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Most memorable for me is an early chapter where she explains how she got the “ban on gays in the military” repealed in the mid-2000s.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.

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, traditionally I would pick one book as the “best book of the past six months”. Due to the delay, I’ve selected my top two books of the past two years at the bottom of the post.

Three Stars

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life – by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Picked this up as I’ve been thinking more about what life advice to give my 16 year old brother. Arnold’s succinct thoughts are practical and as good a set of answers as one can find. He’s also a big fan of thinking while walking, which I strongly support.

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (And Why That’s a Good Thing) – by Salman Khan

This is the first book from Sal Khan, founder of the fantastic online education platform Khan Academy. He was an early adopter in using Youtube as way to teach the masses, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise he’s been deeply involved with the AI companies in experimenting with the application of AI to teaching. The book itself is pretty optimistic with a neutered bent, a lot of “AI will provide high quality custom one-on-one student tutoring on an infinite scale, as long as we don’t let it completely replace our children’s brains!” Which, yes, I agree with, but not what most people will consider a major insight. It is however a comprehensive cover of all the areas of education AI will touch.

Blood Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made – by Jason Schreier

A really fun and swift survey of a dozen videogame companies telling their industry stories, primarily through the 2000s and 2010s. There are distinct lessons to take from each of company featured, from how a solo dev can make millions to the bureaucracy artists face when pushing a game over the finish line in a big tech company. A very good read for anyone interested in the videogame industry.

60 Songs That Explain the 90s – by Rob Harvilla

Discovered the podcast series this book is based on from Spotify’s popular Ringer network and was pleasantly surprised to discover the author lives in Columbus, Ohio. Harvilla writes an impressive narrative that ties the songs together through unexpected themes, making this much more than just a “top 60” list. Plus, I am a sucker for nostalgia.

The Making of Prince of Persia – by Jordan Mechner

As I’ve spent the past few months teaching myself game development, I had to read one of the definitive diaries of game development. Mechner, an industry legend for his pioneering work on Prince of Persia at a young age, publicly publishing his private journal is such a gift to any aspiring creator. That he shows so much raw honesty and his own flaws in the process of generating greatness should inspire everyone: he had huge doubts about whether he wanted to make the game or try to be a film maker, his indecision on this subject dragged out the whole process across three years, and meanwhile computer technology was rapidly shifting under his feet the entire time between Apple, PCs, and consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. I and many others are very thankful to Jordan for opening up his life and showing us that the road to meaningful work is a bumpy one, and that’s okay.

Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind – by Andy Dunn

A cofounder of men’s apparel brand Bonobos tells his story running a startup while suffering from bipolar disorder. Some people may dislike the story for its after-the-fact apologizing for hurting people along his journey to success. As someone who has gone through the venture capital-backed startup experience though, I can relate to how crazy it can drive someone even under the most manageable circumstances and appreciated his retelling.

Cinema Speculation – by Quentin Tarantino

I could listen to Quentin Tarantino review movies and discuss the history of cinema for hours. In fact, I did.

The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond – by George Friedman

To start, this book has flaws, and I rate one of the author’s previous books higher in this list and would recommend that it be read first. Friedman, a political scientist and former Dickinson College professor, published this book in October 2020, essentially at our lowest point of the pandemic and before the Biden election. He spends too much of the book over-matching cyclical patterns through history, which wonks like him and Ray Dalio are wont to do. What he does seem to freakishly nail as a primary prediction is that the elections of this decade would feature a candidate representing the last of the old “technocracy” coastal elite guard trying to hold onto power, resisting a new trend of re-empowering the middle of the country. Given how the Biden presidency and his candidacy have gone, this seems eerily prescient and thus makes the rest of the book worth mulling over.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI – by Ethan Mollick

A professor at the Wharton business school has written his overview of applying AI to life and work, based on his applied experience in research and classrooms. He takes the pragmatic position of “the tech is here and not going anywhere, so the questions are about how to best integrate it into our lives.” If a laymen were to ask me what to read first about understanding what impact AI will have on their life, this would be one of my goto starting point recommendations.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant – by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Considered a classic in the “business book” category, I’m happy to finally be able to check it off my list. The insight from these INSEAD institute professors is that it’s possible for companies to create entirely new markets, even where people think businesses already exist. Examples highlighted include Cirque du Soleil finding the gap between circus and theater, NetJets between first class travel and private jet ownership, and Curves between home workout tapes for women and intimidating weights-oriented gyms. For the techies, it’s very much aligned with the Thiel-ism “competition is for losers”, except pre-dating his statement by many years given this was originally published in 2005. This concept is then formalized into tools any executive can use to help them think more creatively about their business.

Four Stars

Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead – by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Leopold was a researcher at OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) focused on “safety” and “alignment”, that is to say how AIs can be developed in ways that they’ll do things humans want without inadvertently killing us.

However, he was fired for essentially speaking to outside media that the AI research labs were not doing enough to secure their research from foreign adversaries and not investing enough (according to him) in these safety research projects.

After his firing, he published “Situational Awareness”, a 150+ page PDF which I read and is long enough to qualify as a book. It’s a mix of a manifesto and a prophecy for where AI is taking society. Some of his messages are mixed, as is common among AI researchers. Essentially, he claims to not be a pessimist (known as “doomers” in the tech world). But then spends one hundred pages explaining how AI is a national security and societal safety concern which is controlled by a very small number of individuals with questionable motives. Most people would interpret this as alarming.

But it is for that reason that I highly recommend reading this. It’s written in pretty plain spoken language so one does not need a lot of computer science expertise to follow along, and it is one of the best overviews of the risks associated with AI.

The Three Body Problem – by Cixin Liu

For years before the Netflix series was announced, friends were recommending this as a must-read, so the show’s release served as a good forcing function to make me do it. 

The plot is the old “War of the Worlds” mixed with modern physics. What it does uniquely well is be able to take core complex physics concepts like the real three body problem and repurpose them into clever plot devices and a real mystery plot which kept me hooked However, if one has already studied or at least read books in physics, I don’t think the scientific cleverness hits as hard.

I feel similarly about this book as I did Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (which I gave three stars a decade ago): very interesting ideas told through terse prose and pretty one dimensional characters. Cixin’s characters are a little more developed than Asimov’s, and he is able to make the book’s pacing feel a little more alive by playing with time and the character focus in the vein of Station Eleven, except that book had unparalleled heart which Three Body Problem slightly lacks.

What This Comedian Said Will Shock You – by Bill Maher

Maher is a controversial figure, I think more so for how obnoxiously or smugly he makes his points rather than the substance of his statements. His newest book is a collection of the “editorial” sections he’s done at the end of his “New Rules” segment on his Friday night HBO show “Real Time” for the past 20 years. Even if you disagree with these comedic takes on our country’s major political issues, the format invites you to think through precisely why you disagree, because Bill has spent countless hours thinking over every essay. 

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance – by Rashid Khalidi

Going into October 7th, it’d be fair to say that I knew more about Jewish culture based on my friends and life experience. Then a friend from undergrad with Middle Eastern ethnicity recommended this book and I’m glad she did. The author, whose family has a history with the many different past Palestinian governments, does a very good and fair documenting their cause over the past century, why they view Israel as a colonization, and also why the Palestinians have failed at promoting and defending their cause. There are surely other books out there that would give an Israeli perspective, but I’d recommend this for the Palestinian. 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel – by Gabrielle Zevin

When I mentioned to friends that I was studying videogame development, I had three separate people (none of whom are really gamers) tell me I should read this book. And I’m glad they did.

Tomorrow is the best representation of intermingled coworker friendships I recall reading in a novel. Two young kids start a videogame company together and Tomorrow follows their journey as they try to maintain their relationship as the tug of the outside world, both business and pleasure, work to pull them apart. This novel is the most emotional I’ve read since Station Eleven.

An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence – by Kenny Xu

Even before the covid pandemic contributed to a spike in terrible Asian American abuse, a court case had been working its way through the justice system for most of the 2010s before reaching the Supreme Court in 2023. A nonprofit group advocating on the behalf of young Asian students and their families sued Harvard over the fact that Asian students were being accepted at lower rates into the Ivy Leagues than other ethnicities, despite outperforming them on grades and the various standardized exams high school students take and intelligent extracurriculars. The Ivy leagues counter that there is more to university than grades, chess, and piano-playing, which kind of begs the question: What criteria are you using then?

Journalist Xu uses this lawsuit as his framework for discussing the long history of Asian segregation in America, the unfair stereotypes labeled on Asian men and women, and how white America contributes to pitting Asians against the hispanic and black communities.

I probably rate this book higher because I partially identify with the community being 25% Filipino with Asian relatives, and strongly believe in the ideas of intellect and family stability.

The reality that many Americans don’t confront at face value is that Asian cultures are very effective at both excelling academically and building communities. The solution should be for everyone to respect some shared virtues like those of intelligent work balanced with supportive families, not casting Asians out of our prestigious institutions.

Five Stars

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past – by John Lewis Gaddis

Kudos to fellow Ohio State alum Andy Sparks for recommending this after I reviewed another Gaddis book last year. The meat of this book is focused on the subtitle: how do historians do their jobs? And what is the job?

This being my second Gaddis book, I noticed a pattern emerging in how I read them. First, I had to take notes on every other page. Second, I realized those would not be enough and would require re-reading, which is rare.

One pleasant insight by Gaddis, which I strongly agree with and would need a whole other essay to elaborate on, is that historians have more in common with natural scientists than social scientists. This is an important conclusion and this book can serve as a great bridge between those who work in the humanities and STEM.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class – by Rob Henderson

Henderson and his memoir have become something of a mini-celebrity in right wing circles for sharing a story and ideas that shouldn’t be nearly as controversial as they are.

His is a story of an abandoned orphan bouncing around foster homes in impoverished upstate California, hanging around drunk and drug dealing teenagers through adolescence, escaping this upbringing through the luck of walking into Air Force recruitment, and leveraging his innate intelligence to test into Yale from the military, eventually earning a Phd from Cambridge.

As someone with a quasi-similar background (coming from a half-broken home with an abandoned parent and thrived in life largely due to math aptitude), I deeply related to his journey.

What has gotten him into Democrat hot water is his later chapter titled “Luxury Beliefs”, which is a concept he developed during his Yale experience after being exposed to the “liberal elite”. The essence of his theory is that there are a collection of ideas that the wealthy will hold that both signal their class status while actively undermining those below them in a way that makes this undermining less transparent.

A concise collection of these “ideas that rich liberals believe and why they end up hurting people” which resonated with me:

• Monogamy is outdated and people should experiment with their relationships, nevermind that when it occurs in poor communities it results in broken homes and children without parents.
• Technology creators who sell products to the world while they restrict their own kids from using at home. They’ll defend this saying people should self-discipline their tech usage, sidestepping that the poor have the least free time and energy to manage this.
• Defunding police doesn’t impact upper class communities who can afford other methods of protecting themselves, and then it opens the door for lawlessness endangering lower classes, women, and the elderly.
• Patriotism is thought to be for simpletons and George Bush supporters, which divides people in the same communities further apart, rather than bringing everyone together to discuss what America should stand for.

Discussing the multiple sides of these issues should not be controversial, and yet democrats’ unwillingness to think through these is at least partially why they lose support in core parts of the country. 

Best Book of the First Half of 2024

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century – by George Friedman

My little known fun fact is that I took Russian 101 in college. I needed language credits to graduate, didn’t want to do Spanish because it’s cliche, and I had just serendipitously picked up The Next 100 Years at the college bookstore in 2010 (when it was published). Fourteen years ago, Friedman wrote that one of the prime conflicts of the 2010-2020s would be with a resurgent Russia attempting to reclaim what it had lost from the Cold War.

I never finished the book back in school, but when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it naturally resurfaced to the top of my mind.

The book is roughly split into thirds: First, a review of the prior 20th century such that it sets up what is to occur in the 21st century; second, his projections for the near future between 2010 through the 2040s; and lastly, what the second half of this century will look like until 2100.

Normally it’s difficult to rate “prediction” books highly because A) they are so often horribly wrong, and B) written in a way that is self-promoting of the author’s own interests. However, Friedman overcomes these hurdles by already being quite correct on numerous predictions nearly fifteen years after publishing, and his cause of American optimism which is one I’m inherently inclined to support.

Without spoiling too many of his predictions, the important emphasis of the book is not on the specifics anyway, it’s the thought process which is one I subscribe to. Politics is driven, much like economics, by the incentives and capabilities of the parties involved. Following people’s interests can make predicting behaviors much more tractable, if one is only willing to look at the facts with reduced bias. And this reality scales up to the macro decisions of nations.

