I love Tim Harford‘s stuff, and I’m surprised he hasn’t featured here before.
50 Things that Made the Modern Economy is a delightful romp through economic history from cuneiform to mobile money transfers by way of clocks and the Haber-Bosch process. For a more detailed review try this one by a chap called Ian Mann, who finishes off by describing it as ‘an intellectual smorgasbord’. He’s right… and it’s free on the podcasting app of your choice.
It’s a long time since I read The Undercover Economist, and I mainly remember the discussion of the positioning of coffee shops in the great opening chapter, and a story about a library with a leaky roof towards the end (?) where it tailed off…
I was going to recommend Messy, but it turns out that the book I was thinking was actually Adapt, which was, as I recall, quite good. One of these books contains a good riff on how a large pile of papers on your desk is actually quite a good filing system – as long as you put the last piece of paper you touched on top.
Intellectual CrossFit
T.H. is rather prolific, but I came here to recommend a recent TED talk, A Powerful Way to Unleash your Natural Creativity, in which he casts multitasking not as the villain but as the unlikely hero of creativity, intellectual enrichment, and general greatness… as long as it’s multitasking of the slow-motion variety, which he describes as intellectual CrossFit. I can only assume he’s read Hinterland and my posts on networks and hybrids.