Personal Highlights:

• There have been about ten thousand generations of humans so far. For all but the last three or four generations, life was short, lasting on...
• Fungi are all around us but usually only pose a severe threat to the health of the immunocompromised. Helminths are worms, some of our oldest...
• endemic disease (that is, a disease permanently established in a population) and epidemic disease (a disease that suddenly increases in prevalence, often with high mortality) have stamped our history.

Personal Highlights:

• “No children can be born in heaven,” he said. “Therefore they must all be born on earth. But this cannot be until the beginning of...
• After priests, therefore, we perform a more useful function than any other sort of men; for priests offer happiness in heaven, through the influence they...

Personal Highlights:

• The first calls for a separate independent state for India’s Muslims came in the 1930s from the political party All-India Muslim League. Great swathes of...
• In 1933, a Cambridge student, Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, published the pamphlet Now or Never. Are we to live or perish forever? Here he made the...
• As the new border was so controversial, it was not announced until August 17, 1947, three days after the declaration of independence. Months of anguish...

Personal Highlights:

• With his skill in manufacturing and fame as inventor of the cotton gin, he received an initial order for ten thousand muskets for $134,000 from...
• It became clear soon enough that cotton would not be spreading to Virginia and North Carolina in any meaningful way—production was headed farther south. Climate...
• Gibbons found himself on the wharves of New York, where he learned of the reliability and courage of a twenty-three-year-old ferry operator. Young Cornelius Vanderbilt...

Personal Highlights:

• The young man was relieved that the other had not gone on with his first question. He did not have to say what Iqbal he...
• He was a magistrate, not a missionary. It was the day-to-day problems to which he had to find answers. He had no need to equate...

Personal Highlights:

• California had plenty of engineers trained in aviation or radio industries who’d graduated from Stanford or Berkeley, each of which was flush with defense dollars as the U.S. military
• A single missile strike on TSMC’s most advanced chip fabrication facility could easily cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage once
• which moved metal levers that adjusted glass mirrors. These knobs and levers “computed” altitudes and angles more exactly than any pilot could, focusing the sight...

Personal Highlights:

• A cell brings materiality and physicality to a set of genes. A cell enlivens genes. But a cell
• In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
• These pores or cells were not very deep but consisted of “a great many little boxes.” In short, this piece of cork was created out...

Personal Highlights:

• Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing...

Personal Highlights:

• There is the established wisdom, but still there are no false promises. Things thrive or die, and the farmer hopes to tip the balance toward...
• early settlers felled whole swaths of birch and buried corn around the stumps, after which they would release herds of swine to dig around and...
• Root harvest is the hardest work of the year, pleasurable in its finitude when the weather turns cold, and the reaping heavy and repetitive before...

Personal Highlights:

• I never gained more than a vague understanding of what Historical Materialism means—it has something to do with Class Struggle—but authenticating was the key. Not...
• Most of them were cabs, and virtually every cabby in Fuling had rewired his horn so it was triggered by a contact point at the...
• They were accustomed to learning by rote, which meant that they often followed models to the point of plagiarism. They were also inveterate copiers; it...

Personal Highlights:

• “Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial.
• We call people like Kofi American-African, not African-American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.”
• The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. She got up and left a big tip on the counter. For a long time afterwards,...

Personal Highlights:

• A musical morality is introduced: the easy charm of the familiar on the one side, the hard truth of the new on the other.
• Above all, composers from the Romance and Slavonic nations—France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and the countries of Eastern Europe—strained to cast off the German influence. For...
• The advent of the recording cylinder meant that researchers no longer needed to rely on paper to preserve the songs. They could make recorded copies...

Personal Highlights:

• That as biographers we all have agendas, both known and unknown to us, does not change the value and necessity of getting back to the...
• Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning...
• But the German word implies “from the house of” and therefore indicates nobility, which van does not.

