Culture Reading List

Here’s some works, primarily non-fiction, that I especially appreciate, related to the topics of cultural evolution, the cultural niche, cultural technologies, design, and the birth of our current global monoculture, modernity.

• The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Joseph Henrich
• What Can A Body Do?: How We Meet The Built World, Sara Hendren
• Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, Noel Perrin
• “The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World”, Benjamin Breen
• “Large Language Models as a Cultural Technology”, Alison Gopnik
• Economics of Money & Banking MOOC, Perry Merhling