There have been and always will be conflicts, because that is human nature. Through the luck of America’s geography and cultural history, it is in such a position of strength relative to the world that it is highly unlikely to be displaced as the top world power for the foreseeable future. This should be a calming message to Americans and allow us to focus on bringing that bright future to fruition, rather than staring at our own feet as much of culture does today.

Also, due to the backlog of reviews to write, I’ve changed up the format to only provide reviews for the top recommendations and provide a list of all the books. So if any in the list pique your interest and you want to hear more, reach out to me!

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, traditionally I would pick one book as the “best book of the past six months”. Due to the delay, I’ve selected my top two books of the past two years at the bottom of the post.

Two Stars

• Age of Invisible Machines – by Robb Wilson with Josh Tyson
• Build for Change – by Alan Trefler

Three Stars

• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World – by Malcolm Harris
• Zero to IPO – by Frederic Kerrest
• Putting the Rabbit in the Hat – by Brian Cox
• Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet – by Taylor Lorenz
• The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future – by Sebastian Mallaby
• The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance – by Eswar Prasad
• Bezonomics: How Amazon is Changing Our Lives and What the World’s Best Companies Are Learning from It
• Rise of Virtual Communities: In Conversation with Virtual World Pioneers – by Amber Atherton
• Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI – by Kevin Roose
• One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Videogames – by Joost Van Dreunen
• Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success – by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty
• An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination – by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia King
• The Age of AI: And Our Human Future – by Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Huttenlocher
• Cover Story: A Novel – by Susan Rigetti
• Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs – by Ken Kocienda
• The Glass Hotel: A Novel – by Emily St. John Mandel
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order – by Kai-Fu Lee
• My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress – by Rachel DeLoache Williams
• Siddhartha – by Herman Hesse
• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation – by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
• Michael Jordan: A Life – by Roland Lazenby
• Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon – by Mark McGurl
• The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma – by Mustafa Suleyman
• The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley – by Jimmy Soni
• Wonder Boy: Tony Hseih, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley – by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution – by Gregory Zuckerman
• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance – by Angela Duckworth
• Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
• Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I’d Wish I’d Known Earlier – by Kevin Kelly
• Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America – by Beth Macy
• Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings – by Alan Lightman
• Anaximander: And the Birth of Science – by Carlo Rovelli
• White Holes – by Carlo Rovelli

Four Stars

• The Underdog Founder: How to Go from Unseen to Unstoppable – by Edrizio De La Cruz
• Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns – by Michael Mauboussin and Alfred Rappaport
• Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better – by Jennifer Pahlka
• Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami – by Roben Farzad
• Build – by Tony Fadell
• Not with a Bug But With a Sticker: Attacks on Machine Learning Systems and What to Do About Them – by Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Hyrum Anderson
• Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy – by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams
• Without a Doubt: How to Go From Underrated to Unbeatable – by Surbhi Sarna
• Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It – by Liran Einav, Ray Fisman, and Amy Finkelstein
• All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns – by Betty Gilpin
• Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – by Matthew Perry
• Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire – by James Wallace and Jim Erickson
• Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe – by David Maraniss
• There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness: And other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy, and the World – by Carlo Rovelli
• The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success – by William Thorndike
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and Birth of the FBI – by David Grann
• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty – by Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat – by Eric Jager
• Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon – by Alec MacGillis
• Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World – by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
• The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI – by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
• Microserfs – by Douglas Coupland
• Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being – by Neil Theise

Five Stars

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do – by Erik Larson

This book will specifically be an interesting test of human’s ability to predict. Though he doesn’t time-bound his prediction, author Erik Larson makes the case in 2021 (before the release of ChatGPT) that current machine learning techniques will not be able to achieve human-equivalent general intelligence. The thrust of the argument is that there has not been a computer science technique for replicating human’s ability of “abductive logic”. In essence, anyone familiar with ChatGPT knows that you need to input . It can’t (yet) create thoughts without prompting, and is not actively learning through continuous interaction with the world.

The open and not yet knowable question with a book like this is: While he’s correct today, will he ever be proven wrong? Progress in AI research has skyrocketed since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 and it’s tough to bet against technological progress.

One of the few books I know I will have to re-read to fully ingest its ideas.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall – by Zeke Faux

As someone working in the tech startup world, I get asked a lot about my opinion on cryptocurrencies. And I’ve done a fair bit of studying on the subject. Zeke Faux’s book is now my absolute recommended starting point for anyone who wants to understand what the hell happened in the cryptocurrency world.

What started as a journalistic endeavor to uncover the truth behind Tether, a cryptocurrency whose role has been to be purposefully behind the scenes adding stability and support to the rest of the international crypto trading ecosystem, turned into an ironic takedown of every other major player in the industry except Tether.

The real issues with crypto markets are revealed in a stunning final third of the book, where Zeke physically tracks down international crime rings to their Southeast Asian sweatshops where the poor are enslaved as nonstop international scam machines responsible for all the spam we have to filter out of our inboxes. It is here that Zeke vividly portrays the biggest problem crypto adoption has had from the beginning: its purpose from inception was to be a method of money movement outside the bounds of government institutions. It’s an idea one can sympathize with, but it has trouble confronting reality (governments do not like being undermined) and therefore criminals naturally became the biggest adopters.

The Remains of the Day – by Kazuo Ishiguro

Jeff Bezos has repeatedly cited this as his favorite novel for its core lesson of leading a life without regret. It tells the tale of a British butler serving his aristocratic employer throughout the first half of the 1900s and the goings-on of the estate. It’s an incredibly slow build which may turn off a lot of readers before they reach the emotionally catastrophic final act. I almost can’t say much more about the plot without diluting the power of the ending, other than to say it more than any other book makes one stop and wonder what they’ve done with their life. It is no wonder the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Klara and the Sun – by Kazuo Ishiguro

Thirty years after publishing The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro continues to demonstrate a genius ability to create characters anyone can relate to, tug on emotional strings, and yet do so in varying settings and tones.

Klara, a solar-powered “Artificial Friend” (an AI doll) is purchased by parents in the future for their only child Josie. It’s a complex coming-of-age tale for both Josie and humanity’s relationship with technology. For most people this is probably a swifter read than Ishiguro’s other novels, but it packs no less punch as the story reaches both its climax and reflective epilogue.

Where is My Flying Car? – by J. Storrs Hall

The title is self-explanatory to what the book seems to be about, and Hall spends much of it answering the self-imposed question. And yet, somewhat unexpectedly, it’s about so much more.

Through a tremendous balance between the engineering explanations for how flying cars work (spoilers: they already exist, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering how similar helicopters are to the concept) and why they aren’t ubiquitous. The first topic is easier to explain despite it being the technical topic, because the second one is politics. 

Storrs Hall uses “flying cars” as a proxy example for futuristic tech withheld from society due to the bureaucratization of American culture. The regulatory environment would have never supported the Wright brothers from creating the airplane and is the one that has snuffed out the practical possibilities of not only flying cars, but a whole host of economic growth opportunities (nuclear energy being the author’s other primary focus).

It’s this libertarian-esque stance Storrs Hall takes that make me compelled to recommend it to everyone: right-wingers would find the deregulation arguments compelling while left-wingers should be compelled by the portrait of a universal Jetsons-esque future for all.

Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution – by Carlo Rovelli

It was on a small shore of the Helgoland archipelago where it clicked in the mind of a young Werner Heisenberg. “It” being the intuition behind quantum physics, the unsettling realization that it’s probabilities and uncertainties at the foundation of our existence.

As with all of Rovelli’s books, it’s simultaneously concise yet packed with beauty. The simplicity with which he explains the science gives wiggle room for reflection on the wonder of it all. For anyone wanting to understand quantum mechanics, this is the best starting point.

Professor Rovelli is probably the greatest living physics writer.

The Nineties – by Chuck Klosterman

“Ecstatically complacent” is how Klosterman comes to describe the decade in which I was born. Luckily it is not a commentary on me as much as it is on my parents and their Generation X.

The challenge Chuck tackles in this book is trying to capture the feeling of the past, in retrospect, without nostalgia. It’s a tall order that I think he mostly accomplishes, but of course it’s hard to judge since I was a kid. That dynamic itself makes this a half-reflective, half-educational read for those under the age of 45. 

In this way, it’s a spiritual successor or perhaps counter-argument to his own earlier book But What If We’re Wrong, which is partially about how people in the far future misremember the past compared to how those living in the time felt about the experience while it was happening. With The Nineties, he is trying to thread the needle: recapturing the experience as someone who lived it, but now in the future.

He explains well the historical context directly leading into a confluence of events that created the 90s; A decadent 80s created a counter-culture, as is always happening with the generational cycles. This was obviously reflected in pop culture’s media: the rise of grunge music, Tarantino and Kevin Smith mainstreaming meta-culture dialogue into film, and the general “Gen X” concept of “selling out” being a unique perspective not shared by prior or future generations.

These somewhat dour ideas were balanced by the quickening computer revolution and the end of the Cold War. The United States, for a time, was the best place in the world in which to live.

So great, in fact, that we neither properly savored it nor were we vigilante enough to protect it. Perhaps that lesson is timeless.

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology – by Chris Miller

The contention around Taiwan is one of the hottest international issues today. And it all boils down to how Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) became the dominant manufacturer of computer chips in the world.

How did this happen? Chip War documents this story, as well as really the history of why silicon is in the name “Silicon Valley”. Author Miller has done a remarkable job intertwining politics and science into a cohesive narrative that starts from loose startup roots and culminates in the tense militaristic situation China and the United States find themselves in. 

This is not strictly a technology book. It’s history, arguably of the most important stories affecting everyone’s lives today. For that reason, it’s recommended reading for everyone.

The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind – by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera

I have to disclaim upfront that the author Bethany McLean is my favorite author and the greatest business journalist who I’ve had the lucky pleasure of meeting multiple times when I lived in Chicago.

Her latest book covering COVID was inspired by her own experience as a mom forced to school her kids from home due to lockdowns. This posed an important and under-reported question: To what extent should we prioritize the perceived safety of the elderly at the expense of decreased education and socialization for our kids? When framed that way, the answer and approaches are much less clear.

This is only one angle in her broad review of how American institutions and society failed during the pandemic. She even handedly places blame on both ends of the political spectrum. A prime example would be the vaccines: Republicans wouldn’t acknowledge it helped, and Democrats oversold its effectiveness.

The overall list of pandemic-related issues Bethany covers is long: how psychopathic private equity ownership ripped out the heart of the healthcare system the past two decades and left the health of our nation’s people at risk, our fragile supply chains, and gutting small businesses with shutdowns while spending PPE money on big businesses and fraud. The Big Fail is the definitive overview of what went wrong in this country from 2020-2022.

Top Two Books of 2022-2023

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective – by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman

I first heard about this book from an interview of Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI (the company best known for ChatGPT). He so loved the book that he hired its author Kenneth Stanley to come work with him and inform their research agenda.

The two co-authors have both been professors researching artificial intelligence years before OpenAI was created. What they created in this short, almost pamphlet-sized, book is their work’s condensed conclusion: many of the greatest human achievements were not accomplished through the robotic pursuit of goals with continuous measurement of progress. It’s creative experimentation and serendipity supported by a small foundation of social stability which allow the best work of humans and machines alike to bubble out of the ether. 

While a couple chapters may have content specific to computer scientists, most of it is written purposefully for a wide audience. This is the manifesto for everyone who has desired to do great work and felt the pressures of unyielding bureaucracies blocking them from bringing to life a better future.

On Grand Strategy – by John Lewis Gaddis

As the book’s excerpts will tell you, the author Dr. John Lewis Gaddis has been teaching a seminar on “strategy” at Yale for over two decades, after an earlier career analyzing the Cold War in the 80s before it had formally concluded. It was this earlier work that took him from teaching at Ohio University to hopping around Naval academies, Princeton, then ultimately Yale.

This 2018 publication was him condensing his life’s work into a brisk 300 page paperback. And it resonated so strongly because he’s articulated more clearly and with historical examples a core idea I’ve been stumbling around in both my book-reading and professional experiences; there is no “one grand strategy”. As he traces the history of major decision made by legendary figures of history, from Xerxes to FDR, there are really only a few similarities someone can draw from studying history: That decisions must be made unique to the context of all the factors of the moment, a decision made by one person at moment can seem incorrect when attempted to be applied in any other circumstance, and that great leaders must learn to discern between contradicting advice to find the appropriate action for their point in time.

This is the Art of War for modernity.

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

Three Stars

This Is Your Mind on Plants – by Michael Pollan

Pollan, a journalist now famous for his writing on foods and drugs, combines the two topics into this odd short collection of chapters on three plant-born drugs:

• Opium: A 20 year old magazine article Pollan wrote that was cut in half by lawyers at the time, now printed in its entirety about the plant behind the opioid epidemic.
• Caffeine: A history of the relationship between humans and the bean, written during a three month experiment in abstaining by the author.
• Mescaline: The first drug banned in America when the Mexican Inquisition met Native Americans using this hallucinogen from cacti, Pollan tries to go on his own version of a vision quest.

