on philological or technological grounds. In any case, it is considered one of the most important military texts of the medieval years, along with the 10th century military treatises attributed to the Byzantine emperors Leo VI (Tactica) and Nicephorus Phocas (De velitatione and Praecepta Militaria); Leo's Tactica in particular drew heavily from the Strategikon.

The text consists of 12 chapters, or "books", on various aspects of the tactics employed by the Byzantine military of the 6th and 7th century A.D. It is primarily focused on cavalry tactics and formations, yet it also elaborates on matters of infantry, sieges, baggage trains, drilling and marching. The author was familiar with classical military treatises, especially Onasander and Aelian, which he used as conceptional models rather than sources of content. Each book has a general topic to be discussed, and each book goes into great detail even separating each book further into subsections and including maps. These maps are not large and extravagant but more symbols to show positions and a standard design of the formations the Byzantine military used at this time. Books seven and eight contain practical advice to the General in the form of instructions and maxims. The eleventh book has ethnographic interest, with its portrayal of various Byzantine enemies (Franks, Lombards, Avars, Turks, and Slavs). The Strategikon also belongs to Byzantine legal literature, since it contains a list of military infractions and their suitable penalties.

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πŸ”— The Limits to Growth (1972)

πŸ”— Climate change πŸ”— Environment πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Systems πŸ”— Futures studies πŸ”— Energy

The Limits to Growth (often abbreviated LTG) is a 1972 report that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems. The model was based on the work of Jay Forrester of MIT,:β€Š21β€Š as described in his book World Dynamics.

Commissioned by the Club of Rome, the study saw its findings first presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1971.:β€Š186β€Š The report's authors are Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, JΓΈrgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, representing a team of 17 researchers.:β€Š8β€Š

The report's findings suggest that, in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization, it is highly likely that there will be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity. Despite the report's facing severe criticism and scrutiny upon its release, subsequent research consistently finds that the global use of natural resources has been inadequately reformed since to alter its basic predictions.

Since its publication, some 30 million copies of the book in 30 languages have been purchased. It continues to generate debate and has been the subject of several subsequent publications.

Beyond the Limits and The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update were published in 1992 and 2004 respectively; in 2012, a 40-year forecast from JΓΈrgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years; and in 2022 two of the original Limits to Growth authors, Dennis Meadows and JΓΈrgen Randers, joined 19 other contributors to produce Limits and Beyond.

πŸ”— The Power Elite

πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Sociology

The Power Elite is a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, in which Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen in modern times is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those three entities.

πŸ”— The Autumn of the Middle Ages

πŸ”— Books

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, The Waning of the Middle Ages, or Autumntide of the Middle Ages (published in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and translated into English in 1924, German in 1924, and French in 1932), is the best-known work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.

In the book, Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism.

His main conclusion is that the combination of required modernization of statehood governance, stuck in traditionalism, in combination with the exhausting inclusion of an ever-growing corpus of Catholic rites and popular beliefs in daily life, led to the implosion of late medieval society. This provided light to the rise of (religious) individualism, humanism and scientific progress: the renaissance.

The book was nominated for the 1939 Nobel Prize for Literature, but lost to the Finnish writer Frans Eemil SillanpÀÀ.

Huizinga's work later came under some criticism, especially for relying too heavily on evidence from the rather exceptional case of the Burgundian court. Other criticisms include the writing of the book being "old-fashioned" and "too literary".

A new English translation of the book was published in 1996 because of perceived deficiencies in the original translation. The new translation, by Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, was based on the second edition of the Dutch publication in 1921 and compared with the German translation published in 1924.

To mark the centenary of Herfsttij, a new translation by Diane Webb appeared in 2020, published by Leiden University Press: Autumntide of the Middle Ages. According to Benjamin Kaplan, this translation "captures Huizinga's original voice better than either of the two previous English editions". This new English edition also includes for the first time 300 full-colour illustrations of all the works of art Huizinga mentions in his text.

In the 1970s, Radio Netherlands produced an audio series about the book, entitled "Autumn of the Middle Ages: A Six-part History in Words and Music from the Low Countries".

πŸ”— How to Lie with Statistics

πŸ”— Statistics πŸ”— Books

How to Lie with Statistics is a book written by Darrell Huff in 1954, presenting an introduction to statistics for the general reader. Not a statistician, Huff was a journalist who wrote many how-to articles as a freelancer.

The book is a brief, breezy illustrated volume outlining the misuse of statistics and errors in the interpretation of statistics, and how errors create incorrect conclusions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students. It has become one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition. It has also been widely translated.

Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling." It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality. For example, by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart so that differences seem larger than they are. Or, by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.

The original edition contained illustrations by artist Irving Geis. In a UK edition, Geis' illustrations were replaced by cartoons by Mel Calman.

πŸ”— The Myth of Mental Illness

πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Psychology

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in which the author criticizes psychiatry and argues against the concept of mental illness. It received much publicity, and has become a classic, well known as an argument that "mentally ill" is a label which psychiatrists have used against people "disabled by living" rather than truly having a disease.

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πŸ”— The Shock Doctrine

πŸ”— Medicine πŸ”— Economics πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Politics πŸ”— Women writers πŸ”— Medicine/Psychiatry

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book by the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton Friedman) have risen to prominence in some developed countries because of a deliberate strategy of "shock therapy". This centers on the exploitation of national crises (disasters or upheavals) to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are excessively distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response, and resist effectively. The book suggests that some man-made events, such as the Iraq War, were undertaken with the intention of pushing through such unpopular policies in their wake.

Some reviewers criticized the book for making what they viewed as simplifications of political phenomena, while others lauded it as a compelling and important work. The book served as the main source of a 2009 documentary feature film with the same title directed by Michael Winterbottom.

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