Nothing against Harry Potter, but for me, A Series of Unfortunate Events takes the cake. Long before the Netflix series and the (much better) movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Jim Carrey, there were 13 books. And each book had thirteen chapters, recounting the journeys of three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. In Book 1 (and 2-13) they must escape from Count Olaf's never-ending plots to steal their inheritance fortune, and seek out the truth about their parents' mysterious deaths. And then there is Lemony Snicket himself. 

The coy and quirky detective-narrator, the one assembling this series of unfortunate events for us the readers; for me, he is the most interesting part of the novels. Each book begins with an ominous dedication page to a woman known only as Beatrice, Snicket's lover, (For example, To Beatrice—darling, dearest, dead.), and the enigmatic persona grows from there, weaving through the chapters via a series of self-referential, fourth-wall-breaking moments, that halt the Baudelaire's strict narrative, yet offer witty vocabulary sessions, philosophical quips, and deliberately-over-the-top flourishes to heighten the ominous, sinister tone of the story's world; simultaneously undoing that tone. 

The Bad Beginning is one hell of a fun read. Leaning on the author's back-cover description, "In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast." Rereading it eighteen years later, I still laughed out loud at times and can't wait to dive into Lemony Snicket's other series, All the Wrong Questions, a spoof of kid-detective and noir genres.

"​With all due respect." [JG]
​

5. "In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphan's friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression which here means "they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them very lonely." You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friend sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed." 

4. "Unless you are a lawyer, it will probably strike you as off that Count Olaf's plan was defeated byViolet signing with her left hand instead of her right. But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too fare from where you live has a law bars me from coming within five miles of its borders..." 

3. "For most of the afternoon, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny cooked the puttanesca sauce according to the recipe. Violet roasted the garlic and washed and chopped the anchovies. Klaus peeled the tomatoes and pitted the olives. Sunny banged on a pot with a wooden spoon, singing a rather repetitive song she had written herself." 

2. "[Count] Olaf's eyes were shining bright as if he already had an idea." 

1. "The morning's note from Count Olaf ordered them to chop firewood in the backyard, and as Violet and Klaus swung the axe down over each log to break it into smaller pieces, they discussed possible plans of action, while Sunny chewed meditatively on a small piece of wood." 

"It is a pleasure to see young people interested in books..." 

- Justice Strauss, The Bad Beginning
​

Coralie Bickford-Smith
​

"Close to half the birds on the planet are songbirds, some four thousand species, with songs ranging from the mumbled melancholy chortle of the bluebird to the forty-note aria of the cowbird, the long Byzantine song of the sedge warbler, the flutelike tune of the hermit thrush, and the amazing seamless duets of the male and female plain-tailed wren."

- Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

* * * 
​

There are 400 billion birds on earth. That's 80 per human. And yet, for as resourceful and resilient as the feathered species are, author and "bird nerd" Jennifer Ackerman contends we still know very little about—and worse, largely dismiss—them. "Our language reflects our disrespect. Something worthless or unappealing is 'for the birds.' An ineffectual politician is a 'lame duck.' To 'lay an egg' is to flub a performance. To be 'henpecked' is to be harassed with persistent nagging. 'Eating crow' is eating humble pie. The expression 'bird brain,' for a stupid, foolish, or scatterbrained person, entered the English language in the early 1920's because people thought of birds as mere flying, pecking automatons, with brains so small they had no capacity for thought at all. That view is a gone goose." 

Birds are smart. Very smart. They make tools. They count. They imitate behaviors of other birds and even humans. They invent new solutions to old problems. They remember where they put things—especially the Western scrub jay which can recall up to 33,000 winter food caches. They can anticipate and guard against storms. They exploit opportunities, like the great tits and blue tits of the 1920's who learned how to open cardboard bottle tops to drink the cream off the top of milk bottles, and spread their knowledge over the next twenty years to hundreds of localities throughout England, Wales, and Ireland. Birds make nests up to idiosyncratic esthetic standards, even in the absence of females and the chance of mating. The allegedly 'bird-brained' pigeon has an incredible homing instinct and ability to traverse foreign landscapes...These incredible feats and others suggest profound mental capacities and abilities, ones comparable to those found in some primates.