I say odd due to the formatting and writing style varying by chapter, which feels half-jarring and half-intriguing.

It’s a little lighter and less informative and thought-provoking than I thought it might be. But that’s also probably because I’m unfairly comparing it to Pollan’s other longer, deeper books. This is shorter and snappier by design.

Dune – by Frank Herbert

I felt compelled to try reading this acclaimed classic prior to seeing the new movie. It deserves its credit for being a thoughtful sociopolitical sci-fi epic prior to the existence of Star Wars and Game of Thrones, but I found Herbert’s writing to be boring. Similarly to how I felt about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the books are memorable for the ideas more than the implementation.

Greenlights – by Matthew McConaughey (Audiobook)

I barely knew what this guy was talking about (assorted stories from his life before he became a movie star). But his voice and cadence is so smooth, he’s a natural audiobook narrator, especially for his own memoir.

Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of the Sopranos – by Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa

These two guys are just about the luckiest on Earth. First, they get cast in the Sopranos. Next, they unintentionally start a video podcast about the show right before covid lockdowns hit. Third, a prequel movie about the show comes out a year and a half after they start the podcast, right about when they’ve finished rewatching every episode of the show.

Through their podcast, Talking Sopranos, have interviewed every major member of the cast who isn’t the late, great Gandolfini. This book is a concise compilation of the best tidbits from the podcast interviews plus additional interview content about the making of the show and its final season. For fans of the Sopranos who also don’t have hundreds of hours to spend listening through the entire podcast series, this is a great alternative.

Hip Hop and Other Things – by Shea Serrano

I am white and what one could fairly describe as a mainstream middlebrow consumer of hip hop music. Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter 3” is the most significant album to me that came out in my lifetime, but I have never listened through The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill despite knowing it’s profoundly significant to the genre.

So it is with great relief that, in reading Serrano’s newest book, I ran into arguments I can agree with (Nicki Minaj’s verse on Monster being the greatest of the 2010s), and those I would quibble with (Eminem’s Lose Yourself doesn’t make a list of the top 30 hype songs?). But inciting discussion is Shea’s goal, so mission accomplished.

Basketball and Other Things – by Shea Serrano

I know a little bit more about Basketball than I do about Hip Hop, and I’m still riding the high from the Michael Jordan documentary, so this book ranks one spot higher than the other Shea book. Is that a wholly fair way to rank and review books? Maybe not, but it’s the kind of argument I think Serrano would support.

The Annotated Godfather (50th Anniversary Edition): The Complete Screenplay, Commentary on Every Scene, Interviews, and Little-Known Facts – by Jenny Jones

It’s about to be fifty years since what I consider the greatest film I’ve ever seen was released. To celebrate, writer and film buff Jenny Jones has been able to get access to a wealth of new interviews and unknown morsels about the making of The Godfather. This is what I call a “coffee table book”. Not meant to be read on a Kindle, the hardcover is wider, containing high quality photos of the production interspersed between trivia and cast profiles. The throughline is the script, as powerful an original work of fiction as there’s been in the past century. If the Godfather story weren’t already so well-known, I’d probably rate this even higher.

Stranger in a Strange Land – by Robert Heinlein

Something I’ve learned about myself the past few years is that “science fiction” is most interesting to me when it’s fun, not when it’s attempting to be profound. 

I knew nothing about Stranger when I bought it other than its famous title, a phrase taken from the Bible whose subtle relevance unfolds gradually as the plot progresses. So I was completely unaware that it’s main characters are a boy raised on Mars and brought back to Earth who is taught about humanity by a character who I can best describe as a multi-cultural retired doctor-lawyer now running a brothel in his retirement.

The man-Martian works well as a “fish out of water” device to veil the author’s perspective on human paradoxes: concepts like schadenfreude, the violence of peace-promoting religions, and legal systems so complex as to be useless loophole-ridden constructs.

Some dialogues run long in an Ayn-Randian kind of way, but this is balanced by a Douglas Adams sense of humor about this “human existence” thing. For the latter reason, I recommend it, as neither Heinlein nor his book take anything too seriously.

Four Stars

The Soprano Sessions – by Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall

I had previously read MZS’s episodic breakdown of Mad Men. And so, with the release of the new prequel movie, I caught up on their Sopranos collection. These two are such great writers that they exemplify the best of professional criticism: they are clearly lovers of the medium and content (being a hater is not interesting) without being fanboys. They’re comfortable calling out episodes that don’t resonate with them and can explain why both artistically and emotionally.

The extra juice is a nearly 100-page interview with showrunner David Chase. With these two New Jersey journalists he’s a little more honest and frank than I’ve heard him be with other outlets. For someone interested in the making of great art, reading Chase’s part-workman choices of details and part artist-gut-instinct approach is a bit enigmatic but fun to try and decipher all the same.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel – by Quentin Tarantino

I really loved this movie. Much like Margot Robbie’s scene in it, I walked to a theater in downtown Chicago by myself to sit through it, so high was my anticipation.

Tarantino has stated that his post-Hollywood life will be spent writing (books and plays mostly). Making his first book a novelization of his movie is a logical starting point.

Like The Queen’s Gambit, my decision to read this was driven by the desire to spend more time in the world with the characters as they were depicted onscreen.

What I did not predict, and was pleasantly surprised by, is that Taratino’s novelization would not be the same story as the movie’s script. Primarily he focuses on fleshing out the character’s backstories, which works to varying degrees for different characters (a positive for the Lancer cast and Manson family, but demystifying Cliff Booth’s background might detract from the character’s intrigue). The character development is rounded out with asides about the history of Hollywood, fictionalizing stories Tarantino has heard from the likes of Burt Reynolds and Kurt Russell.

For someone who hasn’t seen the movie, it’s probably three stars as a novel. For anyone who saw the movie, loved the characters, and/or is a Hollywood history buff, this is a five.

Educated: A Memoir – by Tara Westover

Westover has certainly had an abnormal enough life to justify a memoir. Raised in an extremist cult wing of the Mormon religion led by her bipolar father, her story is one of a promising young woman realizing that something is not right with her home life. It’s psychologically restrictive and physically abusive. These points maybe feel a little hammered in by the middle third of the book, but the uniqueness of her cult in the first third and her rising above in the last third make the whole picture worth following. Her life is special, given that most people with mentally disturbed parents and childhoods in cults rarely escape.

Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit – by Ashley Mears

I first learned of Ashley’s work via Tyler Cowen’s podcast, and her unique story of a fashion model-turned-academic-sociologist was compelling enough for me to pick up the book.

Mears was out of the nightlife game for nearly a decade before taking her early-20s experience as dissertation material seriously. And so, as Michael Corleone once said, when she was out, she was brought back in.

She does this by reconnecting with club managers, promoters, and VIP clientele she once knew let her back into the scene “on background” (willing to be quoted but under anonymous identities). Thus the book takes an interesting angle of positioning all these nightlife conversations as participants in an academic study. Which they are, but the writing is well-balanced between keeping the reader engaged by the glamor while informed of the dirty underbelly of this industry.

And it is a dark industry. Combining the exploitation of young, poor women with little to monetize other than their bodies and poor (often first or second degree immigrant) men who become the promoters, Mears documents a subculture not unlike most industries still today: an economic system designed for the promotion, pleasure, and ego fulfillment of older white men.

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal – by Eric Schlosser

Schlosser wrote my absolute favorite book I’ve read since college (Command and Control). However, it’s Fast Food Nation which he’s probably most known for.

Published in 2001, it starts off similarly as his future works would: in a military base. The point being that, should a true apocalypse truly wipe out most of humanity, what would remain would be nuclear bunkers and fast food wrappers.

This and a handful of other analogies in the first half of the book feel a little like he’s reaching for bad news (comparing fast food work to call centers primarily to emphasize employment options for the poor are bleak) on a topic (fast food) that is deep fried in it.

So this book is a little slower to get juicy until the second half, when Schlosser’s talent of writing journalistic fact with the flare of fiction tackles the failures of the FDA and USDA regulatory bodies, and his insights into modern slaughterhouses make this a spiritual successor to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

There’s a good reason this story was famous in the early 2000s when it was released, similar to the way the work of the Washington Post and Walter Cronkite resonated: important true stories told well resonate through culture.

Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused – by Melissa Maerz

I’m not a stoner, but I’ve known a few. And they’ve all seen this movie. Although for the next generation of teenagers, I don’t know if they’ll think of it as a 90s-nostalgia-for-the-70s flick or as the movie which made Matthew McConaughey famous.

As part of my quarantine effort to watch through classic cinema, I finally checked Dazed and Confused off my list. The viewing was quickly followed by reading this new oral history of the making of the movie.

I loved the “documentary as a book” style Maerz chose, having mixed together multiple interviews with all the principal players (including director Richard Linklater and McConaughey himself). Also well done is Maerz does a fair job balancing the romanticism of the movie-making process with a bunch of twentysomethings with the critiques of certain people’s actions (the treatment of colleagues and how varying levels of fame coming out of the film influence how people remember the past). Recommended for anyone interested in nostalgia, marijuana, filmmaking, and/or Matthew McConaughey.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power – by Max Chafkin

As it says at one point in the book, there was a time when Peter Thiel was known as a “tech” person and not a “political” one. For many, that change happened when Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook, came out in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016.

Chafkin documents the Thiel story in a way that makes the move seem less surprising than it was. This is an incredible story of a person’s ability to hold contradictory ideas and using them as a tool to maneuver himself from typical middle class kid into one of the world’s most influential power men.

Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric – by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann

When I was a kid, the General Electric name held hefty weight. Even in an economy being disrupted by the computer industry, GE stood for ubiquitous industrialism, with its curvy lettered logo on everyone’s home appliances and the boxes of light bulbs at the store.

This is the chronicling of a corporate collapse comparable to the fall of Rome. While not quite bankrupt, the plummet in the company’s value from its peak two decades ago to today is greater than Enron, Worldcom, and Lehman Brothers combined.

The story spans multiple decades and CEOs, starting the Jack Welch era (once lauded for its emphasis on shareholder growth, now derided for causing the collapse by rotting the culture similar to Enron). Then the bag is handed to Jeff Immelt, whose attempts in the 21st century to recover from Welch’s mistakes are also ill-advised: failed investments as a late-comer to the software industry, overpaying for acquisitions for the sake of maintaining growth, and investments into the fracking industry, all of which cost more money than they made.

I can’t really spoil the ending of the story because googling GE’s stock price will do that. This is the saddest business book since the post-Great Financial Crisis era over a decade ago.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood – by Sam Wasson

Attempting to make Roman Polanski relatable in today’s world and not having the reader reject the story outright is a tricky task. Wasson was up for it with The Big Goodbye, where the pedophiliac director is but one of our four leading men who brought one of the greatest movies ever into existence.

Chinatown was a pivot point for Hollywood. Released the same year as The Godfather and with similar dark tones, they straddled the line between a previous, simpler era of independent cinema and the emergence of the still-unending big blockbuster era.

What really makes this story sizzle is Wasson’s writing style. This is not a textbook biography, more of a reenactment. The dialogue and recreated thoughts of Polanski, actor Jack Nicholson, writer Robert Townes, and producer Robert Evans are not necessarily quoted verbatim, but designed to convey the mood of the moment. It’s this meta aspect to The Big Goodbye, what reads like a fictional novel is actually a retelling, that makes this memorable. 

Five Stars

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals – by Michael Pollan

This is the book that, when published, made me aware of Michael Pollan. As an infamous meat-eater, I tend to avoid books about vegetables which is what I thought this was about given no research or any real knowledge beyond the cover.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is decidedly not that kind of book. Rather, Pollan has accomplished what the best works of pop-science do, which is to translate a swath of related academic work (covering biology, economics, history, etc.) into a compelling narrative leaving you both better educated than you were before but leaving you to answer the biggest questions for yourself. 

The dilemma at the heart of the story is not so much about what we eat, but how we choose and why we make the choices that we do. For me personally, the strongest chapters are the early (multi-disciplinary explanation for the dominance of corn in American diets) and late ones (the great philosophical questions about whether we should be vegetarians and how we should navigate the realities of needing large food supplies to support growing populations).

Pollan achieved a rare balance of breadth and depth without boredom which warrants a strong recommendation.

Station Eleven: A Novel – by Emily St. John Mandel

There are perhaps two types of people in the world at this moment: Those who want to consume pandemic-related content and those who do not. I do, but I did not know that’s what I was getting into when I ordered this book following a friend’s recommendation.

