For Steven Pinker fans out there, he has a new book, The Stuff of Thought. It just came from Amazon but it'll have to wait. I'm working through a book by Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells that outlines the London environment, fellow authors, actors and companies, etc. during the time that Shakespeare did his writing. (The best Bard book that I've read, in which Wells features prominently, was The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum.) Then, I have cued-up a book on the evolutionary development of language by Christine Kenneally that should be a good prelude to the Pinker book.

Just finished Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer. Better than Blink, it looks at the underlying structure of unconscious thought, how it evolved and how it directs our actions. One surprise: he details the importance of ignorance in intelligence.