Suggested Readings

Woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called "Sappho"), Naples Archeological Museum

Would a society of intellectuals be a better place? Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. It combines a theory of history and education with lessons in Zen, meditations on the enduring power of institutions, friendship, duty and excellence, forays into the psychology of genius, a description of life at a hacker paradise like th...