Trying to describe the plot spoiler-free undersells the emotional impact contained in the story. It also sounds quirkier than it reads in practice. A traveling Shakespeare theater accompanied by a band travels from town to town entertaining the survivors of a global pandemic.

Emily Mandel uses Shakespeare combined with chronologically incongruous structure to impress a deep lesson: human creativity is simultaneously immortal and a reminder of time’s passing.

To tell anymore of the plot would be to risk spoiling the experience of letting Mandel guide you through spacetime by your heartstrings. This is the most ingenious fiction I’ve read in a long, long time.

Best Book Read in the First Half of 2021

House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed – by Sara Gay Forden

No wonder a movie was made of this story, and after having read this book, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

I know very little about fashion and even less about luxury. To the extent that I know anything, it’s through the brand names which permeate pop culture. Gucci is chief among them.

What I didn’t know was how fantastical the story was behind the brand. Journalist Sara Gay Forden and others make the Gucci analogy to the 80s-era TV dramas Dynasty and Dallas, where rich miserable families use both physical and psychological violence against their own blood to feed their greed and egos. Except here, it’s all true.

The best nonfiction stories like this work because the author has so much great raw material to work with. Only self-absorbed rich people and psychopaths can create this much real world drama with high stakes. Without spoiling details, this is a biography of an industry (from the nuances of leather-making to the billion dollar stakes of boardrooms) and of a family (whose personal desires conflict with old world ideas of loyalty). In summary, Forden has told a great story of the 20th century.

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

Two Stars

Anticipate: The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success – by Ronald Brown

Three Stars:

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Five Days – by Jake Knapp with John Keratsky and Braden Kowitz

Based on the team’s experience at Google and consulting with startups, the authors assembled a guide for a new way to generate and test new ideas. While it isn’t a guide to delivering fully baked products, and focuses more on design and user experience than making anything functionally work, it does provoke the reader to think about his or her team could be always moving more quickly, more efficiently toward solutions customers will actually care about, not what you think they do.

No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality – by Michael J. Fox

I grew up watching the sitcom Family Ties after school on TV Land, or on Nick at Nite, I’m not sure which. It was my first introduction to Michael J. Fox as the high school yuppie capitalist Alex P. Keaton. This was a character I related to at a young age, which should’ve been concerning to my parents.

Fox’s most recent memoir tells the story of his life since he left the show Spin City in the 90s, as his Parkinson’s disease escalated to debilitating levels, at least to the point of interfering with his ability to fulfill his acting obligations.

Despite losing some control of his motor skills, he has not lost his voice or sense of humor. Unlike some celebrity bios which can feel ghostwritten, this feels like it was actually written by Fox, or at least recited to someone for typing. His unique, playful, youthful humor still shines through both his age and life experiences.

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts – by Annie Duke

Duke has made her living off her decision-making abilities as a professional poker player. Here she’s compiled a collection of thoughts based on her extensive reading into both the natural and social science academic work on the topic. My enjoyment was held back by her use of a couple examples I quibble with, specifically opening the book with the controversial Pete Carroll Super Bowl 49 play-call (which I don’t believe was nearly as clear-cut a good or bad call as she presents). Still, this is a good overview of mental models for improved decision making.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work For You

Don’t Fall for It: A Short History of Financial Scams – by Ben Carlson

The Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It – by Scott Kupor

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – by Jeff Lawson

Lawson, founder of highly successful software business Twilio, has written a combination of his personal story and Twilio’s, which are inextricably linked. Memoirs of his experiences (as cofounder of a failed dotcom startup then early product manager at Amazon Web Services) map to lessons he would later apply in his philosophy at Twilio. In this regard, I’d probably use a similar format if I one day wrote my own business biography.

Some key tenants being: Software engineers should be increasingly treated as leaders of business decisions (not as robotic resources), the average software engineer nowadays is not the 80s white male nerd stereotype, and the people doing the work will know best what tools they should use to get things done.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters – by Ryan SingerFame: The Hijacking of Reality – by Justine Bateman

Basecamp, a small but vocal web software company, is known for publishing books on its opinionated way of working. The latest in its series is by its head of product, Singer, about their product development process. Readers can always count on Basecamp to present experimental ideas. I would call them innovative but it may be premature to call them decisively successful.

From a practical standpoint, there are two ideas here that stood out as unique: eliminating the concept of “backlogs” (if an idea is important, it’ll naturally be brought up often enough that consensus will converge on agreement) and structuring project work in six-week segments.

Perhaps these can’t and shouldn’t be applied to all products and businesses, but it succeeds in making you rethink your assumptions about how product organizations should work.

Fame: The Hijacking of Reality – by Justine Bateman

This was not what I expected, which was either a celebrity memoir (for those not in the know, Justine was mega-famous for her starring role on the 80s sitcom Family Ties) or an academic analysis attempting to define the concept of “fame.”. Upfront, she makes explicit that the book won’t be either of those things. What we get instead is an interesting semi-stream-of-consciousness explaining the emotional roller coaster of life before, during, and after fFame. It’s short, energetic, and conveys what should be an obvious message but apparently isn’t based on people’s behavior: fame is not as important as you think it is.

VC: An American History – by Tom Nicholas

Harvard Professor Nicholas has written a compelling chronicling of the history of Venture Capital, back to its pre-Silicon Valley roots of wealthy families investing in 19th century whaling expeditions. My main takeaway is how inextricably linked the present is with the past, and not just because a historian has presented it as such. The wealthy families of the East Coast Industrial Revolution directly translated into being the major investors who ended up funding the development of Silicon Valley, along with government policies and funding which succeeded in supporting small business innovation.

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win – by Maria Konnikova

You can picture the publisher pitch: A psychologist-slash-journalist with an academic background in decision-making asks a poker champion to take her on as a mentee with a one-year plan to go from novice to competitor in next year’s World Series of Poker.

It plays out mostly as you’d expect. Much of her poker story is relaying the wisdom of her mentor, Eric Seidel, and other poker pros she meets along her journey. That journey is typical enough: start playing online poker games to learn the rules and pace, up to the small local casinos, before getting into the bigtime tournaments, and lastly world travel.

Along the way, she weaves her lessons in poker with her past research into chance and human perception of it. Much of that information I found less informative, given I’ve read and reviewed a lot of other books on the subject.

That said, given the predictability (pun intended), Konnikova’s story weaves together a gaming action-thriller with the philosophy of luck in an engaging, readable way.

The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel – by Walter Tevis

I read this book because I didn’t want to leave the story when the Netflix series ended. That’s the bias disclaimer.

Now having read the series, the mini-series structure was perfect for adapting the material to the screen. Tevis writes with a quick pace, incredibly covering huge swaths of time (more than could’ve been covered in a movie) without the reader feeling like it lacks detail.

The main differences between the show and the book are the Cold War overtones (lessened on Netflix, more of a foreboding undercurrent in the book) and the mother (played up for flashbacks in the show which aren’t in the book). This makes sense, given the time in which Tevis was writing compared to what may be relevant to the modern TV viewer.

From the perspective of someone who watched the show first, you don’t need to read the book, but you won’t regret it either if you, like me, want to spend a little more time in Beth Harmon’s world.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins – by Garry Kasparov with Mig Greengard

Kasparov, once the world chess champion, signed Deep Thinking for me when he was promoting it at the 2017 Techcrunch Disrupt conference in NYC. For four years, this autographed copy sat on my shelf. With The Queen’s Gambit renewing my (and many others) interest in chess, I finally cracked this open.

For those unaware, what makes Kasparov unique among the long line of world chess champions was his high-profile loss to Deep Blue, an IBM chess computer which was the first to beat the reigning human champion in a tournament match (and presumably inspired the title of this book). Here, Kasparov writes what are two parallel biographies: the history of chess computers competing against humans up until his fateful 1997 clash with Deep Blue, and the broader implications for artificial intelligence along the way.

Greengard, a longtime English writing accomplice for the Russia-born Kasparov, spins Garry’s tales into poetic prose. The reader feels, with a combined gravity and humanity, Kasparov’s unique combination of legendary intellectual skill and human frailty once it is pitted against the truly superhuman.

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives – Lisa Servon

Servon, a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in poverty and urban development, joins a payday loan business to get a journalistic-like inside scoop on the highly controversial industry. What she discovers surprises her. Both the business and the customers seem to have a much more respect for one another than she anticipated.

She places much of the blame for issues with the industry and the reason it exists on the big banks (who have abused overdraft fees which cost people as much as the interest payments on payday loans) and racism (society shutting out minorities from mainstream employment and financial options forces them to alternatives).

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy – by Mehrsa Baradaran

This was a hot book in the socioeconomic scene when it hit in 2015. Author and professor Baradaran tells the story of the other side of the “too big to fail” coin following the 2008 financial crisis: while big banks were getting bailed out, individuals were on their own. But we shouldn’t have been surprised. Baradaran spends the first half of the book untangling the long intertwined history banking and governments have had since both their inceptions.

I was most surprised that the book is less about how the poor bank (see The Unbanking of America for that) and generally about how the retreat of big banks from serving the poor created a boom in alternative financial institutions. The conclusion is not one I expected (advocacy for “postal banking”, a.k.a post offices providing bank accounts). I’m glad though, it’s a well-researched history of government-banking relations and the under-pursued alternatives to our current system.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution – by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg

This is the book on the state of gene editing by one of last year’s Nobel Prize winners (Doudna) and one of her chief proteges (Sternberg). It’s a little slow going as the writing gets occasionally bogged down in the scientific details, and the ethical discussion in the later chapters is covered well in other books by more experienced journalistic writers. Of course, it’s still important to read about these topics from one of the pioneers of the field.

Four Stars

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams – by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon – by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

Two Amazon executives (one was Bezos’s Chief of Staff and the other ran Prime Video) have come together to write a practical handbook for how to run a business the Amazon way. Working Backwards is split in two parts: the first half is the guide, the second is examples of the ideas at work in building some of Amazon’s most popular products (Kindle, Prime, and Web Services).

Stories about the history of product creation in the second book sometimes veer a little more into Amazon storytelling (as opposed to the first half’s straightforward advice) than I would like, but I took way more notes than expected. This is a good guide if you want to understand how Amazonians operate.

Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos – by Jeff Bezos with Introduction by Walter Isaacson

Isaacson, known primarily as a biographer, works here as a compiler of Jeff Bezos’s writing and speeches. The content gets a bit repetitive (I would have organized the book a bit more like Lawrence Cunningham’s compilation of Warren Buffett’s writing — by theme, not chronology), but Bezos is one of the best business minds of our lifetimes, so it’s really hard to overrate the best of what he’s said.

Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas – by Christina Brinkley

There was once a man who had the idea to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI’s on their way to the West Coast. And that man’s name was Bugsy Siegel and that city was Las Vegas.

Half a century later, the once roaring Vegas known for Sinatra had, by the late 80s, fallen into disrepair and lost its glamorous luster. This provided the opportunity of a lifetime for those bold enough to bet on their instincts and a belief that a strip of desert land could be something special.

Thus began the war, hotly contested from the mid-1990s to mid-2010s, of Vegas’s resurgence with a vengeance. Steve Wynn and Kirk Kerkorian, through their own friendly rivalry, rebuilt Vegas into a family-friendly Disney World of indulgence, with theme park style hotels, expensive shows with celebrity residencies, and luxury art and cuisine that we come to associate with Vegas today. And Gary Loveman used the non-Vegas casino chain Harrah’s lucrative regional riverboat business to vault himself to the top of the Vegas gambling business with an expensive gambit to takeover the legendary Caesar’s Palace.

This is an entertaining modern history of the most infamous city in the world.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire – by Brad Stone

From the author of The Everything Store, a biography of Amazon’s founding, comes this sequel telling the Amazon story since his last book left off around 2010. In the decade since, Amazon has added a trillion dollars in market value to its stock by launching major new businesses such as Amazon Web Services and Prime Video. In parallel, founder Jeff Bezos expanded his personal empire by buying The Washington Post and starting space tech company Blue Origin.

Brad Stone does an exceptional job in providing a balanced perspective. Amazon dislikes unions partially for the valid reasons that unions have historically prevented Amazon from shipping packages as fast to customers as possible, counter to Amazon’s “customer first” approach. At the same time, Amazon seemingly does not always “work backwards” (as they like to say) from the customer’s perspective considering most of the major pivotal decisions at Amazon still stem from the mind and energy of the founder at the top.

Additionally, Stone’s journalistic efforts are clear, with this book providing unique scoops on who the Alexa voice actress is and sordid details of the Bezos mistress affair. All these factors combined make for a definitive account of the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most powerful companies. If The Everything Store was a startup story or Godfather 1, this is Godfather 2.

