Two Stars

• The Art of Winning: Lessons from my Life in Football by Bill Belichick 

Three Stars

• The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic by Ross Douthat
• Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with our AI Future by Reid Hoffman
• The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
• What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation by Charlie Wells
• Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on a Future That Wasn’t) by Colette Shade
• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat
• Why I am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha
• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
• Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling by Danny Funt
• How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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.

Two Stars

• Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World – by Nick Bostrom
• Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America by Karen Petrou

Three Stars

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want – by Emily Bender & Alex Hanna
• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All – by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software – by Nadia Asparouohova
• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
• The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant – by Tae Kim
• Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism – by Rick Wartzman
• The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future – by Keach Hagey
• Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation – by Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber
• Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State – by Michael Steinberger
• The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West – by Alex Karp & Nicholas Zamiska
• Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist – Liz Pelly
• Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power – by Jacob Helberg
• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in OpenAI – by Karen Hao

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.

I tend to read books in themed batches. Unfortunately the topic for the last six months was politics. I’m usually pretty arms length from politics, but the twisting narratives had me hooked and wanting to understand a field I’d normally write off as uninteresting. So I apologize in advance to those who’d rather forget 2024 for how politically heavy the content here is. However, if you’re trying to make sense of the past year, the top two books are must reads.

Three Stars

The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story – by Sam Wasson

Last year, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now released what may be his last film, Megalopolis, his dream project he had been trying to get made for decades.

Path to Paradise covers two parallel stories in Coppola’s life: the day-to-day production of Apocalypse Now (which was an infamously brutal experience for everyone involved trying to shoot a war movie in Southeast Asian jungles in the 1970s) and Coppola’s later attempts to start his own film production company American Zoetrope.

The format of alternating chapters between the two stories doesn’t quite work as well it did for Wasson in The Big Goodbye (a book by the same author I gave a ⅘ in 2021). The gist in both cases is that Coppola is always living his own vision of auteurism, an iconoclast whose ambitions and visions either produce legendary works of art or destroy the lives of the people around him. I’m not sure this book gave me much more understanding of the man, but it earns its rating for the wealth of stories and source material about a living legend.

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Speaker of the House – by Nancy Pelosi

Well, I think this one was planned to be published at a different time with a different 2024 election outcome. In this new memoir, the former Speaker of the House states that she intended to retire in the mid-2010s and only stuck around longer to reduce Donald Trump’s impact. Despite her best efforts, the jury is still out on determining how effective she has been in that goal.

What is good about this book (which feels ghostwritten due to bland writing) is that it does convey Pelosi’s admirable strengths. She’s a smart woman who knows how to effectively navigate games of power. 

Most memorable for me is an early chapter where she explains how she got the “ban on gays in the military” repealed in the mid-2000s. She admits this was accomplished by inserting it as a requirement into an additional military spending bill, likely meaning that more federal money would be spent in Red states where defense contractors are located. For this reason, she faced resistance from other Democrats who did not want to sign a bill supporting more war spending. 

She simply had to remind her party members that what their constituents would care about is the win on gay rights and not what it cost to accomplish. It is this type of arguably cynical, but ultimately correct, understanding of deal making which was part of what made her so effective and is a savviness which Democrats will miss when she is gone.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness – by Jonathan Haidt

Haidt has been making the media rounds promoting and discussing this analysis on why the kids don’t seem alright, pinning most of the blame on helicopter parenting and cell phones used for social media and mindless entertainment. Paradoxically, this book is probably both his weakest and most mainstream. Upon release, there have been numerous reports questioning the analytical rigor and broad applicability of the claims made in the book. At the same time, his suggestions for improving kids mental health with reasonable restrictions on the frequency of their social media consumption seem completely reasonable and intuitively correct. The moderate recommendations are in balance with the possible weaknesses in the supporting evidence.

Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass – by Ramin Setoodeh

Could Donald Trump have become President if he hadn’t hosted a reality TV show on a major broadcast network?

Probably not. And so author Setoodeh, who is the co-Editor in Chief of Variety magazine, embarked on the worthwhile journey to chronicle The Apprentice. This is a (conveniently quick) biography of arguably the most important TV show of all time.

Setoodeh’s interviews with former cast and crew remind the reader of why Donald Trump was more universally popular before running for the Republican party. With most people one on one, he’s charming and complementary. He takes the TV show seriously but himself less so.

Most importantly, his numerous interviews with Donald Trump emphasize the traits that helped Donald win. He’s a rare billionaire who has a lot of time on his hands and a willingness to talk to anyone. For decades, he made his money solely by being accessible and marketing himself to the public. It was the perfect training ground for politics.

