Reading With Bill Gates

As I’ve mentioned before, I am in awe of the volume of reading and writing that Bill Gates accomplishes. He is a voracious reader and, much to the common good, he reflects publicly on what he’s read.

I was recently intrigued to read his enthusiastic endorsement of Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling (Flatiron Books, 2018). Rosling, a Swedish academic (and a friend of Bill and Melinda Gates) who died in February 2017, talked so eloquently about data that he became a TED Talk star.

Calling Factfulness “one of the most important” books he’s read and one of the top two for 2018, along with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Gates cites Rosling’s essential optimism – his “possibilist” identity – and humanism as part of Rosling’s legacy.

You can see more of Gates’s comments on the book in Time, and further reflections in GatesNotes, the blog of Bill Gates.