Intelligence, or genius, though, can be tricky concepts to pin down; there are plenty of definitions and approaches to measuring smarts, even within species, let alone finding some common ground from which to judge animals against one another. Ackerman lays out these conversations and debates early on—a contentious dialogue that includes some major players weighing in throughout history: names like Aristotle, Charles Darwin, and primatologist Frans de Waal. The central issue is: Are we merely anthropomorphizing, that is, ascribing uniquely human characteristics to the non-human? Or, are the critics of bird intelligence simply in what de Waal coined as "anthropodenial," attempting to build a conceptual brick wall to segregate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom? 

Weighing it at a featherlight 250 pages, The Genius of Birds is rich with eight uniquely self-contained chapters, that explore this central issue, and offers a banquet of anecdotal observations, neurological studies, fascinating experiment results, and a trove of open questions. We traverse the skies, woods, seas, islands, cities — and hear tidings from the perhaps "extraordinary genius packed tightly into that tiny puff of feathers" that, if we're listening, might "lay the mind wide open to the mysteries of a bird's knowing — the what and the why. These are wonderful puzzles to keep on our bookshelf, to remind us how little we still know."

I'm reminded often while reading this book of a short passage from Mark Kurlanksy's, Paper, about how "the story of [a mythic hero of China] Cangjie learn[ed] writing from animal tracks," and how the myth "parallels a Sumerian story that tells of birds that were scribes and therefore sacred; their tracks resembled cuneiform, but were a type of cuneiform that humans could not read." 

I finished The Genius of Birds  sitting on a bench overlooking Lake Rancho Santa Margarita at sunset. A Canadian goose honks from the distant bank at a man, until joined by what might be its mate. And across the water, closer to me, a chorus of bold sparrows sing atop a pair of swaying palm trees and the adobe roof slats of the local Starbucks. I will never look at or listen to a bird the same way again. ​[JG]

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science, nature, and human biology for almost thirty years. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, Scientific American, The New York Times, and other places. After perusing the titles of some of Jennifer's other books, I'll be picking up Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body and report back! 

* Website *
​

10. "Intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure. One psychologist describes it as "the capacity to learn or to profit by experience." And another is the capacity to acquire capacity." - the same sort of circular definition offered by Harvard psychologist Edwin Boring: "Intelligence is what is measured by intelligence tests." (8)

9. "The fog is lifting. I can begin to make out the undulant curtain of the Blue Ridge Mountains across the valley, purpled by the haze. From a grove of trees nearby comes the piercing zeet of a chickadee. I wander over, and there is the bird perched in a pine tree, rolling out its string of dees, perhaps taking measure of my presence. One has only to consider the extraordinary genius packed tightly into that tiny puff of feathers to lay the mind wide open to the mysteries of a bird's knowing — the what and the why. These are wonderful puzzles to keep on our bookshelf, to remind us how little we still know." (266)

8. "Cities have been called learning machines. They make make smart birds even smarter. Who can't cope in the urban jungle? Those birds distinctly unsparrow-like, skittish, or set in their ways. The bird startled off the nest by human hustle or bustle or thrown for a loop by round-the-clock lighting. The small-brained, the inflexible, the specialist." (253)

7. "In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of creepy crawlies—an ap"parently ingenious new use of materials." (245)

6. "To survive the harsh winters [of Wstern North America], a single nutcracker will gather more than 30,000 pine seeds in a single summer, carrying up to one hundred seeds at a time in a special large pouch under its tongue. These it buries in up to 5,000 different caches scattered throughout a territory of dozens, even hundreds, of square miles. Then later it finds the scattered treasures...They rely almost completely on memory to locate their personal caches—and they can remember them for as long as nine months, despite radical changes in the appearances of the landscape across the season caused by snow, leaves, or shifting rock and soil." (211) 

5. "The primeval rainforest that once blanketed New Caledonia has been reduced to pockets. But the island remains a diversity hotspot, with insect species thought to number upward of 20,000, including more than 70 native species of butterflies and 300-plus species of moths. There are some 3,200 species of plants on the island, three quarters of which are endemic, found nowhere else. For this reason, New Caledonia is often considered its own distinct floristic subkingdom. It is also an ark of colossal creatures...Strange things happen on islands. Gigantism is not uncommon. Nor is dwarfism or gaudy experiment or anomalies of every kind...Islands are castles of experiment surrounded by moats. Competition is less fierce and predators less abundant than on continents, so evolutionary experimentation is not so quickly or ruthlessly punished. That includes behavioral experimentation, like tooling around with tools. (perhaps it's not surprising that the only other birds on the planet to regularly potter with tools are the woodpecker finches of Galapagos.)" (75-6)