A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir – by Colin Jost (Audiobook)

Ordered this one as his Weekend Update with Michael Che is the only Saturday Night Live segment I watch. A great audiobook for listening to funny stories on your commute.

The Canceling of the American Mind – by Rikki Schlott and George Lukianoff

Do not let the title of this book deter you, even though “Cancel Culture” is a phrase that’s been repeated ad nauseum. It took until 2023 for a good definitive book on the subject to be published. Schlott, who dropped out of college partly to pursue this book writing independently and partly because she disagreed with the culture she was on NYU’s campus, partnered with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Lukianoff to critically document what “cancel culture” really was. They’ve written a great history on how anti-free speech became intellectualized inside academia, and make a strong case for why we need to fight against mob mentalities on both sides of the political spectrum.

Trump in Exile – by Meredith McGraw

What was Trump up to in the aftermath of the January 6th riots? That’s where this book picks up the Trump story, starting with Biden’s inauguration day and running through the 2024 Republican primaries. The window of 2021 through 2022 could have been the moment when the Republican party moved on from Trump while he was living a reclusive life at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, slightly distracted by business opportunities such as Truth Social and LIV Golf.

And yet, he marched along with his planning for another run, empowered by his team’s polling numbers that showed he was still the most popular politician in the GOP, even if his handpicked midterm candidates couldn’t win.

The insights into Trump’s team, particularly campaign manager and soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, showed that Trump took his revenge tour far more seriously than he had his 2016 campaign by surrounding himself with real experienced political operatives. And it will frustrate Democrats to realize how much momentum the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and lawsuits in 2023 gave his campaign.

Ultimately, it’s Trump’s ability to unilaterally make decisions for himself, especially about when to announce he was running again and how to crush Ron DeSantis before primaries had started, that make him such a distinct and effective politician separated from all other run-by-committee campaigners.

Cultish: The Language of Fanatacism – by Amanda Montell

Maybe my most “fun” read of 2024, Amanda Montell makes a great case for the importance of language to the ability for cults to exist. She writes quick chapters on a range of cult concepts, such as the classic religious groups, through fitness, pyramid schemes, and conspiracy theories. A mix of academic research and anecdotal interviews with former cult members blend together well.

Four Stars

The Handmaid’s Tale – by Margaret Atwood

This was required reading for some English classes back when I was in high school in the mid-2000s. Sadly, it was not on my curriculum. Having come around to it now (due to its potential prescience) I was pleasantly (maybe not the vibe Atwood was going for?) surprised by how breezy a read the book is despite the heaviness of its content. This is a compliment to her writing style, which manages to build an alternative future world that’s detailed without getting bogged down in details. Without opining on its contents, I can see why it’s a book that would be taught in English classes; it invites discussion.

Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP – by Patrick Ruffini

For anyone surprised by Trump’s electoral victory, they shouldn’t have been. A lot of the evidence was already present in the 2020 election. Ruffini, a Republican pollster and Bush administration member, dove into the 2020 data and wrote this book largely to help explain to himself how Donald Trump had taken over his party. What he found after the 2020 election became extremely relevant in 2024: minorities and lower income voters were drifting Republican in most elections since 2016. Anyone on the left who wants to stereotype the GOP as less intelligent really has to contend with Ruffini, who packed this 2023 book with stats and charts that really exemplifies how Republicans have an understanding of electoral trends that counters the Democrats “ground game” approach.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure – by Jonathan Haidt and George Lukianoff

Is every new generation of kids “softer” than their parents were? While adults have been saying this since time immemorial, professors Haidt and Lukianoff started seeing a particular spike in softness amongst their university students in the mid-2010s, and by 2018 compiled their analysis of the causes and solutions into this book.

Without overly spoiling the book’s contents, they exposed what they call “Three Great Untruths” that millennial and Gen Z kids were taught, making them unprepared for adulthood and setting back society:

• “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” – Kids are taught to shrivel or run to adults when faced with challenges, directly contradicting older wisdom we used to teach like “confronting your fears” and “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me”.
• “Always trust your feelings” – When there’s a big body of research and old philosophy about how we should use our rational capacities to manage our emotions, not feed into them.
• “Life is a battle between good and evil” – Teaching kids that anyone who disagrees with you is evil eliminates the ideas of debate, nuance, and perspective, all of which are much more necessary for a functioning society than a tribal “us versus them” mentality.

In general, it seems like society has forgotten that kids are stupid and need raising by adults, not coddled to.

Five Stars

The Revolt of the Public: And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium – by Martin Gurri

If anyone best understood the rise of Donald Trump before it happened, it was Martin Gurri publishing this book in 2014, one year before Trump announced his candidacy. This book is not explicitly about Trump, though his specter looms large when reading it today.