Personal Highlights:

• Life expectancy was about thirty-five years, no more than it had been when Christopher Columbus was setting sail. Illiteracy rates averaged about sixty-four percent. In...
• This stems from the cello itself, which is a melodic instrument, melodic because no more than two strings can generally be bowed at the same...
• It is not quite a chord. There are numerous chords in the Cello Suites, but since a chord is formed by striking three notes at...

Personal Highlights:

• in the sixteenth century, bricklayers, wool merchants, glovers, prosperous yeomen—people who had no formal education and could not read or write English, let alone Latin—wanted...
• Protestant reformers were understandably hostile, for they wished to dismantle the traditional Catholic culture and rituals out of which these pageants arose, and they campaigned...
• The next requirement is to hide the ladder—that is, you have to pretend that you are already there. You do so, Smith notes, by acquiring...

Personal Highlights:

• You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone has already agreed upon them. As Bill would point out, it’s the leader’s...
• Does the aberrant genius have her priorities straight? Eccentric behavior can be okay as long as it is in the service (or intended to be...
• if you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can. There are minor things that...

Personal Highlights:

• viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job.
• One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and...
• My invention of something called the “Z-buffer” was a good example of this, in that it built on others’ work. The Z-buffer was designed to...

Personal Highlights:

• If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
• Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
• Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions...

Personal Highlights:

• The fact that he willingly took on responsibility for product quality and any other unattractive duties that fell through the gaps allowed her to focus on more pressing concerns.
• department to another in the middle of the quarter in order to make sure that you could achieve a goal that was in jeopardy?”
• Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”

Personal Highlights:

• productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every...
• To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
• did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the...

Personal Highlights:

• The method of principled negotiation is hard on the merits, soft on the people.
• the more attention that is paid to positions, the less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties.
• Apart from the substantive merits, the feeling of participation in the process is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether a negotiator accepts...

Personal Highlights:

• People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate...
• The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful....
• You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole.

Personal Highlights:

• I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
• Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm.
• And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events...

Personal Highlights:

• Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.
• You must price your information goods according to consumer value, not according to your production cost.
• Providers of information on the Internet can exploit the same strategy: investors now pay $8.95 a month for a Web site that offers portfolio analysis...

Personal Highlights:

• They stabbed the great giant. Blood gushed out from Ymir’s corpse in unimaginable quantities; fountains of blood as salty as the sea and gray as...
• The three brothers made clothes for the woman and the man, to cover themselves and to keep them warm, in the chilly sea-spray on the...
• And there is the place named after its ruler: Hel, where the dead go who did not die bravely in battle.

Personal Highlights:

• Antagonism breeds extremism, and it was turning one into the zealous revolutionary and the other into an excessive advocate of caution, taking them beyond what...
• vol-au-vent

Personal Highlights:

• Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and...
• (Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt—hence “corned beef” it didn’t take long for Zea...
• the shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”)

Personal Highlights:

• Khazanah Nasional, but nothing like Mubadala. It would take six years for Low to establish himself as an Al Mubarak–like figure controlling his own fund...
• Low’s ability to bring Mubadala to the table marked a revival after the mess of the failed condominium deal. He latched onto the opportunity it...
• Next, Low had these look-alike offshore companies take minority stakes in the Malaysian construction firms. It now would appear to any prospective business partner doing...

Personal Highlights:

• As Mike knew, addresses are usually typed only for business mail, not personal. The package also had a slight bump, which was suspicious, considering it came from the Netherlands.
• Once an underachieving, largely browbeaten high school chemistry teacher, Walter White found in drugs the best way to express his technical brilliance as a chemist...
• Variety Jones was preternaturally aware of these hidden dynamics. He had been warning his boss about this for some time, pressing Dread to at least...

Personal Highlights:

• If most of what people wanted to do online was to be able to tell their family, friends, and strangers what they were up to,...
• The system of near-universal surveillance had been set up not just without our consent, but in a way that deliberately hid every aspect of its programs from our knowledge.
• I was party to it. All of that work, all of those years—who was I working for? How was I to balance my contract of...

