Category Archives: JRE Books

Kliph Nesteroff – The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy (2015)

Kliph Nesteroff is a former stand-up comic turned writer. A longtime contributor to WFMU, writing about the history of comedy, Nesteroff’s latest project is hosting the Classic Showbiz Talk Show, a live series in Los Angeles that has welcomed comedy luminaries like Mel Brooks, Fred Willard and Laugh-In creator George Schlatter.

Michael Pollan – How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018)

Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinatedby the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

Peter Godfrey-Smith – Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2017)

In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (2013)

Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.  In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer­tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil­ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets […]