by Aseem Gupta | Apr 8, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
George Carlin’s Napalm & Silly Putty is easy to misdescribe because it looks like a collection of jokes but behaves like a record of a mind refusing to leave anything unquestioned. Cars, airline announcements, refrigerators, dogs, supermarket etiquette, religion,...
by Aseem Gupta | Apr 5, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
George Carlin’s When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? does not behave like a conventional nonfiction book. It has no sustained thesis that advances neatly from chapter to chapter, no program to follow, and no narrative whose momentum depends on what happens next....
by Aseem Gupta | Apr 1, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
George Carlin spent much of his career making ordinary language sound newly ridiculous. A familiar expression, a polite social ritual, a bureaucratic euphemism, a football metaphor, a restaurant convention, or a supposedly serious institution could become comic...
by Aseem Gupta | Mar 30, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
When Randy Pausch delivered his now-famous Carnegie Mellon lecture on September 18, 2007, he was not participating in the usual academic exercise of pretending to give a final address. Pausch, a computer science professor with metastatic pancreatic cancer, had already...
by Aseem Gupta | Mar 28, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck became famous partly because its title sounds like an instruction to stop caring. That interpretation is catchy, but it is almost the opposite of what the 2016 book argues. Manson does not recommend emotional...
