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Bill Gates didn’t become a success by shying away from giving his opinion. He’s opinionated on countless topics, including his favorite books.
Gates often shares his favorite reading material on his official website and his latest book choice is allegedly his “new favorite book of all time.” Ironically, his old “favorite book of all time” is by the same author.
“For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.
I’m going to stop talking up Better Angels so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, Enlightenment Now, is even better.”
The full title of the book is Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress and the basic idea is that people should stop freaking out that there’s danger around every corner, no matter what your mom tells you.
“Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases.”
Pinker explains that people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, once again contrary to the stuff your mom tells you over the phone, in text warnings and email forwards. Maybe pick up the book for you and her?
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