Month: July 2026

Books Read in the First Half of 2026

~ loganfrederick

Two Stars

Three Stars

Four Stars

Delusions by Cazzie David (Audiobook)

Her first book, No One Asked For This, was released in the depths of COVID and was great comic relief during a very boring time. At the time, I gave it a 3/5.

The sequel earns an extra star perhaps not just for the content, which is still funny, but for the audiobook format which lends itself well to Cazzie’s authentically deadpan humor.

As a reviewer, it’s hard to know whether a comparison to her dad, Larry David, is unfair, complimentary, or neutrally inevitable. All I can say in my case is that it’s meant as a compliment, and just because someone has talented parents, it doesn’t have to discount their own talent too.

The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care and How to Fix It by Dr. Marty Makary

When I started working at Stack Health this year, I had a lot of catching up to do to understand the healthcare industry. This book was recommended by an industry contact as the place to start.

Dr. Makary’s overarching theme is price transparency, the lack of which is at the root of the uncontrollable cost inflation throughout the industry. Hospitals don’t transparently tell patients what the price of service will be ahead of time, leaving huge windows of opportunity for the institution and/or doctor to rack up charges like unnecessary tests and procedures. Those entities will point at the insurance companies, with their obtuse and inconsistent claims processes. And with individuals getting their health insurance options via their jobs, the employer-to-insurance company relationship provides another layer of obfuscation or faced to make poor business decisions to compensate for being choked by healthcare costs. With everyone simultaneously finger pointing and adding their fees, it’s individual consumers who are both powerless and left bearing the costs.

The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less by Elizabeth Bradley and Lauren Taylor

The “paradox” in the title is a common question in the news about the American healthcare system: How does the United States spend so much more money on healthcare compared to other countries and get such mediocre results?

The answer (which is smart, intuitive, and yet still sorta unexpected) is that we do not actually spend less than other countries. The key difference is that other countries (primarily Europe in these comparisons) spend on both their healthcare systems and social welfare programs, whereas the US by comparison focuses on the former rather than the latter.

This is a supremely short book which reads much like a thesis paper in the positive sense; it’s very focused on explaining one core argument. On one hand, the United States almost certainly exacerbates its healthcare problems by not addressing issues like homelessness and poverty safety nets. However, the authors do an academically honest job of balancing this against the unique circumstances of different countries (such as the Nordics being low population, low immigration cultures). In conclusion, there may not be one standard solution to solving healthcare globally, but where the United States is deficient is clear.

Five Stars

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby

The current Artificial Intelligence race is scaring the hell out of people, largely because so many of the industry’s leaders (Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei) are saying exactly the things that scare people: you will all lose your jobs and there is nothing you can do about it. 

But the person everyone should be listening to is Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and head of Google DeepMind. This biography chronicles his journey from child chess prodigy to AI startup founder decades before it was cool. So much of the important work he and his team have done hasn’t gotten to mainstream attention that apps like ChatGPT have. But popularity is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine over the course of history, and it’s highly likely that DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI, which predicts the shape of possible proteins underlying human biology and medicine, will be remembered 100 years from now as the great AI application of our age. At minimum, it will never be forgotten because Hassabis was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

On a personal note, much of his story resonated with me, particularly the early years being influenced by Ender’s Game and starting his career in the videogame industry. And most importantly, an optimistic reminder that, in totality to this point in history, technology has made people’s lives better, not worse.

Football by Chuck Klosterman

I’ve got a bunch of readers who are tech startupy folks who will appreciate the following Easter Egg.

  • In 2008, Paul Graham, the cofounder of the famous Y Combinator startup incubator, wrote an essay on his heroes, and the very first name he put on the list was Pittsburgh Steeler Jack Lambert, because even nerds as kids idolize athletes.
  • In 2010, the NFL commissioned a panel of players, coaches, and industry staff to vote on the 100 greatest football players of all time. Jack Lambert was ranked 29th.
  • Every player who made the list was commemorated with a narrated video. Lambert’s was presented by the author of this book.

Klosterman has made a career of bringing high-brow analysis to mainstream topics, and now he’s tackled American football, asking fundamental questions: Why did this particular sport become so popular? And will it always be this way?

