Shakespeare: The World As a Stage

By Bill Bryson

What's fascinating about Shakespeare is how little we actually know about him. We have copies of most of his plays. We have some legal records, his birth, marriage, will & death certificates and a few mentions of him in various public records. And that's it. We know next to nothing about who he was like as a person. We have no personal letters. No letters from friends. No personal effects. Everything we know about him personally is conjecture. This book covers the endless conjecture, and how it came to being.

That we know so little of him isn't that surprising. We know very little about anyone who lived at that time. In addition, for any Shakespeare's artifacts to have survived to today, they would have had to survive calamities such as the Globe Theater fire of 1613, the Great London fire of 1666, and the bombings of London in World War 2. It is surprising is that we have as much as we have.

And the conspiracy theories... that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays. The book emphatically disagrees with them. There is no evidence that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Talking to Strangers

Malcolm Gladwell books are fun to read regardless of how solid the intellectual foundations are.

In Talking to Strangers, Gladwell argues that humans have three biases that break down when we are dealing with strangers.

Default To Truth-- We presume that people are telling the truth unless the evidence is overwhelming. We had to behave this way, or society would break down. This works against us when we a stranger deceives us. It also means we should not think harshly of people who were deceived by strangers. It's the way we are wired.

Transparency-- we think that the way we express our emotions, is the way everyone expresses their emotions. Everyone, especially strangers, will express their emotions differently. We should not judge someone because they didn't express their emotions the way we did.

Coupling-- Our actions are associated with the opportunities to take that action. Make it more difficult to commit suicide one way, and the suicide rate will go down. The suicidal won't find another way to kill themselves. Maybe the stranger is acting a particular way because of the time and the place, not because the stranger is bad.

How should we deal with strangers? With caution and humility