Euphemistically speaking, I’m ‘between opportunities’ at the moment. Hopefully it’ll be a brief interlude, but pandemics can certainly slow a career path (that was already diverging).
At any rate, I wanted to read something that wasn’t business, tech or politics – something not distracting, per se, but engrossing. I found it in ‘Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Future’ by Melvin Sheldrake.
The NYT review will give you more about the riches on the pages of ‘Entangled Life,’ but it’s a defining, solid read: entertaining, instructive, expansive and well-researched.
That said, appearing several times, is the brilliant Dr A.L. Barabasi and his book ‘Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life.’
Barbasi’s ‘Linked’ book changed the rubric of how I intake anything and everything.
Sheldrake’s book helps round out how the natural world so very much resembles the world
humans create, and vice versa.
• One experiment had fungi create a network that mapped directly to Tokyo’s subway system
• Another experiment re-created a fungal ‘highway’ that mirrors the UK’s road system
The insights and notions in these books help to keep at the fore how interconnected things are, both seen and unseen – anticipated and surprising.
It’s almost mythical in scale how intertwined and interconnected everything really is (which ‘Entangled Life’ tackles to a decent degree).
For instance, when a fungus invades an ant, and directs the ant to destroy itself to the benefit of the fungus, who’s in ‘charge’? Another philosophical take is where does a blind person ‘end’? At the end of the person’s walking stick? At the stick’s handle? At the person’s hand?
I’m trying to keep these posts tight, but I could gush about each of these books (and their inherent findings) for longer than anyone would want to read. (That’s what links are for, right?)