What it is about is the downfall of authority figures, and the implications that would have for politics. Gurri didn’t come up with this insight out of thin air. He was a CIA analyst who saw how social media was used by the public during the 2011 Arab Spring to revolt (hence the title) against half a dozen Middle Eastern governments. His big predictive leap was expecting that trend to hit Western nations given the internet technology would only continue to spread.

This also greatly explains the recent losses of the Democratic party since 2014. They positioned themselves as the defender of the old authority order, not realizing that no existing government could control its policy narratives in the new social media age and any weaknesses would be exposed and attacked mercilessly by the public.

Like many profound ideas, all one had to do was look in the right spot and extrapolate to the future. For its prescience in 2014 and ability to make sense of the past decade, this is a five star book.

The Best Book Read in the Second Half of 2024

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion – by Jonathan Haidt

This book tackles a question, critical and universal to humanity, suggested by its subtitle: How is it that there are so many various opinions among people, and yet everyone seems so certain their one opinion is correct?

Haidt’s answers this question gradually and methodically, bridging the fields of biology, psychology, and political science into the cohesive new theory of Moral Foundations. 

It belongs in my short list of “books I wish I had written”, where I’ve discovered that ideas loosely floating around my mind have already been rigorously considered, tested, and communicated better than I would have. The world would be a more peaceful, understanding place if every high school senior had to read this book.

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

• History of Movies and The Sopranos
• Science Fiction
• Food
• Authors with Multiple Books Featured:
  • Michael Pollan
  • Shea Serrano

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

• Con Artists
• Product Management
• Poker and Las Vegas
• Chess
• Debt
• TV Sitcom Family Ties
• Amazon
• Venture Capital
• CRISPR and Gene Editing

As a reference, my grading scale is:

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

• Comedians: I love sitcoms and standup comedy, and I’ve included stories from stars of both related worlds.
• Netflix: A new set of separate books by the Netflix co-founders teach the lessons learned from launching an entertainment revolution.
• Mad Men: Two books analyzing my favorite televised drama.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey: Also two books telling the stories around the making of the classic Stanley Kubrick film.
• Business of Biotech: Continuing my education in the natural sciences, I focused on learning the histories of Vertex Pharma, Genentech, Amgen, and the broader drug business.

As a reference, my grading scale is (without any one or two star books this time):

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

• Technologist Gene Kim: The cofounder and CTO of TripAdvisor now dedicates much of his time to writing books about how to best run technology organizations. Applicable to large companies and startups alike.
• Uber and How We Work: As part of my research for working at Bluecrew, I delved into the temporary staffing industry, modern “gig economy” companies such as Uber, and some general history of labor.
• N+1 Magazine: I’ve reviewed books written by the staff of literary magazine n+1 in the past, and this year I’ve added three more to that list.
• Bill Simmons Colleagues: Simmons is best known as a founder of two successful online media brands (Grantland and The Ringer). After I learned he’s good friends with Chuck Klosterman, I’ve dived into books by more of his colleagues.
• Adult Entertainment: The confluence of Dave Chappelle Netflix special, a new book by one of my favorite authors, working for Tinder’s parent company, and Hugh Hefner’s semi-recent death all converged into me reading a lot of material around sex. Readers are forewarned.

As a reference, my grading scale is (without any one or two star books this time):

Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

• “Gig Economy” and Temporary Work: Since I’ve started working at Y Combinator alum Bluecrew moving industrial temp staffing to a tech platform, I’ve dived into the industry’s literature.
• Accounting: Brushing up my knowledge on the field in which I’ve occasionally worked.
• The Legal System: Between the current state of our politics and an increase in my own experiences with lawyers over the past year, both personally and professionally, I’ve got multiple books which cover how our legal system works.
• Japanese Culture: Three books spent time covering Japan, two for a couple chapters and one entirely.
• Books from Mad Men: The show is my favorite drama and features multiple books from the shows time period. I’ve now read a couple of them.

Continue reading “Books Read in the Second Half of 2019” →

As a reference, my grading scale is (without any one or two star books this time):

Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.

Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.

Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.

Additionally, I pick one book every six months as the “best book I’ve read” during that time period.

Themes from these six months:

• Chuck Klosterman: I’ve completed the Chuck Klosterman collection, including his two novels.
• Alan Lightman: A physicist-novelist recommended by my good friend Ritoban Thakur has a unique voice which bridges spirituality with science.
• Technology Company Growth and Management
• Stripe Press: A new publishing company with the goal of advancing economic and technological ideas also puts great care into their uniquely designed and high quality physical book covers.

Continue reading “Books Read in the First Half of 2019” →