HeyJaredBrain Food - Books are Food for your Brain
Writing that analyzes non-fiction books touching on topics that range from politics, culture, history, and psychology. Along with summaries, the writing includes essays that help make sense of the overwhelming information in our world.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 4, 2026
Latest issues
Balance (opens the original)
Read excerpt
How can I follow up last month’s post about love as a political philosophy? If you haven’t read it, please go back and take a look. It was titled, “All About Love.” So, this month, I will be discussing something that is just as crucial to find in life and that is balance. Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian management scholar best known for his work on organizations, strategy, and the balance of power in complex systems. His 2015 book “Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Cente
The Coming Wave (opens the original)
Read excerpt
One of my readers asked a while back if I would cover a book about AI. So here it is. But first, let me share my own AI story. I do not have AI write my pieces. That would defeat the whole purpose. But I have used AI to brainstorm, for some editing, and to help me with technical problems and research. I am rethinking this every day but it is a lot like social media. I had to have some experience with it, or I wouldn’t get all the hype.Early on, I was using Claude and our project was doing a revi
The 1900s (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Our book, “These Truths,” by Jill Lepore will now take us into more modern times. My grandparents were children at the turn of the century and by the early 1900s, the United States had entered a new world. It was now being shaped not just by laws and elections, but by mass media. The Civil War had settled some questions but it had not settled who holds power and who gets to be an American. Industrialization and immigration were transforming the country. Walter Lippmann was part of a generation o
What Flow can Teach us (opens the original)
Read excerpt
One theme we often explore is how disconnection, powerlessness, and changing social norms can create alienation. It is what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called anomie. Last month, we started looking at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.” book.” The book offers a solution to those emotions and the alienation that can result. Flow is worth trying as a way to add meaning into our daily lives and might be one step toward repairing our relationship w
Can love be political? (opens the original)
Read excerpt
I read this book about three years ago but just wasn’t quite ready to write about it. It wasn’t until we spent so much time covering why people cling to hierarchy and the damage done to our collective culture as a result of extreme individualism, that these ideas began to come back to me. I wanted to ask, what could counter these two ways of being? The answer may sound naive but isn’t it worth examining? This is where bell hooks comes in. In her 2018 book “All About Love,” she asks a very simple
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.
See coverage about Brain Food - Books are Food for your Brain