Paul Miller

Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years, partly because it’s very well written and researched but mainly because it made me change my mind about some important issues. Perhaps the easiest argument for me to accept (although I still learned a great deal) [...]

About this time last year I went on a little day-trip to Birmingham with my friend Steven Johnson. It was grey and miserable and we had to go and buy umbrellas from Boots to keep dry. It was a fantastic day though. We were on the trail of Joseph Priestly tracking down the places he [...]

I picked up a copy of this in a bookshop when I was in the US and absolutely love it. Great for kids of all ages. “Howtoons: The Possibilities Are Endless” (Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen)

If you want a good insight into what being a first time entrepreneur is like, Nassim Taleb gets it spot on in this short passage from his book The Black Swan (the first book I’ve read in months by the way – when I was at Demos I read about one non-fiction book cover-to-cover per [...]

Jon Ronson had a great little piece in the Guardian Weekend yesterday that illustrates in just a few hundred words what’s changed and stayed the same about journalism in the last couple of decades. Them is one of my favourite non-fiction books – way ahead of its time in terms of the characters Jon chose [...]

There’s no escaping the similarities between the lonelygirl15 saga and the plot of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition. From the Washington Post: “The plot [of Pattern Recognition] centers on mysterious bits of video posted anonymously on the Internet. The shadowy black-and-white videos, called “the footage,” appear to feature a pair of lovers and hint deliciously [...]

I’ve got a review of Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks in todays Financial Times Magazine. Since the FT website doesn’t let you comment, I’d be interested to know what other people who’ve read it think. Here’s an excerpt from the piece: “There is, of course, something perverse about the fact that perhaps the [...]