Monday, May 12, 2008

What is Tom Vanderbilt reading?

The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Tom Vanderbilt, author of the forthcoming Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) and other books and articles.

Among the books mentioned in Vanderbilt's entry:
Diandra Leslie-Pelecky’s The Physics of NASCAR. I don’t follow the sport whatsoever, but I am interested in things like motion transfer in collisions, and the like, which the author covers in an accessible manner. Having recently finished Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Tim Harford’s Logic of Life, I’m now onto the somewhat related book Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which I find interesting for its treatment of a problem I kept coming across regarding traffic safety and laws: How can you get people to do what’s in their own self-interest, but yet which they for some reason don’t decide to do? [read on]
Tom Vanderbilt writes about design, technology, science, and culture for Wired, Slate, the New York Times, and many other publications.

In addition to the forthcoming Traffic, Vanderbilt is author of Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press), and The Sneaker Book: Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon (The New Press). He has also contributed to a number of books, including Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age (The MIT Press), Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler (W.W. Norton), Boob Jubilee: The Mad Cultural Politics of the New Economy (W.W. Norton), and The World and the Wild (University of Arizona Press).

He is also contributing editor to I.D. and Print, and writes for a wide range of publications, including: The New York Times, Wired, The Financial Times, Smithsonian, Preservation, Slate, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Harvard Design Magazine, Cabinet, Artforum, and others.

Read more about Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) at the Knopf website, and learn more about Tom Vanderbilt's work.

Writers Read: Tom Vanderbilt.

--Marshal Zeringue