Banana (Dan Koeppel)

Bananas start my day. I eat one almost every morning and seldom leave a grocery store without a fresh bunch. But the familiar yellow Cavendish banana is a threatened fruit, succumbing to Panama Disease in several parts of the world and facing extinction like the Gros Michel banana so popular 50 years ago.
I [...]

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The Big Switch (Nicholas Carr)

History has been known to repeat itself.  In The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny [LibraryThing / WorldCat], Nicholas Carr identifies one trend that seems to be doing a rerun in our modern world.  He connects the rise of electrical utilities in the late nineteenth century and the advent of Internet utilities during our own era.
The [...]

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Freakonomics (Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner)

Back in my college days, economics was one of the careers I considered. I even graduated with a minor in the subject despite excelling in little more than the fundamental supply and demand graphs from my very first Macroeconomics 101 class.  But that’s okay. “Economics,” someone once said, “is the science that makes astrology look [...]

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