Quick Cash: The Story of the Loan Shark by Robert Mayer

Professor Mayer has written a compelling history and critique of the American loan shark, spanning many different types of financial products we would all wrap under the label of “payday lending”. Remarkably, Mayer presents comprehensive arguments for all constituents in the payday debates: the lenders, regulators, consumers, and ancillary financial institutions such as big banks and credit unions. As someone who works in the subprime lending industry, why personal loans exists, who benefits, and who is hurt is a nuanced conversation that is rarely treated as such.

It is academic without being dry, but most importantly, it’s intellectually balanced while still allowing the author to put forth his position in a logical way that’s derived from first principles (primarily prohibiting payday loans).

The Caesar’s Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street – by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap

Not since Barbarians at the Gate has complex corporate financial transactions been explained in such intricate detail without losing the story’s suspense. Whereas that book chronicled the buildup of a leveraged buy-out, The Caesar’s Palace Coup explains the modern aftermath.

The famous casino company got dismantled by greedy investors in the past couple decades. Without spoiling the financial twists, the innovative legal approaches the equity (“stock”) investors took to extract money from the business while attempting to force their creditors and bankers to lose money is shocking to those trained in the classical idea that those who lend money have more control over their debtors than vice versa.

This book can get more technical in parts that I could see boring the non-accountant readers. But for those intrigued by the 3D chess games that are financial markets and corporate strategy at the most white-collar level, the Caesar’s story is a thriller.

The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History – by William Rempel

Author Rempel wrote this biography after his subject, Kerkorian, passed away a few years ago. Oddly enough, Kerkorian’s death is a day I remember distinctly for texting a friend in finance when I heard the news. Kerkorian was such a significant a figure in the history of American business, and one of the least well-known in my generation.

Perhaps no other American billionaire in the last 100 years has had quite the same set of traits as Kerkorian: truly self-made from nothing, and an ability to parlay success in one industry (starting with his own airline after World War 2) into an even bigger success in different industries (branching into Las Vegas casinos, the MGM movie studio, and significant holdings in carmaker Chrysler).

Less known to me going into this story was his profusive philanthropy, especially the tens of millions donated back to his war-torn homeland of Armenia. It’s hard to tell if this book is a hagiography, or if Kerkorian really was the most beloved billionaire.

The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind A Century of Wall Street Scandals – by Frank Partnoy

My seventh grade history teacher of mine always said, “Times change, people don’t.” This phrase comes to my mind whenever I hear people shocked by the news of a Jeffrey Epstein island, a Bernie Madoff scheme, or Elon Musk’s outlandish antics.

A century before them all was Ivar Kreuger, who in relative terms for his era, reached greater heights as measured by political power than them all. Summarized, his scheme was to take a reasonably boring business, making matches (the kind for lighting cigarettes, not dating), and expand the business into a global match monopoly by raising millions (billions today) from investors via stocks, bonds, and a variety of financial instruments that were original innovations of their time and have since become mainstays in finance. 

An astute reader can probably guess where this leading without me having to spoil Kreuger’s fate.

As with all corporate fraud stories, they are only able to succeed because they’re built on some small foundation that’s real. Enron’s pipelines moved real oil and gas. If Theranos’s technology actually worked, it would’ve been as valuable as they claimed. And for Swedish Match, well, everyone understands what a match is and thought it could be a real business.

At the Kreuger story’s core is an often unknowable question: When someone commits a white-collar crime destroying millions of people’s lives by taking their money, were they a well-intentioned idiot, or were they purposely stealing all along?

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet – by John Green

John (and his brother Hank) Green are fiction authors I’ve heard are popular but whose content (books or their popular podcast) I’ve never consumed. I didn’t even know John had a new book out until I saw its colorful cover on the shelf of my neighborhood bookstore. The inside flap sold me on it; it’s his first published collection of non-fiction.

The book has a delightful premise. Green applies the method of 5-star reviews, made mainstream by the internet, to various aspects of his life and modernity. The format is more framework than gimmick, as Green’s gift is the ability to amplify the pleasures of life from the little things. Having never read his novels, I suspect this is what people enjoy about them.

Even the negatives of the book, primarily its overuse of quotes, is self-acknowledged without seeming disingenuous.

And personally, I was surprised at how many things he reviewed that I have a particular affinity for:

• The Great Gatsby: My favorite novel.
• Dr. Pepper: My favorite soda.
• The Yips: A fascinating phenomena with a great name which I never hear outside of sports radio.
• Mario Kart: John is more than a decade older than I am, but the feeling of playing these videogames seems universal and unconstrained by time.

Five Stars

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century – by Jessica Bruder

The 2008 financial crisis irreparably altered the livelihoods of millions of Americans. Nomadland is the story of this group of people and the grit and ingenuity they’ve shown in surviving in a world that does little to help them.

Nomadland’s specific demographic journalist Bruder embedded herself in is the movement of modern migrant manual laborers. These folks, often elder Americans whose wealth was destroyed in 2008, live in their RVs, which they drive across the country to whatever hourly work will take them and park in “workamps” (essentially trailer parks near work sites). Much of the story also covers the rise of Amazon as a massive employer for this population. Bruder handles this topic fairly, split between Amazon’s grueling warehouse work environment with the fact that its pay and constant need for workers provides an option for those without many.

As the population of people in this situation has grown over the past decade, they’ve formed communities, camaraderie, and second nomadic families based on their shared experience. Bruder generates warm feelings throughout the book right up until the last couple chapters where the reality of the situation comes crashing down. People will die in their cars in a society that has marked them as outcasts. Even for the libertarian among us, it will leave you thinking that there must be a better way we can support everyone in society.

The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World – by Mark Spitznagel

Filing this under “books I wish I’d written”, hedge fund manager Spitznagel provides a history of the Austrian school of economics (whose tenets I won’t list here and instead direct you to this book), including its forerunners in Asian philosophy, before extending the ideas into his own simple, practical investing framework. This will be insightful for anyone new to Austrian economics and looking for a twist on how they think about investing and markets.

The Great A&P: And The Struggle for Small Business in America – by Marc Levinson

The A&P is a name I’d vaguely heard of, either from old TV shows or grandma’s stories. But when I had heard that Jeff Bezos recommended this book to his staff, the business infovore in me had to read it.

When I used to think of the most powerful retail stores of the past century, the names that come to mind are Sears and Walmart. Arguably though, the great A&P was greater than either of them. At least measured by the length of its reign on top, which spanned from roughly 1910 to 1960 as the world’s biggest retailer as measured by revenue and store count.

Levinson did an incredible job telling multiple stories at once without any of them feeling disjointed. The history of the Hartford family from humble 1800s beginnings to becoming the robber barons of America in the post-Industrial age, the evolution of grocery store technology from the roots of tin and aluminum cans through refrigeration and the automobile.

It is no wonder Bezos loves this book: it’s an entrepreneurial story about a business that thrived through its own reinvention and adaptation to technology over the owners’ entire lifetimes. And how government intervention through lawsuits, legislation, and public relations distracted them from their business, leading to its demise.

It’s a tremendously American story where no one side is clearly right and wrong. The idea of one dominant retailer, the ultimate middleman, sitting in between individual consumers, small business owners, product supply chains, and the government has persisted since A&P’s rise to prominence one hundred years ago.

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA – by James Watson

This legendary book written by a legendary scientist tells a legendary story in a completely compelling and approachable manner. Watson’s story about their co-discovery of DNA is a brilliant thriller, only matched in the annals of science stories by Feynman. 

As someone with a little knowledge about Watson’s offensive statements about women and minorities but not much about his scientific career, I was immersed in the story from the get-go. Watson’s wit and energy are electrifying, a funnier Bill Nye for an earlier time. He succinctly conveys all the critical pieces that led to him and Crick’s big breakthrough while still in their 20s and early 30s, primarily the competition between competing schools (both geographically and intellectually). It’s the race to the finish line that keeps the book moving, with just enough science so the reader understands the various perspectives but not so much to slow things down.

There are absolutely segments of this book that will not read well for a modern audience, specifically his objectification of women. However, it’s no wonder that a story this important to the history of humanity, told with humor and a heart-racing pace, inspired generations of young scientists.

The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It Every Time – by Maria Konnikova

As some readers may know, my own father is/was a con artist who disappeared from my life after forcing our family to declare bankruptcy. Thus life experience has led me to read everything I can on the subject.

Konnikova’s coverage of con artists is the most well-rounded I’ve found. It’s structured as a guidebook to the steps con artists take in luring in victims, extracting what they want, and figuratively disposing of the bodies. The contents of the individual chapters is a mix of academic psychology, historical examples of similar cons repeating over time, and personal retellings of cons gone wrong (for both the artists and their subjects).

Confidence Game tells stories of the dark sides of humanity without the reader ever feeling the depressing weight of reality. Rather, the underlying message (that con artistry works because the majority of humans are optimists) leaves you upbeat, despite what you’ve read.

Best Book Read in the First Half of 2021

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race – by Walter Isaacson

I’m naturally biased to highly rate books about “big” ideas. As cliche as it sounds, there are so many problems in the world and humanity must remain vigilant in constantly addressing them.

Famed biographer Walter Isaacson has undertaken the heavy task of telling the history of genetic engineering through the lens of Jennifer Doudna, the co-winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Her work (and her collaborators) unlocked the ability for humans to easily edit our genes and the genes of all life on Earth.

Nearly any story of such a powerful tool is going to be worth reading, as there have been few technologies created or discovered by humans that are as profound in their implications.

What sets Isaacson’s book apart is painting the portrait of how scientific progress is made, which is the hard work of individuals. While the technology may be cold and logical, the people who make it are not. Competition, sexism, and greed are characteristics of scientists as they are in any field. Jennifer may serve as a centralizing force and thrust for the story, Isaacson’s legendary biographical skills are humming as he chronicles the arc of the biochemistry community at large over the last century.

The hard science itself is explain superbly; simple enough for you to feel the gravity of the discoveries without feeling lost in the complexity to which these experts have devoted their lives.

Far better than his Steve Jobs biography, Isaacson’s writing here succeeds in the trope “making something difficult look easy.” Code Breaker is energetic, educational, and emotional, without losing the reader to tonal shifts or banal academic meandering. 

There’s not a stronger recommendation that I can give than to say that this is the book everyone alive today must read to understand the most important technological development of our 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:

• 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.

Two Stars

The Biotech Trader’s Handbook – By Tony Ayers Pelz

More focused on options trading and finance 101 than the biotech industry specifically. Pelz recommends some questionable technical analysis as well, but doesn’t dwell on it. I did gleam one memorable non-obvious observation from Pelz’s experience: that biotech call options may lose value as price increases from major news as volatility decreases with future certainty. Other than that, readers who are aspiring traders are better off, and those interested in biotech have better books to read.

Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing Is as it Seems – Edited by William Irwin, Rod Carveth, and James South

As a Mad Men devotee, I felt compelled to pick this up. However, the scope and audience for this is limited. The series of essays by philosophers only covers the first three seasons, requires too much recounting of the scenes from the show (making half the text redundant for those who have seen it) in order to support the points, and the philosophy is introductory. This is for Mad Men fans or Philosophy 101 students only.

Three Stars:

True Story: A Novel – by Bill Maher (Audiobook)

Aptly titled, this fiction feels like Maher’s memoirs as a poor traveling standup in the 80s. The story is split in two halves: first, biographies of four degenerate friends stuck somewhere between the bottom and second-to-bottom rungs of the entertainment industry ladder; second, a series of their antics on a gig trip out of town, hassling waitresses and wrecking night clubs. It’s a quick two hour listen that’s darkly funny in the way that rings true to those poor souls who hustle but haven’t quite made it.

The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide – by Jenna Fischer

Jenna Fischer, one of the most recognizable faces in America since The Office became a hit, has assembled a very practical guide to becoming a working actor/actress. She weaves her personal story into the structured progression from “girl next door moves out to LA” to “struggling to build a resume and get a SAG card” to “finding representation who will get you the legitimate auditions”. For those thinking of going into acting, this strikes me as a handy, no-bullshit manual, and it’s still a fun, informative autobiography for the rest of us.

Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business – by Matthew Emmens and Beth Kephart

This truly is a curious, little book. Emmens had an illustrious career in the biotech industry spanning Merck and the CEO position at both Shire and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. He partnered with Beth Kephart to write this 100-page-double-spaced-with-big-font fable about the foibles of big businesses. Avoiding spoilers, it’s written like a kids book about a young woman applying for a job at Zenobia, a generic large corporation. In order to even find her interviewer’s office, she must navigate treacherous obstacles such as office gossipers, naysayers, and Powerpoint presentations. It was not at all what I expected, however, it works in its quirkiness and, due to the illustrations, I imagined it as an animated short film while reading.

Is This Anything? – by Jerry Seinfeld

This gives a strong “concluding my career” vibe and yet is not what I expected. Specifically, I thought this would be more of a memoir. Instead, this is a compilation of most of Jerry’s jokes since the 1970s in written form (akin to how a poetry collection is structured with a lot of whitespace and only one or two jokes per page).

