There’s no shortage of good ideas. The significance of a technology is not really in the idea; it’s in the execution. A mere idea will not change the world. Good leadership, good communication and faultless and execution will. I’m interested in big ideas: the bigger the better. The conquest of the South Pole, the circumnavigation of the North Pole, the genesis of neural networks, the Theranos and WeWork scams, the world domination of the ubiquitous toy LEGO. I’ve enjoyed biographies of Roald Amundsen, who won the race to the South Pole by stratagem, and of Ernest Shackleton, another polar explorer who didn’t achieve the big trophy firsts but paved the way for his successors by proving that they were possible. I loved the biography of Angela Merkel, whose worldview was shaped by her life behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, and am still absorbing the painstaking work of Vaclav Smil, whose “How The World Really Works” is a fantastic precis of the technology that underpins modern existence like Atlas shouldering the globe. I’ve also included (a) scattered reviews of Persian films, which seldom follow a neat plot, and occasionally neglect plot altogether for mood, notions, or ideas and (b) some original essays. Enjoy!
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