Thanks to posts over at Rich’s & Art’s, I picked up a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  It’s a fascinating read and ties together a ton of other ideas I’ve absorbed from other authors, ranging from Jerzy Kosinski to Ayn Rand to Jacques Monod to Alfred Korzybski.   I highly recommend it.

Speaking of Kosinski, it was a book review of his book Passion Play that led me to cancel my subscription to the National Review.  It wasn’t that the review was negative, it was that they made the factual error of saying that Kosinski won the National Book Award for his novel, The Painted Bird, when he actually won it for Steps.  Coming as it did after the Review’s scurrilous article on libertarianism, that error was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.