Every day, our community manager, Noor Bin Ladin, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every week, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant ones and reposts them on this blog. This post was written by Sandboxer Maria Popova, the original list can be found here.

Get your books for the holidays!

The best books of 2010: Business, Life and Mind

1. WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM

Steven Johnson is one of our favorite cultural synthesizers, the prolific author of some of the best nonfiction of the past decade. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is practically a manifesto for the founding belief of Brain Pickings — that creativity is a combinatorial force — and traces the building blocks of innovation throughout all of human history.

2. COGNITIVE SURPLUS

Clay Shirky may just be the Marshall McLuhan of our day, only with saner vocabulary and less of a penchant for LSD. (At least as far as we know.)

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, one of our 5 curated summer readings, takes a fascinating look at how new media and technology are transforming us from consumers to collaborators, harnessing the vast amounts of free-floating human potential.

3. WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS

Futurist Kevin Kelly may be best-known as the founder of Wired, but he’s also one of the most compelling big-picture thinkers of our time. What Technology Wants begins with a brilliantly broad definition of “technology” — encompassing everything from language itself to augmented reality — and unfolds into ten insightful universal tendencies that give technology direction.

Kelly and Johnson (see above) discussed the role of technology in innovation and the origin of good ideas in this excellent Wired article — we highly recommend it.

4. WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS

We’re big proponents of de-ownership. Or, as we called it in one of this year’s most-read articles, having more by owning less. The lovely and brilliant Rachel Botsman went ahead and wrote a book about it: What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption — a compelling investigation of the emergent cultural shift from consumerism to community. From bike-sharing to house-swapping to book exchanges, the book concocts a potent antidote to the modern maladies of wastefulness and access, a bold and hopeful constitution for a new era of relating to the world and one another.

5. I LIVE IN THE FUTURE & HERE’S HOW IT WORKS

From New York Times columnist Nick Bilton comes an ambitious exploration of where the media landscape is going and how our brains are adapting to it. I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted dissects our analog past to find the roots of our digital future and our ambivalent present, illustrating with meticulously curated historical anecdotes that new technology has always been met with resistance but has inevitably effected progress that betters human life. People didn’t resort to never leaving their homes again when the telephone came out, as the front page of The New York Times declared that year, nor did the invention of the phonograph lead to mass illiteracy at the abandonment of books. These fears, Bilton argues, were natural but unfounded, as are their contemporary counterparts.

It’s the necessary antidote to Nicholas Carr’s decidedly techno-dystopian (and, we dare add after years of neuroscience studies, largely misinformed) The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

6. THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY

After the Predictably Irrational slam-dunk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely outdid himself in The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home — not only a powerful research-driven look at the practical applications of irrationality, but also a personal story of the youthful accident that left Ariely scarred and sent him into years of painful physical therapy.

7. THIS IS NPR

Since its inception in 1970, NPR has “always put the listener first” — a mission not always friction-free at times of political turmoil, government overregulation and divided public opinion. This year, the iconic public broadcaster celebrates its 40th anniversary with This Is NPR: The First Forty Years, a beautifully designed anthology of behind-the-scenes photos, essays and original reporting, and NPR: The First Forty Years, a companion 4-CD compilation featuring some of the most memorable moments from 40 years of news, culture, conversation and commentary.

8. A LAB OF MY OWN

Dr. Neena Schwartz is one of the world’s most influential reproductive biologists, whose seminal work in endocrinology has changed the way science thinks about the relationship between the brain and the reproductive system. A Lab of My Own, is cultural landmark not only as a fascinating look at the feminist plight in science, but also as Schwartz’s deeply personal, powerful and graceful coming out story, with six decades of secrecy revealed for the first time on the pages of the book.

9. THE THIEF OF TIME

The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination is an absorbing anthology featuring essays by a wide range of scholars and writers spanning from the entire spectrum between theoretical and empirical. From the morality of it (is procrastination a vice?) to its possible antidotes (what are the best coping strategies?), the book is an essential piece of psychosocial insight.

10. PORTRAITS OF THE MIND

A remarkable intersection of art and science, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century takes us on a gripping visual journey through humanity’s understanding of the brain, from Medieval sketches to Victorian medical engravings to today’s most elaborate 3D brain mapping. Author Carl Schoonover delivers a book that sources its material in solid science, roots its aesthetic in art, and reads like an ambitious literary anthology.

Make sure to also check out Maria’s list with beautiful visuals for
The Best Books of 2010: Art, Design and Photography, we’re sure you’ll find great gift ideas

Sandboxer Phoebe Lapine is a 24 –year-old food writer, born and bred in New York City, where she continues to live and eat. She has always been a girl of many hobbies, and of all of them, she never really expected cooking to be the one that would start her career. But it made perfect sense, and after lots of reflection during long walks, late night drinking, and insomnia-induced writing, Phoebe realized she had laid the groundwork a long time ago for this quirky little lifestyle. Phoebe on Facebook and Twitter.

1. Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

A year ago, I left my job (and paycheck) at L’Oreal to work full-time on Big Girls, Small Kitchen, a food website for twenty-something cooks looking for user-friendly, affordable ways to navigate their kitchens. My best friend and I started the site in November 2008, after over a year in the corporate world, in order to balance our soul-sucking day jobs with the warmth and satisfaction of food. The full story will be captured in our upcoming cookbook, which will be published by Harper Collins in May 2011, if we can ever settle on a title.

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

Right now, I’m trying to be the Martha Stewart of our generation. But with messier hair, more pairs of skinny jeans, and less jail time.
My culinary story started a long time ago, at age 7, with the breakfast burrito. Every summer at my grandparents’ house, I would open Phoebe’s Restaurant—a one-day-only affair where I exhibited shameless only-child, attention-seeking behavior and indulged in a burgeoning multiple-personality disorder, playing both the surly waitress, Shirley, and a greasy-spoon short-order cook, Bob, and dishing out breakfast to my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

The placemats were finely crafted from the most refined fax-machine paper, the menus written in bold crayon, and the food was always a disaster. It took a few years, and some very patient family members, but eventually I learned from my mistakes and began taking a more totalitarian approach by offering only one item on the menu: Phoebe’s Famous Breakfast Burritos, which I still make for friends about every chance I get.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

Biggest success was getting a book deal last fall. My mom won an Oscar at age 25, so it was very important to me to feel like I was keeping up at age 23, albeit not in statue-form. Biggest failure was (and is) feeling the weight of my parents shadow and letting it prevent me from pursuing certain passions. Also, not having a more open and honest relationship with my writing/business partner from the get-go. Working with a best friend is probably one of the more challenging things I’ve faced. But as with any relationship, the key is to communicate.

4. What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?

In the next week: properly execute two stressful catering gigs. In the next year: sell over 50,000 cookbooks, get my mug on TV in some sort of weird and quirky hosting capacity. In the next 10 years: inspire others to live a more fulfilling life through food, and hopefully practice what I preach.

5. What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

Having dinner with my cousin. She is a badass.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

Readership and participation have been the most valuable and rewarding parts of starting my blog. I would be honored and thrilled to have my Sandbox peers cooking and eating my food with friends.

7. Phoebe’s favorites:
-book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
-movie: You Can Count on Me
-place on earth: Orvieto, Umbria, Italy
-travel destination during last year: Paris
-food: French Fries
-drink: Malbec
-quote: most recent was “If you aren’t having a meltdown in your 20’s, then you haven’t set high enough expectations for yourself” – My friend Madeline.