Cheery Friday e-mails
Every Friday I send a “Cheery Friday” email chock full of insights about learning and changing to a million registered learners from the massive open online course (“MOOC”) Learning How to Learn. To receive these emails, just register for the course here (it’s free, and registration takes only a few seconds). “See” you on Friday!
The Bilingual Brain
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Bilingual Brain, by Albert Costa. We’re suckers for books on bilingualism, and this recent book, by multilingual Albert Costa, (who is in real life a leading researcher on bilingualism), really delivers the goods on what we know from neuroscience. Unlike many authors wh …
More >
The Craving Mind
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Help Michael Live Here is a rare request directly from me (Barb) regarding a life-or-death situation. My niece Meg’s husband Michael is facing a rare, life-threatening neuro-biological disease. Michael and Meg are a young couple whose life has been completely upended. And Michael is the love …
More >
The Breakdown of Higher Education
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done, by John M. Ellis. This provocative book provides a sobering analysis of what is unfolding on college campuses today—a phenomenon similar to that which Barb experienced in her past wo …
More >
The Idea of the Brain
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience, by Matthew Cobb. This broad-ranging book starts near the dawn of written history, where we learn that even back in ancient Rome, active learning was a “thing.” “To demonstrate his discoveries Galen used ‘lecture-com …
More >
Born a Crime
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Year We watched Trevor Noah’s thoughtful video take on George Floyd, the Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery, and Amy Cooper, and were inspired to read Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Wow! This riveting book describes how, due to miscege …
More >
The Chiffon Trenches
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Week The Chiffon Trenches, by André Leon Talley. Barb’s own sense of fashion tends toward frumpy. So she was fascinated to read André’s descriptions of life at the highest levels of fashion—he was friends or colleagues with practically every major figure in high fashion over the …
More >
The Great Mental Models
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Week The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts and Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology by Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien. by Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien. There is intriguing evidence from neuroscience that our brains “reuse” patterns based on …
More >
In Hoffa’s Shadow
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, by Jack L. Goldsmith. Since Barb lives in the Detroit area (she has lunched at the old Machus Red Fox, where the notorious Hoffa was last seen), she can’t help but take an interest in t …
More >
Napoleon: A Life
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts. Having read Robert’s wonderful Napoleon, we now realize that we’d had an enormous gap in our understanding of European history—a gap related to Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. If you’re a biography buff, Napoleon himself was one of the …
More >
The Order of Time
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli. Who knew that a world class physicist—one of the founders of loop quantum gravity—could also write world class prose? In this lovely little book, Rovelli introduces us to the complexities of (current) conceptions of time, where nothing is …
More >