It’s not all highfalutin pseudo-philosophy. A fair number of chapters cover the more mainstream questions too: Why does football seem to mean more in Texas? Who is the greatest football player of all time, and how does one define the GOAT? There’s a broader point underlying these chapters, which is that the usual questions seem to carry more weight when talking about American football.

This is my favorite cultural commentator explaining the most uniquely American cultural artifact. In doing so, he’s created what we both hope will be a lasting piece of American anthropology.

Best Book Read in the First Half of 2026

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal

Healthcare is one of those sectors of the economy where, if you’re like me, you hear big headline numbers of “X% of national GDP is spent every year on it”, without really knowing what that means or where the money is going. But it sounds bad and seems like it should be fixed, if only someone could explain the dysfunction.

Dr. Rosenthal does a straightforward chapter-by-chapter takedown of every player in the system: The usual suspects of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, but hospitals, doctors, and the American Medical Association too. The recurring theme is consolidation. Some of it caused by capitalistic incentives, some of it by regulation, but all of it has led to a system where a small number of entities dictate what should be plentiful and individualized options for patients.

It’s simultaneously information-dense and engaging. For anyone looking to understand the American healthcare system, this is my recommended starting point.

Books Read in 2025

~ loganfrederick

Two Stars

Three Stars

Four Stars

When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany – by Adam Fergusson

Democrats generally did not like to admit or acknowledge in 2024 that the election was about inflation and the cost of living. There was a lot of incredulity about “how could people vote for Trump”. But the historical analogy, which those same people are often apt to make, was sitting right in the history books: Hitler was elected into the German parliament. Why? At least partially because of the failure of the Weimer Republic which preceded him and the hyperinflation under their reign.

Fergusson here has concisely chronicled the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic through newspaper clippings and the diaries of everyday Germans. So much of all societies and history can be boiled down to the upper class fucking with the finances of the lower classes. And while inflation was not the sole reason for Hitler’s rise, it certainly did not help the prior regime’s popularity.

Readers may find the material academic and dry, but harsh realities are more often meant to sit with you uncomfortably, not entertainingly.

Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America – by Danielle DiMartino Booth

The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful institutions of the world that the average American does not pay attention to or know anything about. Or at least it was until 2023, when inflation, interest rates, and cost of living became the hot topics going into the presidential election and people were looking for answers as to why their finances were fucked.

This memoir from a former staffer at the Dallas branch of the Fed is a great insiders dissection of the failures of the institution, which broadly fall into two categories: The hubris of those who’ve been leading the Fed the past 20 years, and their myopic view of the solution space to economic problems.

She documents how the Dallas Fed internally clashed with Janet Yellen both in her time at the San Francisco office and later as the Secretary of Treasury in DC, and her predecessor too-hands-off Tim Geithner in the run-up and fallout of the 2008 financial crisis.

Essentially, it was a detachment from the real economy and a breakdown of common sense amongst the academic class on how to deal with the economic tremors of the 2000s which seeded the Trump nationalist and Democratic socialist movements we’re seeing today.

Fed Up really earns its five star rank by being published in 2017, years before the interest rate calamities of the 2020s which ultimately proved correct much of what Danielle DiMartino Booth wrote.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company – by Patrick McGee

There has been a cultural anxiety about domestic jobs being relocated to China for a couple decades now, yet it’s unclear to me how much the average American understands how it happened.

McGee has chronicled in great detail the perfect example of this phenomena. Apple, a company started with its founders hand-building its first Macs, began its outsourcing journey in the 90s as a life- and money-saving move when the company was notoriously on the brink of bankruptcy before Steve Jobs’s return.

This fateful decision slid the company (and country) down the slippery slope of dependence on Foxconn, the cutthroat but undeniably effective manufacturer who paired Apple’s rise with its own and positioned it as the backbone for the world’s most popular hardware.

Apple in China is an incredible balance between micro-business tactics and the macro-geopolitical consequences of having one of our most valuable and important businesses embedded in a foreign country.

