Note-taking Lessons From America’s Greatest Biographer
For example, some of you may have wondered about a special section of The Honest Broker called The Vault. This includes more than 400 literary essays that I’ve written over the years. The vast majority of these were simply the result of me thinking about books I’d read, and trying to organize my observations after I’d finished them.
Nobody hired me ... See more
Nobody hired me ... See more
Ted Gioia • How I Take Notes
During his prewar years as a congressman, he had, in a monumental feat of ingenuity and resolve, brought electricity to his isolated district, in a single stroke bringing the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country into the twentieth century. And he had maximized the effect within it of so many New Deal programs that he had been called “the best c
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
The historian and biographer extends this backwards in time. Now youth find models of honor not only among the living but among dead. To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider ... See more
T. Greer • The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite
let his mind roam on the page.
Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From
Nothing could change him. Some men—perhaps most men—who attain great power are altered by that power. Not Lyndon Johnson. The fire in which he had been shaped—that terrible youth in the Hill Country as the son of Sam and Rebekah Johnson—had forged the metal of his being, a metal hard to begin with, into a metal much harder. In analyses of other fam
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