How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Very interesting book. It discusses the instinctive versus thinking mind. There are pitfalls of the 'thinking' brain such as loss aversion and difficulty with high complexity. The book highlights that very experienced people, quarterbacks, poker players, have instincts which can be correct and these have to be relied upon in some brief decision window situations rather than the slower 'thinking' process. Nevertheless, other people in more life/death situations need to be mindful of pitfalls of their instincts and override them or disregard them, for example, in panic situations. In a way this book is a lot like parts of 'Blink' and 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell, but somehow it seems more cohesively written.

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A few people coming to this post are asking if Lehrer is gay. Though he's somewhat cute, I believe he is married to a woman. Besides on his latest book jacket, he's obviously straight, wearing the horrific fashion faux pas of two tone plastic glasses frames.

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Lehrer has since had a big downfall because of made up information in his more recent book Imagine and rehashed/reworked blog posts.  This book How We Decide has been pulled by the publisher because of similar inaccuracies.

SFMOMA: Avedon and Adams/O'Keefe

You might think Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keefe would be more exciting than Richard Avedon. You'd be wrong. I'd seen Avedon's American West at the Cantor (Stanford) exhibit a few years ago, and I knew he was good. But the SF MOMA exhibit has those as well as some photos from other times and with famous people, including Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, Truman Capote, and an ensemble portrait of Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory. As it happens some guys are nude in that last one. There's also the photo of Twiggy with the massive and awesome hair all in the air. The photos are all from large format film and large prints.

If your strapped for time, I'd almost skip the Adams and O'Keefe which wasn't terribly new and was horribly crowded.