Personal Highlights:

• The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can...
• Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my...
• The other way my father got contractors to work for a good price was by selling them on his reliability. He’d offer a low price...

Personal Highlights:

• Gotham—which in old Anglo-Saxon means “Goats’ Town”—was (and still is) a real village in the English county of Nottinghamshire, not far from Sherwood Forest. But...
• forests with towering stands of walnut, cedar, chestnut, maple, and oak. Orchards bore apples of incomparable sweetness and “pears larger than a fist.” Every spring...
• That they made better hosts than the inhabitants of the seaboard was confirmed as the Halve Maen sailed down “that side of the River that...

Personal Highlights:

• If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall.
• Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first...
• Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way.

Personal Highlights:

• The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by...
• All funeral parlors have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be...
• For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and...

Personal Highlights:

• In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar’s computations had been confirmed, Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as surveyor general.
• The first eight expeditions to Everest were British, all of which attempted the mountain from the northern, Tibetan, side—not so much because it presented the...
• And thus, shortly before noon on May 29, 1953, did Hillary and Tenzing become the first men to stand atop Mount Everest.

Personal Highlights:

• As I show in chapter 2, ship lines and railroads had been experimenting with containers for a half century before Malcom McLean’s trip to Jersey...
• A transport innovation of the 1880s, the refrigerated rail car, made meat affordable for average households by allowing meat companies to ship carcasses rather than live animals across the country.
• When transport costs are high, manufacturers’ main concern is to locate near their customers, even if this requires undesirably small plants or high operating costs....

Personal Highlights:

• Italy, Germany, and Japan were building huge military machines, America scrapped its navy, reduced its army, tried to lull itself into a belief that trouble...
• Seniority therefore added, in George Goodwin’s words, “a new non-constitutional dimension … to our constitutional system of separation of powers.”
• It was, in many cases, the rock on which they based their campaigns for re-election, since their more sophisticated constituents—the ones most deeply concerned about...

Personal Highlights:

• When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection:...
• You don’t need to cultivate separateness in the early stages of falling in love; you still are separate. You aim to overcome that separateness. As...
• It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy. Maybe he can love her, but it’s clearly much harder for...

Personal Highlights:

• So I was kept inside. Other than those few instances of walking in the park, the flashes of memory I have from when I was...
• We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.
• They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision,...

Personal Highlights:

• “We are so accustomed to considering our own thoughts private.”

Personal Highlights:

• He finally reached the EMERGENCIES menu – which included a cheerful icon of a cartoon figure suspended from a parachute. Bailing out was what everyone...
• When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion...
• In twelve short real-time years as a Copy, he’d tried to explore every possibility, map out every consequence of what he’d become. He’d transformed his...

Personal Highlights:

• Bud was running out of money and getting tired of eating the free food from the public matter compilers.
• Equity Lords
• “In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life.

Personal Highlights:

• Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Personal Highlights:

• was not impossible for a lugger to be trapped a light-year or two within the Slowness. It was then you’d thank goodness for the ramscoop...

Personal Highlights:

• Her world is one in which there is no great divide between the thinkers and the thoughtless, only a long continuum.
• It was everything: from the very beginning his people had known they were inheriting a used world. The ruins and the decayed relics of a...
• There had been no innovation that the ancients had not already achieved, and done better. How many inventors had been relegated to historical obscurity because...

Personal Highlights:

• This inexorable reality defines the second law of thermodynamics, and entropy is the measure associated with this loss of useful energy. While the energy content...
• Candles convert just 0.01% of chemical energy in tallow or wax to light. Edison’s light bulbs of the 1880s were roughly ten times as efficient....
• Bipedalism and efficient heat dissipation explain this feat. Quadrupedal ventilation is limited to one breath per locomotor cycle. The thoracic bones and muscles must absorb...

Personal Highlights:

• In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail...
• There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,”...
• Like arsenic, bismuth was a metallic element used in medicines. In particular, it was a key ingredient in antinausea and antidiarrhea formulas. One of the...

