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The Study Newsletter #001
by Ivaylo Durmonski
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A bimonthly bookish newsletter for lifelong learners and wanderers alike. Full of timely, wise, and deliberately short assortments ranging from book recommendations and summaries, articles, introduction to thinkers, thinking concepts, and more. All shaped specifically for our morally confused and widely distracted age.
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Hello online friends,
Welcome to the first issue of The Study Newsletter, replacing Unstuck.
(Make sure to mark this email as important and move it to your primary email box.)
As you can probably tell from the book summaries on my website, I love books and reading. The reason I'm making this change is not only to highlight more books and experiment with a new format but also, to introduce more interesting ideas to people.
You see, I'm subscribed, myself, to a handful of email bulletins but most of them focus on the same banal things: how to be successful quickly, or how to become super famous, or why you should do exactly as what the current modern people do, or why you should buy more gadgets. And while interesting, I believe these content creators are neglecting an important concept: that improving in a field, any field, requires time and learning.
This newsletter is something I wish existed. Consider The Study as your private (quiet) place online to retreat, read, study, and discover new things. But it is meant to be more than just a newsletter: I like to think of it like your undisturbed online space where you can take a quiet moment from your busy day to read and learn new stuff - just like the rooms that appeared in early modern Europe serving as a study, furnished with books and works of art.
My goal is to continue to provide you with hand-pick articles, share my summaries but also to introduce new books that I'm considering reading, short biographies of important thinkers, and more.
The idea of this newsletter is to be informative and interesting to read.
I really hope that you'd like the new format.
Of course, make sure to share your feedback. I'd love to hear what you think - just hit reply.
Here's the first issue:
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- [NEW] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Overwhelmingly comprehensive research of the big tech corporations that are now controlling our lives. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism can be considered as an encyclopedia that aims to explain how the famous companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) that we all use in some way in our daily lives first started and are now tracking our every move, analyzing our behavior with the intention to capitalize on our compulsive nature by encouraging impulse buys.
- Amusing Ourselves To Death: A book about a world yet to be infiltrated by the Internet. In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman explains how the cultural transition from a print-based society to a television-obsessed one negatively influences our lives. The author traces how our civilization went through several stages of communication – from mostly oral, to typographic-minded, and now we mainly being visually entertained.
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Support my work: My newsletter is sponsored by my dearest members. If you want to support my work and to get access to the full summaries, you can consider becoming a member yourself. This way, you'll gain access to everything on my site and give me the strength to continue doing what I do best - convert long books into short practical lessons.
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Interesting books I recently added to my reading list (and hopefully will read at some point):
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- Shame and Guilt by June Price Tangney: This book describes the similarities and differences between guilt and shame. The work offers compelling evidence about how shaming people can lead to negative behavior.
- Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman: A splendid collection of short stories from the philosopher-physicist Alan Lightman. All of them are about time, relativity, and physics as if they were the dreams of Albert Einstein.
- About Behaviorism by B.F. Skinner: A classic book about the controversial philosophy known as behaviorism, written by its leading exponent. Although dry, this is a very dense study about how we behave.
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Currently Reading |
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No Filter by Sarah Frier
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No Filter was named the winner of the 2020 Business Book of the Year by the Financial Times and McKinsey. To be honest, I was skeptical about the book and about the possible application of the text in real life but fortunately, I was mistaking.
The book presents chronologically the events around the creation of Instagram - how the app appeared, how was, and still is, influencing our lives, why Facebook acquired the company, and what happened after that.
No filter is a super light and interesting read. Expect a summary of the book in the following issue of the newsletter.
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Dictionary |
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Interesting words from books and around the web.
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Flaneur |
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noun
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The ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life. A deliberately aimless pedestrian.
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Cordolium |
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noun
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A Latin word that literally translates to heartfelt grief, or sorrow of the heart. Heartfelt grief. Heartache.
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Idyllic |
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adjective
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Like an idyll; extremely happy, picturesque. Charmingly simple or rustic. Something that's extremely pleasant, simple, and peaceful without any difficulties or dangers.
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Sigmund Freud |
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Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, and influential thinker of the early twentieth century. His famous method of treating patients is based on a set of theories and therapeutic techniques used to study the unconscious mind. He argued that the unexplored areas of our lives are key factors for understanding ourselves and conquering our struggles. He was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but his family moved to Vienna when he was four years old. Then, in 1938, to escape Nazi persecution, Freud left for England where he spent his last days.
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Big ideas: |
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- The unconscious mind: What we know, our conscious mind is just a small piece of what's happening in our brain. Freud argued that the unconscious, the unexplored areas of our lives form the processes that give a reason for most of our actions.
- The psychic apparatus: Mainly formed by the id, ego, and super-ego, this is a hypothetical conceptualization of important mental functions. By understanding these three, you'll make the unconscious conscious.
- Psychosexual Development: Children go through a series of psychosexual stages that lead to the development of the adult personality: oral, anal, phallic, latent, genital. Completing all of them leads to a healthy personality as an adult. If something remains unresolved in a stage, however, the individual might remain fixated or stuck at a certain stage.
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From my desk:
- The 10 Best Books I Read in 2020: I was able to read the number of books I had set as a goal at the beginning of the year – 41 books. See the best 10 books I read in 2020.
- Ten Things I’ve Learned in 2020: In addition to the books I read, every year I'm reflecting on the things I've learned. Hopefully, this post will give you ideas about how to make improvements in the new year.
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From around the web:
- Success Addicts Choose Being Special Over Being Happy: "As I once found myself confessing to a close friend, “I would prefer to be special than happy.” He asked why. “Anyone can do the things it takes to be happy—going on vacation with family, relaxing with friends … but not everyone can accomplish great things.” I would put off ordinary delights of relaxation and time with loved ones until after this project, or that promotion, when finally it would be time to rest."
- 100 Tips For A Better Life: "You have a plan. A time-traveller from 2030 appears and tells you your plan failed. Which part of your plan do you think is the one that fails? Fix that part."
- Why Small Habits Make a Big Difference: "While everyone is looking for big gains—the proverbial get rich quick scheme—there is a space that’s not getting as much attention. Those who understand compound interest can make it work for them and those that don’t understand it spend much of life trying to get out from its shackles."
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Handicap Principle |
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The handicap principle is a hypothesis proposed by Amotz Zahavi to explain why some signals exist in the animal world. To show superiority, and to increase their chances of mating, animals will perform costly to them, and also clearly visible signals or traits, to show to others their greater biological fitness. For example, when a gazelle sights a lion it jumps high into the air several times before it flees. This clearly visible act shows that the gazelle is in good enough physical condition to escape the predator. This principle can be also observed in humans. When we help others, we handicap ourselves in a way - helping others costs us time and resources. Our prime motive is not altruistic, though, we aid others to increase our prestige within the group.
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"We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
- E. O. Wilson
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Thank you for being a part of this list.
Once again, I'd love to hear your feedback about my new newsletter.
Hit reply to share what you think. I read and reply to every email!
Have a great rest of the week!
Regards,
Ivaylo Durmonski
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