Nonfiction audio is my main thing. Autobiographies, parenting, science, social issues, and some business or anything educational.
I consider nonfiction to be a healthier and more useful view of the world than the news.
I have a few Mastodon accounts, like @travisfw@fosstodon.org
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The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows …
This definitely belongs near the top of my list, especially considering I would be listening to the abridged 2012 audio version read by the author, Riane Eisler. Almost no excuse to leave it shelved.
The author shows that before there was money, there was debt. For 5,000 years humans have lived in societies divided …
There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers …
Nord's chapter 4, Motivation Drive and Wanting, strikes directly at the crux of my personal life challenges. The difference between wanting and pleasure. I want, and I have sometimes extreme drive, but I do not feel good about it, and am almost always disappointed. The countless times I have finished doing something and found myself pretending to be happy about it for the sake of others…
The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is …
I enjoying these, specifically the account of drama beetween neighborhood cats which I just finished. A nice book I don't have to pay much attention to, but am glad to, when I do. A reminder to take delight where I can, not just think hard about everything and stay busy.
There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers …
"Although hedonic hotspots [in the brain] are both small and distributed, they also function together as a pleasure network. […] These hedonic hotspots are your brain's map of pleasure, and their biology gives us a route into understanding the role of pleasure in mental health."
— The Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord (12%)
This is interesting to me because of the drug-induced anhedonia I experienced as a side effect of the ritalin I was forced to take for five years in my childhood. My experience of pleasure of all kinds never recovered to healthy levels, as is easy to rediscover at any time by comparing my experience with anyone who claims to enjoy anything that I also try to enjoy. (It is often difficult to describe not feeling pleasure because people are looking for an objective reason in the world, but it is easy to see that I don't reach the level of pleasure others express, even if I am finding some level of pleasure.)
Now I know the injury is not specific to a brain region.
Content warning Judgment of insightfulness
In this section on male and female culture I really feel like the Surgeon General is two decades behind. Maybe he is watering it down to be broadly accessible? Or maybe he doesn't know as many psychologists as I do? But he really missed how feminist culture is bringing loneliness to the previously socially adept sex by adopting masculine individualistic values, and he really missed the huge trove of insight into the psychology of relationships that can be gleaned from queer, lgbt, ace and aro communities, and he only scratched the surface of intergenerational social trauma in men, and the possibilities for healing that young boys have access to now that their fathers and grandfathers should be paying attention to. I hope I am speaking too soon.
Pertinent for our time, considering the "culture war," politics, nuclear family dynamics and all the other divisive factors of modern life.
There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers …
The book I've been looking for all my life (really)
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable …
I began this book over a year ago, but today is a good day to take it up again.
There is a growing movement of people with a different vision for their local communities. …
As an anarchist systems thinker I have to say I don't appreciate how they clearly and emphatically imply that social systems are necessarily hierarchical. They draw a false dichotomy between community and systems. Systems are not diametrically opposed to communities. Systems are just repeating and interrelated behavior patterns plus the other resources that support those behavior patterns. Communities have systems, sometimes named, sometimes unrealized, sometimes designed, sometimes appreciated, and sometimes dysfunctional. Systems are a way to match complicated dynamics with declarative semantics so it can be acknowledged and manipulated, instantiated, moderated, or ended. Hierarchical organizations are just one type of a huge range of human systems.
The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the professor of comparative …
I am committed to at least taking in everything published by #Graeber eventually
Travis F W
boosted
Bertrand Russell's classic introduction to philosophy, with relevant selections from various philosophers
"Philosophy, though unable to to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases knowledge of what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect."
A lovely, lucid, short introduction to some key questions at the heart of philosophy.
In ch 6, Chen takes aim at the pathology mindset (and ingrained dysfunction) of the medical industry. Chen, then, moves on to eugenics. This is one of those chapters I want to be played on popular radio.