So, it loses points for originality, as a Seinfeld comedy fan will have already encountered the material before, save for a handful of biographical essays interspersed between the decade-by-decade chapters. The value here is in the fact that Seinfeld’s patented observational comedy works better in writing than probably any other comedian. The simplistic style of the cover and typesetting makes this a “coffee table book” where anyone can flip to any page for a couple of minutes to chuckle.

No One Asked for This: Essays – by Cazzie David

Upfront disclaimer: I bought this book because her dad is Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm). Luckily, Cazzie is self-aware enough to know this is probably a pretty popular reason people picked up her book.

Even more luckily for us readers, she takes after her father in the best possible ways: A dark, ironic sensibility with stinging observations seen through a woman’s lens.

She tackles the obvious head-on: she’s a child of privilege who should be really thankful for all she has. And yet she makes you sympathize with her plight, understanding that everyone has their demons. In her case, these include fighting the perception of nepotism regarding any accomplishments of her own, and having famous boyfriends (Pete Davidson) leave you for even more famous women (Ariana Grande). 

Potentially the best compliment I could pay her is that I had read her essay “Too Full to Fuck” online before learning she was related to Larry. Her humorous insights hold up on their own.

Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion – by Matt Zoller Seitz

This compilation of reviews for every individual Mad Men episode is an impressive feat. Zoller Seitz, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Roger Ebert’s website, is clearly a devout fan of the show (my favorite) to devote this much ink to every detail of it.

He’s not afraid to question the show as any rational critic and devoted fan should: the cliched writing in season one, the arguable under-utilization of non-white characters. The risk Seitz’s reviews sometimes run is in trying to over-explain a show whose meaning is in the unspoken. Regardless, if you’re a fan of the show, Carousel is the definitive Mad Men companion.

Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extra-Terrestrial Interviews – Interviews by Roger Caras, Edited by Anthony Frewin

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey was originally going to have a different opening. To ground the fantastical elements viewers were about to see, Kubrick was going to start the movie with five minutes of extra-terrestrial punditry by leading thinkers of the day. These interviews were conducted and recorded by his product Roger Caras, but were ultimately cut from the final film.

Are We Alone, now one of the rarer books in my collection, is a collection of the interview transcripts published by Frewin, Kubrick’s former personal assistant. Caras traveled worldwide to meet the likes of Isaac Asimov, Freeman Dyson, and 19 other diverse voices across academic borders (philosophers and theologists among the scientists).

There are common themes, driven by Caras asking many of the interviewees similar questions: What are the chances aliens exist? What are the implications for aliens to the concept of God and our Earthly religions? Will the budding field of artificial intelligence help us contact alien? Are the aliens going to be AI? Will humans evolve into an AI-machine-based entity ourselves?

While the minds at work are fascinating, Are We Alone is held back from a higher rating due to the level of repetition in the questions and answers (with some chapters such as the rabbi interview an exception to this pattern).

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea – by Marc Randolph

Randolph, Netflix’s co-founder and first CEO, has written his memoir of the first few years of Netflix’s life. Despite being pushed out by co-founder/lead investor/current-CEO Reed Hastings, he seemingly holds no ill will (the millions he’s made from stock surely helps) and tells his story with nostalgic glee. The business lessons taken away are mostly a reminder of what innovation looks like when there are few precedents; Netflix had to be a pioneer in the online subscription business model, online-to-offline logistics, and what we now think of as online multivariate testing. Most importantly, Randolph comes across as a really fun, nice guy who you root for throughout the story.

Four Stars

Pharmaplasia – by Michael Wokasch

Wokasch worked for decades in the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing machine. His review of the industry, now out of print since it was published in 2010, was incredibly prescient (or perhaps obvious to those on the inside). He accurately predicts the industry would run into trouble (which it did a mere five years later with the collapse of Valeant Pharma and Martin Shkreli) as it continued to consolidate and the new drug conglomerates could only grow earnings through higher prices, shady sales tactics, and debt-laden corporate acquisitions driven more by executive greed than the desire to discover new drugs.

A couple of the middle chapters are a little too “introduction to business”, but that hardly detracts from this sharp analysis of why the drug companies either underperformed or“outperformed” through financial schemes, none of which helped patients.

How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents – by Jimmy O Yang (Audiobook)

Jimmy O Yang has been on a hot streak with his one-two punch of starring in HBO’s Silicon Valley and Crazy Rich Asians. In his memoir, he tells his incredible life story of growing up as an immigrant, pot-smoking his way through an economics degree, and continuing to disappoint his parents by working as a strip club DJ in between practicing his standup comedy. It may be my favorite audiobook, as his entertainment experience explodes through the earbuds.

No Rules Rules – Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

This guidebook to business comes from the cofounder and current CEO of Netflix (Reed) and a management professor (Meyer). It takes an interesting approach by integrating each of their experiences and perspectives into cohesive chapters, each with a unique lesson. Reed will lead with his theme, give the practical direct advice on how he applies his ideas at Netflix, and Meyer (in clearly delineated sections) gives additional context to the ideas by interviewing Netflix employees or comparing Netflix’s practices to other companies. It is not just a rehash of the infamous Netflix Culture Deck and does a great job of explaining, in very plain language, the insights of business Netflix has learned and most other companies are still trying to catch up.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs – by Gina Keating

This was a real treat and fantastic journalism. Keating writes the history of Netflix, from founding to 2013, with quick pacing while maintaining key plot points and developing the business personalities.

Where this really shines is that it spends as much time telling Blockbuster’s story as Netflix’s, something that is probably overlooked by most people who see the cover, and is the more interesting story.

Blockbuster gets dogged on nowadays for blowing its opportunity to shift from retail stores to digital streaming. That popular narrative is oversimplified. Netflix CEO Reed Hasting admits at one point that Blockbuster’s Total Access program was on the path to destroying Netflix, had Blockbuster not shut it down.

It’s internal political power struggles at Blockbuster that prevented them from finishing Netflix. Without spoiling the meat of the book, it’s a textbook example of out-of-touch old business executives investors misunderstanding a disruptive technology shift, despite the young talent inside Blockbuster who did have a plan to beat Netflix and were ultimately proved correct.

The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma – by Barry Werth

A sequel to one of my favorite books read in 2019, The Antidote picks up the story of Vertex Pharmaceuticals where Werth left off in The Billion Dollar Molecule.

This is no longer a startup story. It’s not really a spoiler to say that Vertex has succeeded (anyone can look up the public stock price). Here, Werth documents the transition from an unprofitable, scrappy biotech startup into a pharmaceutical powerhouse. Replacing the story of all-nighters and founders is the high stakes game of moving science out of the laboratory and into pill bottles in hospitals, doctor’s offices, and people’s homes. In this regard, it works as a fantastic traditional business book; the lessons are in recruiting experienced expensive executives, building global supply chains, and competing directly with existing multi-hundred billion dollar drug companies in the marketplace.

Although this phase of Vertex’s life doesn’t have the same verve, the stakes are higher and the evolution of America’s drug industry through the 90-2010s still contained a lot of surprises.

Five Stars

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece – by Michael Benson

2020 has gotten a lot of comparisons to 1968 for being the two most tumultuous years in American history since World War II. Nineteen sixty eight included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April, Robert Kennedy in June, and the Vietnam war all throughout.

Amidst 1968’s chaos was the release of arguably the best film ever made: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Fifty years later, Michael Benson published his own masterful history of the film’s making.

The achievement here is in exploring the realities of creating lasting art. It’s not purely luck, although Kubrick clearly had a unique genius. It’s the culmination of talent and effort and coincidence all brought together through shared desire to pursue excellence. This cultural thread ran through the crew, and hundreds of people played their part in bringing art to life. Benson provides numerous examples of ideas coming from everywhere, like the college-aged assistant who finds the perfect scene location in one of his school textbooks. Part of Kubrick’s gift, more than coming up with ideas himself, was identifying the genius in others.

And even geniuses have their moments of weakness. A constantly shifting script and the film’s shaky reception stand out as near-breaking points for Kubrick, a man burdened with his reputation for brilliance and doubting he can deliver external and internal standards.

Personally, 2001 and The Godfather are the two greatest films. The Godfather adapts the best of literature, history, and theater into film as an artistic medium. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the highest representation of science and philosophy as cinema. And only 2001 made Roger Ebert’s final list of the top ten films.

No doubt I am biasing my review of Benson’s book because of the movie. And obviously, you’ll get a lot more out of this if you’ve seen the movie, which is something you should have done already anyway. When the film is this legendary, and the biography does it justice, there’s little harm in conflating feelings for the two.

There have been many other biographies on both this film and Kubrick’s life. Benson draws upon all of them without turning this book into an encyclopedia. He does what skilled biographers do, weaving a story from the facts collected while drawing wisdom from them when possible. This biography in particular is unique in that it’s not of a person, or even of just one movie. It’s a testament to the creative process. Or dare I say, with the jacket cover removed, its black hardcover stands as a monolith to greatness.

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech – by Sally Smith Hughes

When I asked a handful of my natural science acquaintances for the “one book” they would recommend to someone new to the industry, the answers were frequently this one.

The reasons are quickly obvious: It’s a lot shorter than I expected, which is a plus. Sally Smith Hughes’s storytelling pace is brisk, constantly moving the story forward (much like how I assume it must have felt to work at the young startup) without feeling like you’re missing important details.

Then the details themselves are extraordinary: Genentech was the first biotech company (at least the first successful one). Through its groundbreaking genetic engineering discoveries and technology, it exploded onto the business scene with its new lab-manufactured drugs for insulin and human growth hormones.

Hughes traces this groundbreaking story back to the roots of its two unexpected co-founders: An unemployed ex-venture capitalist (Robert Swanson) who convinces chemistry professor Herbert Boyer to start a company with him after reading about the budding, but not yet economical, field of genetics.

The rest, as they say, is history, captured concisely here by Hughes.

Science Lessons: What the Business of Biotech Taught Me About Management – by Gordon Binder and Philip Bashe

Gordon Binder found himself on an odd route to the CEO job at Amgen, a biotech company. He had no biology or chemistry background as an electrical engineer-turned-CFO at a government software contractor. But as tends to be the case in the startup world, opportunity took precedence over experience as he was recruited to be the CFO of a business with no product, no revenue, and just a couple dozen scientist employees. Eight years later, he became CEO, and by the time he stepped down in 2000, Amgen was valued around $60 billion based on its successfully commercialized kidney failure drug treatment Epogen and its broadening portfolio of drugs tackling truly terrible, tough problems (i.e. cancer).

Science Lessons is the kind of business book I like, which is a melding of a memoir with the business advice sprinkled between the personal stories. Straight memoirs tend to be hagiographic and straight advice tends to sound contrived without real-world applied context.

Binder provides both with candor and the right amount of self-deprecation. The science content is educational, the business stories are thrilling, and as a package it really inspires the reader that business can be conducted for societal good, a sentiment that sometimes feels hard to find.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness – by Morgan Housel

The premise is simple. Housel, a venture capitalist, has written nearly two dozen essays on how to think about money: how to make it, how to keep it, and how to value it in relation to the happiness in your life. The stories and advice inside are so short, simple, and well-written that there is no point in me summarizing here.

It’s in the rare class of “books I should have and wish I’d written first” (alongside Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong”). This is primarily because the lessons, told in an almost fable-like fashion, are the ideas that have been obvious to me from my own extensive reading, and yet are not taught in school or mainstream resources. 

I bought a copy for my brother as a Christmas present, and it is my new go-to pick when a friend asks me for a book recommendation about money.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

One of those books I’d heard quoted, but never knew the whole plot. It’s an allegorical fable for Stalinist Russia, incredibly effective at explaining how normalcy can devolve into tyranny, and should be taught in all schools as it’s written in a readable language for all ages. This makes it particularly relevant for today’s youth to read, as a warning against the overly-communistic tendencies of a generation who haven’t seen it. Otherwise, I have little to add that hasn’t probably already been written elsewhere, except this short story scores high on my value-per-word ratio.

Best Book Read in the Second Half of 2020

The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong – by David Orr

A former colleague once asked me, in one of those cheesy get-to-know-you moments, if I had a favorite poem. If I had to pick an intellectual realm I’m least informed on, it’s possibly some sort of three-way tie between poetry, Mayan temples, and Medieval theology. So I gave the answer that, while true to myself, is also the most cliche: Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.

Orr opens the book upfront with the poem itself, in case you haven’t read it in full since grade school. But it’s surely recognizable, as he establishes early on how modern Google data provides a strong argument for this poem being one of the most popular pieces in American pop culture history (greater than, say, Alfred Hitchock or Bob Dylan). The rest of the chapters, each succinct, cover angles to interpret the poem’s oft-misunderstood aspects: “The Poet”, “The Poem”, “The Choice”, and “The Chooser”.