Personal Highlights:

• Any sailor worth his salt can gauge his latitude well enough by the length of the day, or by the height of the sun or...
• The measurement of longitude meridians, in comparison, is tempered by time. To learn one’s longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is...
• And so each hour’s time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude to the east or west.

Personal Highlights:

• In fact, the idea of a “total book” has a much longer history. In the past, encyclopedia compilers appreciated far more acutely than we do...
• call this the Da Vinci effect. The great Renaissance inventor generated endless designs for mechanisms and contraptions, such as his fantastic flying machines, but few...
• So the trick for a quick-start guide must be to provide appropriate technology for the post-apocalyptic world, in the same way that aid agencies today...

Personal Highlights:

• China is the only country that can genuinely be said to be universal, to overstep its boundaries, extending its presence to distant geographies. This is...
• In 2015, word started to reach Europe’s capital cities that the People’s Republic of China had launched an ambitious new initiative, a national project, perhaps...
• The Belt and Road reflects the change towards a more active foreign policy strategy, one aimed at shaping China’s external environment rather than merely adapting to it.

Personal Highlights:

• If the West ever falters, America will want to become less Western. As the fulcrum of world power moves away from the West, so will America. One senses
• Beijing promises local rulers help in increasing their ability to develop policies and deliver results. From the perspective of these rulers – limited as one...
• Letting the statue stay would be a sign of public acceptance of the British legacy. Investors in Europe and America took notice.

Personal Highlights:

• On a more subtle level, all the Western powers, including the Ottoman Empire’s/Turkey’s chief ally in the war, Germany, continued to refer to the city...
• Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.
• Through cutthroat tactics devised by its principal shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades...

Personal Highlights:

• Today, Ras Al-Khaimah is one of the poorest of the seven emirates of the UAE. For this, they hold the British responsible.
• 175 years of uninterrupted succession is probably unprecedented.
• Sheikh Maktoum saw the low-hanging fruit. He launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower Gulf. He abolished the 5 percent customs

Personal Highlights:

• Moreover, given the legacy of the Holocaust, the West has a particular responsibility to prevent another genocide in Europe. Otherwise, what were World War II...
• But saving the Jews as a reason to justify the death of American GIs would not have sustained the Roosevelt administration for even one week...
• It is only from bottom-line summaries that clear-cut policy emerges, not from academic deconstruction.

Personal Highlights:

• What we call the Byzantine Empire was in fact the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its citizens referred to themselves as Roman from...
• Byzantium—the ancient name of Constantinople.
• Handing over the western areas of the empire, where Latin was the dominant language, to Maximian, Diocletian kept the richer, more-cultured Greek east for himself....

Personal Highlights:

• So great is the volume of these glacial deposits that the Po Delta is advancing fifteen feet a year and the ancient port of Adria,...
• Geology has made the Adriatic’s two coasts quite distinct. The western, Italian shore is a curved, low-lying beach, which provides poor harbors but ideal landing...
• The scale of the operation dwarfed any of the city’s previous maritime expeditions. It required Dandolo to order the immediate suspension of all other commercial...

Personal Highlights:

• It was Portugal’s fate and fortune to be locked out of the busy Mediterranean arena of trade and ideas. On the outer edge of Europe,...
• In 1433, during the seventh expedition, Zheng He died, possibly at Calicut, on the Indian coast. He was most likely buried at sea. After him,...
• The Europeans of the Middle Ages had less contact with the Orient than had the Roman Empire. Marco Polo had walked and ridden there down...

Personal Highlights:

• Hence, it gives particular emphasis to important creators and carriers of memory, such as language, literature, law, religious and political institutions, and of course historical writing itself,
• The monasteries—in which laypeople stored their wealth for safety—were plundered.
• Effectively the country was controlled by about 250 people: the king, the great prelates (chosen by him), and about 170 barons with landed incomes of...