Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America is a funny and poignant book examining America’s obsession with positive thinking. In it Ehrenreich not only details her own experiences with the positive-thinking movement, but delves into its history and evolution.

(more…)

Those of us who believe we are familiar with Charles Darwin often think of the quiet man who went about his work with little fanfare; a man who was so gracious that when Alfred Wallace sent him a manuscript that seemed to anticipate Darwin’s own evolutionary theory, he arranged a joint reading before the Linnean Society; a man who was so retiring that he relied on Thomas Huxley to be his bulldog in debates. Darwin’s Armada will certainly shake those beliefs free from your mind.

(more…)

You don’t have to spend too much on time online before you run into conspiracy theorists who claim dubious forces are manipulating the world’s financial systems. They say the system is unfairly set up to make it impossible for the average person to be successful. Believers in this conspiracy would do well to remember the adage known as Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It is the stupidity in the financial system that is documented in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.

(more…)