Ultimately, this book is a manifestation of what great criticism is supposed to be. Thoughtfulness without pretentiousness; contextualizing without stretching too far for meaning. Orr does for poetry what Roger Ebert did for films: tackling the quintessential American poem and manages to elevate the material with his lens.

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.

Two Stars

Breaking Through: Leadership Disciplines from Top Performing Staffing Firms – by Mike Cleland and Barry Asin

Read this as research for my work at Bluecrew, a subsidiary of InterActive Corp trying to disrupt the blue-collar hourly staffing industry. I was disappointed to find that half of the book is the generic advice one would find in any issue of the Harvard Business Review. There are a handful of lessons specific for those interested in the temporary staffing space, but it fails to serve as either a general business guide or a comprehensive analysis of the industry.

The Day the Bunny Died – by Victor Lownes

Little-known fact about Playboy: although the company is most well-known for the magazine, the most profitable part of the business through the 60s and 70s was its British casino business. And the man behind Playboy’s business success was Victor Lownes.

An early friend of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, he held a variety of executive roles at the Chicago headquarters before asking Hef for the responsibility of expanding to England. Lucky timing landed him there shortly before the British government deregulated casinos, and it was Lownes’ shrewdness to associate the Playboy brand with casinos. The profits were so overwhelming, so quickly, that for a time, Lownes’ was the highest paid businessman in all of England.

There are three main problems with this autobiography: First, his overt sexualization of women, in his own words, I don’t think ages well even to the sexually liberated. Second, his chapter on his friendship with controversial director Roman Polanski would also be deemed questionable today. And lastly, it’s oozing with his own ego, which is not at all appealing except in the context of managing the casino business. Though, for anyone interested in understanding Playboy as a business, Lownes’ story is a necessity.

Three Stars:

Pimp: The Story of My Life – by Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck

In Dave Chappelle’s standup hour The Bird Revelation, he tells a dark story implicitly comparing his time in Hollywood with being a prostitute controlled by a brutal pimp. It is this book he holds onstage and uses one of its stories to make his analogy.

Out of morbid curiosity, and as a devout Chappelle fan, I picked up a copy to see if the stories he told onstage were really in it (they are). And the depiction Chappelle gives his fans is not dark enough.

Pimp is a brutal book written by someone who lived a rough life. Iceberg, a native Chicagoan, escaped a broken home with a mom being serially abused by the men in her life. Striking out for himself as a black man in the late 1930s with no education, he learns viscerally on the streets and from older men how to break into the pimping business, and break women down in the process.

There are graduate theses written about the role Iceberg has played in our cultural understanding of pimps, its influence, and ultimately our numbness to its realities. It all stems from what is, by biography standards, a short book. But it’s a brutal one, and Beck’s honesty about himself and the life of many black people in that era is why it still resonates.

Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work – by Alex Rosenblat

Journalist Alex Rosenblat spent years compiling this sociological study of Uber’s relationship with its drivers. She does a great job of calling Uber out as a pioneer in newspeak: a self-proclaimed “tech” company that’s a taxi service with GPS. If it were truly a tech company, it wouldn’t have had the problems making money that it’s had.

This isn’t to say Uber is evil. Rosenblatt outlines the differences between all the different constituents Uber has to keep happy, such as the heterogeneous base of part time and full time drivers. A lot of their legal and public relations issues would be handled a lot easier if Uber used software to yield decision-making over to these drivers. Of course, letting drivers set their own rates and regular customers would make the Uber entity itself less valuable.

And this is the crux of Rosenblat’s critique: Uber claims to be a software provider to its drivers, not a taxi service, and therefore the drivers are not employees. But when the Uber software dictates how much drivers make and who they can drive, the algorithms are as much of a manager as a real boss would be.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy – by Jeremias Adams-Prassl

Prassl’s book is way more academic than I expected, without becoming verbose or boring. His history of global employment law and economics provide great context for the debates happening today. Particularly astute is the connection between the algorithms used by companies like Doordash and Uber to manage their gig workforce and the philosophy of Frederick Winslow Taylor. The former is an even more ruthlessly efficient form of the latter, without incorporating the criticisms Taylorism has faced.

What’s helped Uber and Lyft succeed to the degree they have is because their competitor, the traditional taxi industry, was as intertwined with regulators as they are and as equally hated. This is one way in which the rideshare cases are unique from, say, house cleaner apps.

Lastly, the best critique, and why this book leans anti-tech, is because most gig economy apps call themselves “disruptors” in a misleading use of the term. Popularized by Clayton Christensen, “disrupting an industry” was about new science and engineers techniques. What these mobile apps are “disrupting” is government laws. Whether that is good or bad is up to you to decide.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis

For the uninitiated, “DevOps” (short for “Developer Operations”) is a field of work and study that broadly covers tools and practices for how software gets coded and the process by which it can get used by customers/users. I leave that definition purposely vague because comprehensive guide compiled by experienced practitioners covers what you need to understand the core DevOps concepts.

It’s less about specific tools (although they are mentioned) than about key ideas to simultaneously improve a software team’s execution speed and safety, a seemingly impossible win-win scenario. The evidence for their ideas comes from case studies and interviews with leading technology managers at companies such as Target, where there is very real business results driven by the success or failure of their technology.

The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

It is not unusual for people to think their company is underperforming, especially when the media is filled with stories about hot tech startups or massive monopolies that seem to make everyone else look like losers. The hard part is responding: how do we improve the company we’re already in?

Gene Kim, cofounder and CTO of Tripwire, has written a sequel to his prior Phoenix Project, covering similar ground as its predecessor. Maxine, a senior software engineer unjustly blamed for another team’s software failure, is moved to another failing software team at her employer Parts Unlimited, an automotive repair and parts retail chain.

What she discovers is an underground team of technologists and a retired board director who are trying to implement new ways of working faster and smarter in hope of turning an old brick-and-mortar business into a digitized, omni-channel customer-pleasing experience. Kim captures corporate politics accurately, as a manipulative marketing executive trying to prevent the technologists from gaining power provides the necessary narrative thrust.

Unsurprisingly, the story is a little cheesy. But it’s both very relatable for anyone who has dealt with business politics, and practical for anyone who has worked around software teams that just didn’t seem to be performing as well as they should.

Four Stars

Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown – by Gerri Hershey

I don’t read Cosmopolitan, but I know what it is. Or at least I thought I did until I read the life story of HGB.

Hers was a name I’d vaguely recalled from documentaries about the middle of the last century. She was famous for two major achievements: First, writing a blockbuster book Sex and the Single Girl forty years before Carrie Bradshaw but very much an influence. Then she was able to leverage her potential one-hit wonder into an enduring role as the 35-year Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan, remaking a fledgling fiction journal into the powerhouse women’s magazine of our lifetimes.

Gerri Hershey should possibly be most proud of is the impressive journalistic effort she’s made to unveil the complex person underneath the bubblegum glam. What lies beneath Helen is a beautifully complex mixture of childhood trauma growing up in Ozarkian poverty, an innate ambition which led to her spending her twenties in Los Angeles leading a Peggy Olsen-esque secretary-to-copywriter career, before becoming a fully-realized celebrity in Manhattan.

One of her friends said that what made Helen, her books, and Cosmo so successful was not that she wrote about sex for titillation’s sake. It was a Midwestern earnestness to give the Big Sister guidance to women everywhere that she had learn herself the hard way. As with many innovators, if her work now seems cliche, its because she made the mold from which so much of our culture is now mass-produced.

Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream – by Steven Watts

It’s hard to review a biography of someone who, until quite recently, was still a public figure (through venues like the show The Girls Next Door). Hugh Hefner and his creation, Playboy, have been omnipresent in the zeitgeist as long as I’ve been alive. What I’ve learned, unsurprisingly though, is that he was much more than the media’s depiction of him.

Watts does a tremendous job in chronicling the evolution of Hef’s complex psyche. Hefner is a man whose reputation as a polygamous womanizer was possibly caused by his first wife cheating on him. He would respond to this by creating a magazine featuring naked women whose first investor was his mother (supporting her son above all else). For my generation, he may have seemed like a socialite, yet the young Hef avoided any drugs harder than dexedrine, an early Adderall alternative to help him work on his business empire through sleepless nights. His commitment was to his business and philosophy of life, not to shallow celebrity fame.

The rocket-ship story soars from there through the 1950s and 60s. Playboy’s cultural significance and profitability are business legend. And even once its power plateaued by the end of the 60s, the sustained relevance of Playboy and Hefner in American discourse (as participants in the women’s liberation movement and AIDS epidemics as a couple examples) is a testament to how Hefner tapped into something deep and permanent about America. As author Watts concludes, how we feel about Hefner is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves.

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace – by Nikil Saval

Architecture is not a field I know much about. But I have worked in cubicles. When I came across Cubed during my research on how we work, and when I saw the author had written for n+1, it moved up my reading list.

I was not disappointed. Saval weaves together multiple intellectual heritages (architecture, economics, media, interior design, etc.) into a retelling of the evolution of offices. From the small, pre-Industrial offices for bookkeepers, through the Skyscraper and “office parks” revolutions, Saval explores how our innate needs for labor and art converge in the aesthetics of our workplaces. Simply put, I give Cubed high praise for telling an interesting history of office spaces, which would surely be a boring read if written by a lesser author. 

No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World – by Amos Barshad

Rasputin is one of those historical figures whose name is recognizable, but most people couldn’t really recite the story of why he’s famous. Barshad, a journalist and former contributor to Grantland, pulls this shadowy persona into modern context.

Following a recap of Rasputin’s life (a possible con artist who had an unusual but very real manipulative relationship with the Czar of Russia, his wife, and their hemophiliac son), subsequent chapters explain current day examples of behind-the-scenes manipulators of power: music agents, Mexican drug lords, and political power brokers.

Although some of the later modern political chapters are a bit long and less interesting than some of the non-obvious fields, Barshad’s journalistic capabilities combined with concise storytelling are impressive. It is a brave soul who goes to meet with Putin’s assistants with the purpose of writing a book about them.

Movies and Other Things: A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, and Illustrated – by Shea Serrano and Illustrated by Arturo Torres

Ringer writer Shea Serrano got me hooked with his “Top 15 Gangster Movie Moments” (as I am a sucker for the genre). It was through this that I discovered this new book in his straightforwardly named “…and Other Things series”.

The book is an essay collection of Serrano’s musings on movies, interspersed with comic-style illustrations. Alongside the gangster movie moments are chapters on: fixing incorrect historical Oscars awards, which films would be improved if they featured Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and an interview with his kids about why they like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Adding to the lighthearted content is a unique (to me, at least) binding and hardcover shape that sticks out on a shelf. I don’t own a coffee table, but if I did, this would be the first book on it.

Also, he purposefully buries the lede; Don Cheadle writes the closing afterword and it’s awesome.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber – by Mike Isaac

If you’ve followed the tech industry the past few years, much of the Uber story is well-known: Co-founder Travis Kalanick takes his friend’s idea (with permission) for ordering cars from an app and turns it into one of the iconic companies of the 2010s. He accomplishes this essentially through a disregard for people: misclassifying the employment status of drivers, supporting a culture of the kind of “tech bro toxic masculinity” that wouldn’t have to be a cliche buzzword if Uber employees didn’t embody it, and wasting billions of dollars of investor and eventually public money.

Much of what I just wrote is not news and comprises the first half of the book. So some readers might be tempted to cast this aside after an hour if they haven’t learned anything.

It’s in the second half where Isaac’s journalism shines. As Uber’s internal cultural issues leak, the “battle for Uber” occurs between the investors trying to redeem the money they’ve invested in Uber and Travis, detached from the reality that he’s flying his company into a cliff. Isaac’s inside sources got him access to never-before-seen documents that are a testament to both his ability to cultivate relationships, protect sources, and the dysfunction at Uber.

As I suggested earlier, the first half may seem like a slow retelling of old news. The second half was an adrenaline rush I had to finish in one sitting.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber – by Susan Fowler

Fowler exploded into the tech world’s consciousness in 2017 with her bombshell blog post “Reflecting on One Very Strange Year at Uber”, chronicling Uber’s self-destructive culture of misogyny and abuse, ultimately leading to the CEO’s dismissal.

This book (which is, important to note, not her first since she had previously published a software engineering textbook) expands upon the Uber blogpost with her backstory, and the events that happened following the post.