4. "Reciprocity in the form of gift giving is another kind of social behavior unusual in nonhumans but fairly common among certain birds, including crows. Two decades ago when a family friend first reported receiving gifts from the crows she regularly fed—a marble, a little wooden bear, a bottle cap, colored berries, all left on her doorstep—I was skeptical. But in recent years, tales have rolled in from all over the country of crows offering up gifts of jewelry, hardware, shards of glass, a Santa figurine, a foam dart from a toy gun, a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, even a candy heart with 'Love' printed on it, delivered just after Valentines's Day." (105)

3. "As early as 350 B.C., Aristotle noted that songbirds do not utter the same voice as their parents when they sing, if they are reared away from home and hear other birds singing." Darwin remarked on it, too. He knew that birds had an instinct to sing just as we have an instinct to speak, btu they learn the songs themselves, just as we learn languages. He suspected that birds, like people, pass alongn their songs from generation to generation, forming regional dialects." (149)

2. "In birds like the mockingbird, canary, and cockatoo, the gates of learning stay open for longer, so they can continue to add new songs as they grew older. But learning is harder for adults than for juveniles. We human, too, are "open-ended learners." And like mockingbirds and canaries, for us the task of language learning grows more arduous as we age." (154)

1. "Extravagance in nature is so often found in proximity to sex." (161)

"Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer becomes a very dangerous man to the prince."

- Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy from Part I of Conspiracy

In 2007, Gawker outs Peter Thiel, Facebook's first investor and Paypal cofounder, as gay. Nine years later in 2016, Gawker declares bankruptcy, slammed with a $140 million judgement after publishing an illegally recorded sex tape of Hulk Hogan. "These two seemingly unrelated events," author Ryan Holiday writes in Conspiracy, "were in fact the bookends of a nearly decade-long plot masterminded by [outed Peter] Thiel..." 

​Surreal, disturbing, and potentially instructive, the story of Thiel's secret plans to totally and legally destroy one of the most powerful and ruthless media companies of the 21st century is brought into sunlight in a very dark time for the media landscape—a time that includes fake news, #gamergate and Trump, Breitbart and Salon, Antifa and Anonymous.

As newsworthy and contemporary as the events in Conspiracy are, Ryan Holiday's commentary places them into a dramatic, overarching narrative—a narrative largely crafted by Peter Thiel, his camouflaged legal team, and the (in)famous, anonymous, ex-Gawker employee known as Mr. A.

But in Conspiracy, we as readers are privy to enjoy the killing (and suicide) of Gawker from even higher vantage point than Thiel himself, in part due to the author's exclusive access to Nick Denton and other Gawker team members, and more importantly because of the author's ability to draw both philosophical and tactical parallels with both ancient and contemporary strategists of war, sports, and politics. 

This book is a trip. And especially for me because I actually worked with Gawker on behalf of Huckberry from 2015-2017, and saw firsthand the events unfold: the suite, the trial, the verdict, the bankruptcy, the auction and purchased by Univision, the shutting down of Gawker.com, the second-life of its various affiliate sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo, and the age-old-yet-seemingly-still-too-forgotten truth play out: actions have consequences.  [JG]
​

8. "When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, it destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence." - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 'Right to Privacy,' 1890

7. "In the search for collaborators, hunger is an essential qualification. While it's dangerous to conspire with people who have a lot to lose, you can't conspire without someone who is afraid to bet on themselves, who isn't willing to take a big stake on something that very well could fail. Where those two traits overlap there is often a sweet spot: the man or woman who has something to prove and something to protect, the strong sense of self-belief coupled with that killer instinct." - Ryan Holiday

6. "The staples of old yellow journalism are the staples of the new yellow journalism: sex, crime; and event better, sex crime." - Nick Denton in a Gawker memo

5. "I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various thing that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if i defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media landscape." - Peter Thiel

4. "Today, we have a complex relationship with secrecy insomuch as we live in a world that no longer values it." - Ryan Holiday

3. "Keep your object always in mind, while adapting your plan to circumstances." Liddell Hart, Strategy 

2. "He who traffics with a tyrant becomes his slave, though he goes to him a free man." - Sophocles

1. "There are things that were very tempting, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Retributive justice. But I think those would've ultimately been self-defeating. That's where you just become that which you hate...There were all these things that you could be tempted to do and it's not clear they would work any better. So we decided very early on we would only do thing that are totally legal, which is a big limitation...We were comfortable taking a very aggressive legal posture, just entirely within the system." - Peter Thiel

Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author of books on marketing, entrepreneurship, ancient Stoic philosophy, American culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into twenty languages and appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Fast Company, The New York Observer, and others. 

