With a wee bit more time on my hands now, or that is what I keep telling myself, I have been chewing on the fun scribbles of one Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think that iconoclasts who write in an entertaining manner are folk who tickle my intellectual fancies more often than not. A good book to me is one that provokes new ideas, disturbs what I thought were settled ideas (yes, I do have a few) and also is a tad playful. Taleb's two books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan both qualify on these grounds. Taleb is wonderfully skeptical and delightfully curious in his exploration of ideas which touch on much of what count as important in education, the academy and other interesting and important bits of social space.
I came across an excellent review of The Black Swan. Well worth a read.
