LETRAS

Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life. These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI. Most of us don’t have traits commonly found in the River: high tolerance for risk, appreciation of uncertainty, affinity for numbers—paired with an instinctive distrust of conventional wisdom and a competitive drive so intense it can border on irrational. For those in the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it. People in the River have increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—and the flaws in their thinking— is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today. Taking us behind the scenes from casinos to venture capital firms, and from the FTX inner sanctum to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of power bro­kers and risk-takers.

Entre los diversos avatares que el aura legendaria de Homero y su obra han conocido a lo largo de la historia de las letras inglesas, acaso los dos más asombrosos sean el Ulises de Joyce y el Omeros de Walcott. Como en la Ilíada («Omeros» es el nombre de Homero «en la antigua lengua de las islas», invocado por una muchacha griega, Antígona, exiliada en América), la historia comienza con la rivalidad por el amor de una mujer. No es una princesa sino una negra criada antillana, y quienes luchan por ella no son reyes sino pescadores, pero el rostro de Helena es de aquellos en que los dioses «consagran toda la belleza de una raza». Ella ama a Aquiles pero le deja por Héctor, y un día en que el pueblo se prepara para una fiesta, el amante desdeñado zarpa de Santa Lucía, y en un sueño iniciático y un viaje a través de siglos es devuelto a la tierra de sus antepasados, en la costa occidental de África. Y mientras Aquiles va tras sus raíces, otro personaje clave de la obra, Dennis Plunkett, el blanco, el colonizador, el eterno marginal en un pueblo que ama, también cumple su personal odisea: tras sucumbir al encanto de Helena (en otro tiempo la isla se llamó como la muchacha), se convierte, por amor a ella, en un experto en la historia del lugar, así como en sus batallas.