I'm also a big fan of three other books by Ryan: Trust Me, I'm Lying, The Obstacle is the Way, about which I had the privilege of interviewing him in 2016, and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, & Advertising.

I first encountered Ryan by way of the Chase Jarvis Live show in 2012, and since have discovered an incredible amount of books from other authors and creatives, including bestselling author Robert Greene, CEO of Breather Julian Smith, human guinea pig Tim Ferriss, and others. 

"How we have lost this. How squeamish we have become. We now blindly demonize what is often one of the most effective forms of action. How vulnerable this ignorance has made us to the few real conspiracies, successful or not, that exist in the world. In this rare occasion, though, we got a peek behind the curtain, as the title of Gawker's last post put it, of how things worked." 
​
- Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy

PERENNIAL SELLER
The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

Ryan Holiday
​

GROWTH HACKER MARKETING
A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising 

Ryan Holiday
​

THE OBSTACLE IS THE WAY 
An interview with author Ryan Holiday

Jon Glatfelter
​

CONFESSIONS OF
​AN ADVERTISING MAN

David Ogilvy
​

Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was an American playwright, poet, and and journalist. Scanning through his extensive list of works, a few caught my eye that I've added to my reading pile: his play Joan of Lorraine, which was adapted for the screen and stars Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, and also Anderson's 1934 play Valley Forge, which reimagines the harsh winter encampment of George Washington's ragtag army. Will report back soon! 

5. "We...bring this charge against Socrates—that he is guilty of crime, first because he does not worship the gods of our city, but introduces new divinities of his own; second, because he corrupts the thinking of our young men. We make this charge and demand an immediate trial. The penalty due is death." — Crito

4. "Nothing could be healthier than to bring the whole thing into the open, right out in the good sunlight before every man in Athens with every possible charge levelled against me and full discussion of politics, gods, and men." — Socrates

3. "I must say that the search for truth is more sacred than any god, more desirable than any woman, more hopeful than any child, more lovely than any city, even our own! If you have not seen this, you will vote against me, and you should. But you are men of Athens, and you have seen it or Athens would not be here, would not from the beginning have been possible.  — Socrates

2. "Athens has always seemed to me a sort of mad miracle of a city, flashing out in all directions, a great city for no discoverable reason. But now I see that Athens is driven and made miraculous by the same urge that has sent me searching your streets. It is the Athenian search for truth, the Athenian hunger  for facts, the endless curiosity of the Athenian mind, that has made Athens unlike any other city. This is a city drenched with light—the light of frank and restless inquiry—and this light has flooded every corner of our lives: our courts, our theater, our athletic games, our markets—even the open architecture of the temples of our gods! ... Shut out the light and close our minds and we shall be like a million cities of the past that came up out of mud, and worshipped darkness a little while, and went back, forgotten, in the darkness!" — Socrates

1. "My spirit you can certainly have, and anyone can have it who remembers it and wants it."  — Socrates

" Be of good courage, Xantippe, and lose nothing of Socrates. Knowing how great he was, think of his life, not of his death. Still, the death, too, if you consider it carefully, appears noble and excellent. Farewell. " 

— Friend Xenophon to Xantippe, Socrates' widow, in a letter post-trial and execution
​

Terence Rattigan
​

Coralie Bickford-Smith is a "designer of fine things. Mostly books." She currently is working in-house at Penguin Publishing.

I first came across her work via Penguin's clothbound classics a few years back, whose covers she with their richly colored, pattern-based covers that reference a Victorian-era sense of design and quality construction. My favorite of the series is actually Les Miserables with its red cardinals and dark gray cloth binding. 
​
Coralie's second children's book is titled The Worm and the Bird, published by Penguin in 2017. ​You can see more of Coralie's work at her website and Instagram.
​

Mark Kurlansky
​​