Stuck: How the Propertied and Privileged Broke the Engine of Opportunity – by Yoni Applebaum

The last Presidential election was decided by inflation, primarily of our most basic needs: food and shelter. Author Applebaum was prescient, claiming to have started Stuck a decade ago due to the popularity of the Rent is Too Damn High movement.

He chronicles the history of housing in America and how it has completely flipped upside down over time. At the turn of the 1900s, the average American was a renter and often actively migratory. This changed gradually as the century churned forward, often driven by Democrat policies that were more conservative than a modern member of the party would outwardly associate with. This includes, at best, overly optimistic efforts to maintain existing community cultures (in opposition to immigrants) and, at worst, outright racist zoning laws.

Both incredibly well-researched and readable, this is the book to understand the most important domestic political and economic issue of the moment.

Five Stars

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies – by Nick Bostrom

Before there was ChatGPT, before AI became all anyone talked about, there was a little 2014 book by Nick Bostrom whose paperback fits in the palm of the hand. As a professor of philosophy at Oxford, he was prescient about, or perhaps the progenitor of, what came to pass: the concept of superhuman intelligence, how perhaps the people who build this AI will need to be organized in something like a non-profit, and the tension between the need for international collaboration on this technology and the low likelihood of it taking place, just to list a few of the countless concepts he captured in this definitive work on artificial intelligence.

This is the book that was read by all the AI leaders you might just despise, except they read it a decade ago and were inspired to build the world in which we now live. For that reason, it may be the most important book of the 21st century.

Abundance – by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

This one got so much publicity that it makes less sense for me to explain the contents than to recommend one of the many interviews the authors

But for anyone who has tried to avoid politics the past couple years, the short synopsis is: Two left-leaning journalists try to paint a picture of a techno-utopian future. In doing so, they highlight how today’s politics prevent this from being a reality, especially the Democrat’s inability to manage their own states.

Ultimately, they’re providing imagination to a Democratic party which has had very little. If we want a brighter future for this country, then people fundamentally need to be more optimistic and believe tomorrow can be better than today. Abundance is the most mainstream attempt I’ve come across at making that point. That is the reason why I would both recommend everyone read it, and why it got as much press as it did.

Best Books of 2025

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – by Dan Wang

China’s rise is the overarching geopolitical topic of our times. Yet I get the sense that Americans around me don’t have the faintest idea of how China has become such a threat.

Breackneck is a fair-minded pros and cons analysis of the two cultures. The author essentially sums up the two cultures as the United States being led by lawyers and China led by engineers. This is evident in who fills their political rank and how their economy operates. China is a society of action. When done well has pulled a generation of its citizens out of poverty into middle class luxury, and when done poorly results in the efficient execution of minority genocides and unwanted children resulting in a demographic crisis. In America, our own preference for legalistic debate has mostly resulted in a broad economic malaise and a resentment for the only sector of the economy trying to grow (Silicon Valley).

This books supports an opinion of mine that is not appreciated by most Americans: Much of what has celebrated and rewarded politically and often financially in the United States the past two decades has been wrong, both morally and quantitatively. If these cultural undercurrents are not corrected, and doing things is prioritized at the same level as talking about how we feel about them, it puts Americans’ fundamental understanding of reality at risk of being lost to adversarial perspectives who absolutely do not care about our feelings.

Nuclear War: A Scenario – by Annie Jacobsen

A decade ago, I read what I would argue (mostly with myself) is the best book I’ve read since college: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, which tells the true story of a 1980 nuclear missile explosion in Arkansas and the risks of nuclear weapons in an era where they’ve faded out of people’s day-to-day concerns.

Nuclear War is the spiritual successor, this time shorter and blunter.

The format is unique. Without spoilers, Jacobsen establishes a scenario where another nation launches a nuclear missile at the United States. Minute-by-minute, of which we have very few, she walks through every important decision that needs to be made by members of government and the very minimal data they have with which to make it. It reads like an episode of 24, due to both pace and subject matter, made all the more horrifying by the plausibility.

All of this is informed by her extensive research and interviews with government personnel helping her paint the most realistic portrait of the apocalypse possible.There is no more important topic, and Jacobsen has written a definitive document on how it could realistically unfold.