Anna Gát

The Seven Rules of Trust sees Wikipedia as a blueprint

From our US edition

Everybody criticizes Wikipedia, but everybody uses it. Having spent my childhood cross-legged on my carpet reading dictionaries and encyclopedias, I found it a revelation and refuge from the get-go. Google could never emotionally compete. While some AI products have become useful knowledge tools, there is still nothing like Wikipedia’s hyperlink paradise, which allows nights to slip away as you click through slices of world history or science. Now its co-founder Jimmy Wales has written a book (with the help of author Dan Gardner) about what enabled this impossible project to become one of the world’s favorite utilities. When reading The Seven Rules of Trust, two things jump out at you.

wikipedia

Living one’s best life

From our US edition

In our era of Twitter hot takes and Medium listicles promising to make you millions, I have a soft spot for life-wisdom books, meditations of the old school that you can spend quality time with even when the ideas presented in them are timeless. I’ve read with pleasure the popular life guidance books of the past decades, from The Happiness Hypothesis or Letters to a Young Contrarian to Zena Hitz’s quietly transformative Lost in Thought, and I felt a renewed connection with the ancient questions of existence in a modern retelling. It should be the habit of all widely read thinkers, whether coming from STEM, the humanities or the social sciences, to sit down and write an accessible recap for all of us of what they have found out.

wild problems