#BookLovers 📚

Retired teacher Antonio La Cava travels to the villages of Basilicata in his lovely little bookmobile to promote reading. Truly Amazing.

This is all it took.

Who still enjoys reading actual, physical books?? 🙋

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT. He knows his time is running out. So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour. He died 5 months later. This is that lecture. The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇 Bookmark it for later

Carl Sagan’s prediction about America, made 31 years ago.

Black Classic Literature: Autobiographies 🍯

“In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.” — Saul Bellow

BIG personal news: I wrote a book! And it's good. I promise. It comes out on September 15th! So what is I DISAGREE about? It's my answer to the question I get the most: How do you do it?  It's not just Democrats that ask me. It's people of all political stripes who watch the Five or see clips of me flying around and feel like they're going to get an ulcer from just a few minutes of the heated political debate we engage in daily. They want to understand the dynamic - "what's it like in commercial breaks?" - but more than that they want to know how I stay true to my values, find common ground where it's available, and communicate across political and social divides. And they want to do it, too! That's what I DISAGREE does. It uses my life experiences, and some social science, as a roadmap for big lessons that can help all of us do better in representing our beliefs in tough situations. Hopefully, we'll be able to forge a path toward better politics and, crucially, better relationships. You could be facing anything from the Thanksgiving table, to the water cooler at work (if you go to the office), to a TV hit in front of 4 million viewers. It's all rooted in using the same accessible tools for building confidence, knowledge, and approach to difficult conversations and issues.

“Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.” — Carl Sagan

“When you fear something, learn as much about it as you can. Knowledge conquers fear.” — Edmund Burke

Carl Sagan warned that suppressing uncomfortable ideas, common in religion and politics, is deadly for science. Science thrives on open inquiry, not dogma, and no one can predict who will make the next breakthrough.

“The most dangerous form of blindness is believing your perspective is the only reality.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“Read everything... but remember: a book is only a book. You must learn to think for yourself.” — Maxim Gorky

Sadly many Star Trek fans still do not understand this.

Bradbury on Reading

President Barack Obama talks about Belonging.

C. S. Lewis’s advice to a young schoolgirl on how to become a better writer: