Life Hacks from Dead People: Recent Episodes
Eurydice
From individual lives lived to make the world a better place to heartbreaking mass tragedies, I review the books that memorialize them.
This episode's life hack is "Don't follow the crowd," but that's a little misleading because, in "Fever Pitch," author Nick Hornby explores how following the crowd to ultimate soccer fandom gave him a sense of belonging and a sort of map to manhood. But it was also following the crowd--or being overrun by them--that led to so many ghastly tragedies in soccer.
My 23 year-old son, Charlie Fisher, joins me to review "Fever Pitch" for this episode.
After setting the scene of Steven Johnson’s fabulous book “The Ghost Map” in Episode 1, I share some key passages from the book and a seemingly prescient piece from Johnson’s epilogue written in 2006.
Life Hack #1: Sometimes Everyone Else is Wrong. I review Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and how it changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.”