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This book is a high level introduction to work on virality that includes a number of cases that illustrate the potential of narratives to build and gain their own momentum, causing real changes in the economy. Many of these connections are anecdotal, and while I loved the engagement with the literary theory literature there was surprisingly little with natural language processing and complex contagion research. This makes for a good read if you're completely unfamiliar with these fields, but otherwise it'll mostly feel like a rehash of basic concepts.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was undeniably an extremely important work in his era, but arguably its legacy as a philosophical touchstone in the centuries since is even more profound. After all, anyone today with a BA in accounting or economics knows much more about economics than Adam Smith did. Rather the use of Adam Smith as a quasi-religious figure for different purposes - from justifying US industrial policy in the 18th and 19th century to neoliberal principles in the 20th shows the contradictory readings of his work. Liu traces and examines all of these issues methodically, revealing not only much more about Smith himself but also why it's important to critically engage with any invocation of his work. Highly recommend

This book covers a lot of fundamental social psychology research and a number of compelling cases to demonstrate the different types and effects of failure. There's not a lot of new data here, and while the mostly case-based approach makes for good storytelling I feel like one could probably get the core of this book from one of the HBR pieces Edmondson has written. If you want a wide variety of examples to draw from to bring to a discussion around the importance of failing effectively, though, this book will serve you well.

This book is not an easy read, deeply engaging with the darkest period of US history and the development of economies and a society built on human commodification across the lifespan. Following that lifespan, starting at pregnancy and ending in the corpse trade that persisted into the late 1800s, Berry combines chilling accounts with macro analyses to demonstrate the depths of these practices. This is an essential American history. Highly recommend

If you've read other African American studies books, or any of Gates' other books, the first 80% of this book will mostly be review. It's still a good overview of Black literary and cultural history, but not too much that's new. Then you get to the conclusion chapter. Wow. Gates methodically dissects modern revisionist falsehoods about history, exposing how a small group of slaveholders and their descendants engaged in a systematic effort to rewrite US history post Reconstruction. He then moves to current efforts to censor texts that critically evaluate these histories. Highly recommend