BUILDING ON INSIGHTS from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, ‘The Sea We Swim In’ shows us how to see the world in narrative terms, not as a thesis to be argued or a pitch to be made but as a story to be told. This is the essence of narrative thinking. Learn more about The Sea We Swim In …
Books by Frank Rose
NEW: Frank Rose names the five best books on pattern recognition
When Shepherd.com asked Frank to recommend his favorite books on a subject of his own choosing, he chose Pattern Recognition. It’s the common thread of nearly everything he’s done for the past 15 years or so, starting with The Art of Immersion and continuing with The Sea We Swim In. The ostensible subject of both books was storytelling—but pattern recognition is what storytelling is all about.
Here’s his take on five books that in very different ways deal with humans’ capacity for pattern recognition and what drives it—our need for some semblance of structure in a (seemingly?) random world. Often this ends with some form of delusional thinking. So first up is Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns’s The Self Delusion, about the most basic delusion of all.
NOT LONG AGO WE WERE passive consumers of mass media. Now we approach television, movies, even advertising as invitations to participate. We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of narrative that is native to the Internet. Learn more about The Art of Immersion …
FOR DECADES, the Morris agency made deals that determined the fate of stars, studios, and television networks alike. But everything changed after the agency’s president dismissed his own best friend, the man who’d brought Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz out of the mailroom. A multi-generational saga of loyalty and betrayal in Hollywood. Learn more about The Agency …
IT SEEMS UNTHINKABLE TODAY—but forty years ago, when personal computers were still new and the World Wide Web had yet to be invented, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. And it wasn’t just Wall Street that applauded—it was most of Silicon Valley. Learn ore about West of Eden …
IN A CRAMPED LABORATORY in the Berkeley engineering school, scientists are trying to teach a computer to think—not just to shuffle data but to learn, reason, remember, understand English, and exhibit common sense. But first they have to get it to put on a raincoat before going out in the rain. Learn more about Into the Heart of the Mind …
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT BEING MALE. About power and discipline, sex and violence, and the roles they play in the lives of American men. Think of it as a personal and idiosyncratic survey designed to produce not statistical data but individual answers to the question of what it means to be a man. Learn more about Real Men…