Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Brazen Weekender! Long time no speak, this is Bradley Hope, your loyal servant, and this is the newsletter where I share what the team has been watching, reading and listening to this week. 📖 First up this week, When We Ceased to Understand
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Brazen Weekender! Long time no speak, this is Bradley Hope, your loyal servant, and this is the newsletter where I share what the team has been watching, reading and listening to this week.
📖 First up this week, When We Ceased to Understand the World
First I want to talk about the most awe inspiring book I've read in a long time, When We Ceased to Understand the World, by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. It's what I can only describe as a beautiful fever dream of a book. I picked it up expecting a straightforward history of science and instead found myself tumbling through a kaleidoscope where fact and fiction blur into something entirely new. It's like standing at the edge of a black hole – terrifying yet impossible to look away from.
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What struck me most was how Labatut transforms these brilliant scientists – Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Grothendieck – into fully human characters, complete with their madness, obsessions, and moral shadows. The book does this strange thing where it makes quantum physics feel like a ghost story. If you're looking for something that will make your brain feel like it's being rewired as you read, this quite short book packs more wonder and existential dread than books three times its size. After that, you can move on to his follow-up work The Maniac.
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