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3 Books is a completely insane and totally epic 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. Each chapter discusses the 3 most formative books of one of the world's most inspiring people. Sample guests include: Brené Brown, David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Rich Roll, Soyoung the Variety Store Owner, Derek the Hype Man, Kevin the Bookseller, Shirley The Nurse, Vishwas the Uber Driver, Angie Thomas, David Mitchell, Surgeon Ge ...
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Nick Sweetman is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists. Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend Michael Bungay Stanier, who was our guest back in Chapter 48, and as we strolled under a giant bridge I saw a giant ... well, it looked like a photo! But it wasn't a photo. It was a massive spray-paint…
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Who else loves David Sedaris? I discovered him in 1997 when an old mentor/editor at Golden Words, my college humor papers, suggested I pick up his book 'Naked' to become a better writer myself. I found the essays sardonic, witty, uncannily observational, and laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't believe how gently and elegantly he wrote about topics ran…
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Happy Solstice! As we do every December solstice it's time for our 7th Annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books. 3 Books is our 22-year-long conversation to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This year we sat with academics at Oxford to bus drivers in St. Louis, with Jonathan Franzen in Santa Cruz to Oliver Burkeman …
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Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure. But Chris Smalls took it on anyway. Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Ama…
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Once you find purpose, and once you find style… what’s left? Beauty. What’s left is finding and putting out beauty into the world. There are not many writers who have genuinely figured this out … but one of them is Mitch Albom. Mitch is the author of 'Tuesdays with Morrie,' the bestselling memoir of all time, as well as 'The Five People You Meet…
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Are you ready for a writing masterclass from one of the best self-help writers in the world? After graduating from Cambridge, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in ‘The Guardian’ for over 15 years sharing his real-world, real-time poetic exploration of the self-help universe. In 2021 he published 'Four Thou…
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Let's jump into the backseat of Vishwas Aggrawal's Uber and take a trip you won't forget. This is a story about setting your own standards in a world constantly hammering us into "human resources." This is a story about setting your own winning lines in a world that wants us to be widgets. This is a story about raising the bar for yourself and deep…
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James Daunt grew up in England the child of a diplomat—moving countries, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its core. He lived in Turkey and Cyprus before coming back to England for boarding school. After studying history at Cambridge, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so the Career Services department pointed him towards …
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Did you grow up with Judy Blume? My mom says I “found my voice” reading 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' to my sister in the bathtub when I was a little kid. Well, I grabbed that tattered copy and carried it with me down to Key West, Florida where I had the extreme privilege of sitting down with the one and only Judy Blume. Judy and I met on a hot…
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“Happiness is a choice.” Heard that saying before? Betting you have. We all have! It’s almost cliché. And yes, while research shows that a good deal of our happiness really is a choice, the saying gives us a “what” without a “how.” And if your life is anything like mine, you have a million things going on—emaisl! texts! driving kids to soccer pract…
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‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett. ‘Big Little Lies’ by Liane Moriarty. ‘Let's Pretend This Never Happened’ by Jenny Lawson. ‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins. ‘This Is How It Always Is’ by Laurie Frankel. ‘Listen for the Lie’ by Amy Tintera. ‘We Begin At the End’ by Chris Whittaker. ‘A Higher Loyalty’ by James Comey. ‘The Book of Awesome’ by Neil Pa…
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Happy new moon, everybody! I am going to release a few of my favorite classic chapters of 3 Books. Let's start with Seth Godin! I flew down to New York to uncover and discuss the most formative books of the one and only Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) from his Hastings-On-Hudson studio. Seth is the bestselling author of 'Linchpin', 'Purple Cow'…
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I was at a coffee shop on College Street when the barista Tony yelled “Hey! There’s that duck!” I turned and, sure enough, out the front window was a… duck. A giant pixelated-looking green-headed Mallard set atop a rubber-tire-sized body on top of orange-stockinged legs and a pair of orange Converse. And he was just … walking by. Like some kind of …
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Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U.S. six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania after “being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live.” Did it work? Well, yes and no. She spent her family’s life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and, des…
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I remember getting the knife. It was near Christmas about 10 years ago and Leslie and I were zipping up a tiny suitcase before a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family. We weren’t married and I was making a desperate last-second plea to stuff a 576-page novel called ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen into our bag. “It just won’t fi…
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I just got back from St. Louis. It was my first time there and I met a wonderfully rich collection of people who I’m so excited to introduce you to in a special on-the-ground, in-the-street, from-the-backseat Chapter of 3 Books. On the way from the airport to the hotel, the driver regaled me with St. Louis trivia from a deep well of St. Louis pride…
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Cal Newport is a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of others on living an intentional and productive life amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world. He’s an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of 10 books which have collectively sold over 2 million copies including ‘Deep Work,’ ‘D…
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