And deservedly so! Congratulations to Seth and the Domino Project team for a year’s worth of books and experiments to learn from. The 2011 Gift Guide from Boing Boing is guaranteed to help Santa make ever more discriminating choices this year. Get to it!

A wonderful review from Kirkus for The Thinking Life by PM Forni:

Insightful meditation on how changing the way we think can improve our daily lives.

Forni (The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude, 2009, etc.) encourages the pursuit of thinking in an age when “serious thinking is often the illustrious casualty in the digital revolution.” The author explores dependency on modern technology and its associated problems but primarily focuses on the greater value of thinking. He argues against those who write off the lost art of pondering, revealing the reality of wasted time and providing practical suggestions on how to create space in busy lives. He addresses multitasking as “our attempt to do the maximum amount of things in the shortest amount of time with the minimum amount of thinking.” To illustrate his ideas, Forni effectively blends a combination of ideas from classical and modern philosophers, myth, current events and personal anecdotes. He chides parents and schools for not properly instructing the next generation in how to make good decisions, and how this is detrimental to society at large: “I wish I could tell you that I had the good fortune of undergoing a solid home training in decision making, but I did not. I wish that just one of my teachers had managed to impress upon me and my schoolmates that being happy depends upon making sound decisions.”

A deft exploration that urges us to think before speaking.