In fact, she does not get to Uber until halfway through her story, which chronicles her unglamorous homeschooled childhood in the Arizona desert and her stint in academia which she purposefully cuts short after her sexist experiences with colleagues in her pursuit of a physics Phd. These earlier stories are crucial for understanding why she ultimately wrote her Uber blog, and is emblematic of so many public outcries occurring in the current culture: when people have been proverbially stepped on and felt discarded for so long, the psychological buildup is going to cause an explosive pushback.

Whistleblower pairs well with Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record (reviewed last year), as they’re similar stories written in similar styles; they slowly build to a quick, chaotic climax when their lifetime of preparation converges with the right moment in history. Is it perhaps a bit hagiographic by the authors? Sure, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I and many others have come to the similar breaking points Fowler describes, and she conveys the important psychology of a whistleblower well.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir – by Anna Weiner

Anna’s story is a relatable one for many people I know: an intelligent, educated, English major millennial takes her stab at breaking into the book and media industry in NYC only to find it underpaying and overly-elitist. Thus, in the pursuit of being able to pay her bills, she crosses the country to Silicon Valley, a land she knows little about except that some of her college connections were able to make a living being funded by the tech industry.

What ensues, and what she chronicles with an incisive touch, is her wanderings through some of tech world’s hottest startups (Mixpanel and Github) as a non-computer programmer. Which in her case meant copywriting and customer support, people-facing roles often assigned to women and minorities to undermine their voices. “Instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, listening comfortingly” is one of my favorite astute aphorisms.

Having taken Wall Street’s crown as the money-making outlet for the young and ambitious, she fairly skewers the institutions which give vast responsibility to inexperienced and uncaring company founders who are developing their moral reasoning at the same time they are given control of employee’s livelihoods. 

She does not name any companies or many prominent power players she comes across. For the insider, you’ll still know who she is talking about, and for the uninitiated, it’ll likely give a dual sensation of mystique and interchangeability, as all the important-sounding-people are more of a hivemind than they typically admit. 

When someone asks me what tech startup culture is like, this is the book I recommend (alongside Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys).

Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories – by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

From the creator of my favorite Netflix original Bojack Horseman comes a set of short stories all revolving around relationships. 

Raphael illustrates well the wide variety of relationships in our lives. Many are not strictly romantic: “Rufus” (about the relationship of humans and dogs told from the perspective of the dog) and “These Are Facts” (on the complexities of step-siblings who don’t understand why one kid might like their father and the other doesn’t) were two of the hardest hitting stories, and I have neither step-siblings nor an affinity for dogs.

However, the heart of the book is romance, and mostly failures. “Lunch with the Person Who Dumped You” and “Lies We Told Each Other” are such sharp, relatable observations of human nature that they don’t feel like fiction.

Bob-Waksberg has an incredible gift: Other than Soprano’s David Chase and Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner (and their writing teams), there are very few others with a philosopher’s insight into our animalistic nature, a comedian’s levity about this fact, and a dramatic writer’s ability to turn realities into narrative. The best collection of short stories I’ve read.

The Player’s Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise – by David Kushner

David Kushner wrote my favorite book of all time which I read 15 years ago (Masters of Doom, which I haven’t reviewed but blogged about once). Then last year I started working for a subsidiary of InterActive Corp, the longtime owner of Match.com. So when I saw David Kushner had written about the founder of Match.com, I considered it a must-read.

I was not disappointed. Kushner continues to nail his niche, telling the true stories from the shadowy or less glamorous, yet highly lucrative, sectors of the technology revolution.

At the time dot-com entrepreneur Gary Kremen started the website Match.com, he purchased the name Sex.com as well. Unbeknownst to him, a con artist by the name Stephen Cohen had swept in and convinced the internet gatekeepers that he was the owner of Sex.com.

What unfolds is a cross between Skinemax and Catch Me If You Can. Kremen attempts to use his matchmaking wealth to reclaim his rightful ownership of Sex.com, while Cohen hustles around the world with his growing pornography empire.

Without spoilers, these very real events take on bizarre, Breaking Bad-esque turns. In the category of “truth is stranger than fiction”, Kushner captures the characters perfectly and keeps the adrenaline pumping.

Five Stars

A Terrible Country: A Novel – by Keith Gessen

In college, I took a quarter of Russian 101 after reading a prediction that Russia would have a resurgence in the 2010s (and my degree required four credits of foreign language classes). It was tough and I was ill that quarter, so I ultimately bailed back to Spanish as many Americans tend to do. But even sitting in that room with the Eastern European teaching assistants and eccentric classmates taught me a lot about this literally and figuratively foreign culture. Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country has given me a new lesson.

Gessen, who wrote one of my top ten favorite books I’ve read since moving to Chicago, fictionalized his experience as a Russian-America intellectual trapped between two worlds. 

Our protagonist, Andrei, is a Russian descendant slumming his way through American academia as a post-doc when his brother in Moscow requests his assistance caring for their dementia-struck grandmother. A short stint turns into a one-year tour of his family’s homeland.

One year away from home, living in an ancestral land, forces Andrei to confront his notions of what it means to identify oneself with a land or culture. The struggle between socialism and capitalism can’t be easily settled in one’s mind. His hodgepodge of Russian acquaintances don’t make this internal dialogue any lighter. This underlying conflict throughout the book is the title’s subtext: Is it Russia or America which is the terrible country? 

A New York Times reviewer captured the mood perfectly, as it’s written with “plenty of self-deprecation, but we aren’t given much reason to assume this is parody.” The subtext seems to be that these are thoughts and feelings with which Gessen himself struggles. We all would be better off if we all had, or better yet expressed, the complexity of Keith Gessen.

Dear Committee Members: A Novel – by Julie Schumacher

Many of us are familiar with the degrading process of asking a teacher or boss for a letter of recommendation. If it makes you feel any better, most of them don’t enjoy the rigamarole any more than you do.

Professor Jason Fitger, a literature professor at the fictional Payne University, is such a teacher. Disgruntled by his departments dwindling budget, his ex-wife, his own writer’s block, his nagging students, and his jaded disposition, Fitger spends all his working hours writing reference letters.

Therein lies the story’s gimmick; every chapter is itself a letter of recommendation. Some to students applying to grad school, some to colleagues looking for promotions, all slowly torturing Fitger via bureaucratic boredom.

I suspect most readers will find at least one of the letters relatable, for we’ve all at some point felt stuck in a dead-end situation (perhaps quarantining at home). For that dark reason, I think it’s the funniest novel I’ve ever read.

Best Book Read in the First Half of 2020

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed – by Ben Rich and Leo Janos

Much like mythology, I had heard of the “Skunk Works” before I ever really knew the story. The phrase has become a bit of business and engineering legend, harkening back to a time in history fewer people remember firsthand.

The term, now synonymous with “secret research lab funded by a private corporation”, has expanded its origin. Founded in 1943, the Skunk Works was Lockheed Martin’s secret intellectual weapon against the Cold War-era Soviet Union. This book tells two primary stories: author Ben Rich retelling the Skunk Works origin story under its founder Kelly Johnson, and Rich’s own time at the helm once Johnson passed the torch.

Across the two reigns came some of the most important engineering advancements in history, particularly the U-2 spy plane and F-117 “stealth fighter”. Lockheed’s introduction of stealth technology could arguably be the leading reason why the United States was able to win the Cold War, and thus one of the most important engineering teams in American history.

Interspersed between the tech talk are interviews and essays by those around Rich during the war: presidential cabinet members, military brass, and Rich’s engineers. I don’t recall reading a memoir that’s half autobiographical and half-written by observers. I hope to see more of them.

As much as this is an excellent engineering story, it’s also a deeply American one. The growing vitriol in social discourse is depressing all around. However, when modern politicians talk about returning America to its alleged glory days, the Skunk Works story is the best version of what they mean. It was a time when America had principles it stood for that could be honestly and intelligently defended. And the defenders, protectors, and ultimate embodiment of those values were scientists and engineers at the Skunk Works who won a war with their intellect and work ethic. That is an American spirit we should all support.

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.

Two Stars (Not Recommended)

A Warning by Anonymous, A Senior Trump Administration Official

All the President’s Men this is not. Allegedly written by a member of the Trump administration, this insider account doesn’t really say anything new. The main news that came from Anonymous’s leaks was the idea of the “Steady State”, those in Trump’s team who stayed to work in the White House because they felt the world would be better with them filtering Trump than if they weren’t there. But, you know, anyone paying attention would’ve guessed this was happening. It’s short, but only worth reading if you can’t help your addiction to Trump stories.

Three Stars (Recommended)

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara

“I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again.” – Don Draper quoting Frank O’Hara in Season 2

I don’t read a lot of poetry, but since this collection was featured in Mad Men season two and I’m dedicated in my fandom for the things I like, I picked this up. It’s a lot thinner than I expected. O’Hara has a sense of seriousness yet levity, so I can see why he was both popular and influential to Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner.

Poems I liked: “To the Film Industry in Crisis”, “Les Etiquettes Jaunes”, and the final poem also featured in Mad Men, “Mayakovsky”.

Gigged – The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

The rise of Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Etsy, and the rest of the tech platforms of the past decade have created what’s commonly called the “gig economy”: what used to be called “temporary work” rebranded for the modern digital, app-driven world.

Specifically, Kessler tells stories from both sides of the “Gig economy”: the employers Uber, Gigster, Managed by Q, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and then people (not employees) who work for these services. She’s sympathetic to both sides without being preachy about perceived slights against workers that can be popular in the media.

Kessler concludes this compact book with an overview of the challenges and opportunities ahead: How can society ensure health benefits for these contractors? And a chance at retirement or support in old age? It’s still too early for anyone to know how it’ll play out.

Attempting Normal by Marc Maron (Audiobook):

I like Maron’s comedy and podcast, so I bought his audiobook. It delivered exactly what I expected. This biography covers the almost-cliched stories one would expect from a middle-aged standup comic: a dysfunctional childhood with borderline deadbeat parents leads to a quasi-directionless life and broken relationships. Some of the stories (such as The Legend of Frankie Bastille) have been retold by Maron elsewhere, yet he’s such an entertaining speaker that he really sells his own audiobook in a way no other author has. I’m not sure if Attempting Normal would be more or less funny if I didn’t find it so relatable.

On the Future – Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees

Rees, the Astronomer Royal of the British Royal household, provides an overview of both ends of the spectrum on humanity’s prospects, contemplating our existential risks (such as our reliance on everything being a fragile electronically networked system and nuclear threats) through the opportunities of biotech and artificial intelligence to expand our capabilities. This segues nicely into projecting about a post-human future (which seems inevitable the way he describes it). Also unexpected is a section where Rees very seriously discusses how we might find alien life, which may seem unrelated to the book’s title if except that the collision of aliens and human descendants may be likelier on the cosmological timeline than people intuitively understand. He brings this short book back to Earth by recommending that the scientific establishment today could let loose a little by losing its ivory tower-ness and welcoming the amateurs, a message I support.

Four Stars (Highly recommended for those interested in topic, or generally recommended for anyone)

What You Do is Who You Are – How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz

Horowitz’s last book (The Hard Thing About Hard Things) is one of the best management and leadership books of the past decade. His latest books is shorter and is more focused on a specific organizational problem: culture.

It’s a slippery subject that Horowitz pins down with one overarching theme: culture is your “virtues” (what you’re willing to do) rather than your “values” (what you believe). It’s an applied stance on an old philosophical debate; what’s more important, intentions or actions?

He illustrates this idea with four historical, non-business examples: the Japanese samurai, the Genghis Khan military, the slave revolution of Haiti, and Detroit prisons. They may seem extreme, but often you’ve got to give extreme examples to get a point across.

The only passage I disliked is when Horowitz listed Google ex-Chief Lawyer as an example of someone who can thrive in a company as culture changes over time and called himself a “chameleon”. Drummond is a pretty well-known psychopath who was finally forced to resign a couple weeks ago after news of Drummond’s multiple affairs with employees, including having a kid with a staffer and then firing the mother, came to light. This had been industry news for a while before the recent firing and I found it odd that Horowitz would choose to leave the Drummond reference in the book.

Financial Shenanigans – How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud in Financial Reports, Third Edition by Howard Schilit and Jeremy Perler

I am occasionally known for my intense dislike of fraud and white-collar crime. For this reason, it’s surprising it took me this long to read the definitive book on the methods for identifying corporate malfeasance. The authors go into gritty detail about the various nefarious methods used by immoral managers to deceive the public, investors, and media about how well (or not) their businesses are doing. This is a must-read for any investor.

My favorite fun fact learned from this book: recipients of Chief Financial Officer Magazine’s annual Excellence Award from 1998, 1999, and 2000 are all in jail (WorldCom’s Scott Sullivan, Enron’s Andy Fastow, and Tyco’s Mark Swartz, respectively) . Let this be a reminder to all that just because someone is rewarded for their work doesn’t mean they earned it.

I Like to Watch – Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum (Audiobook)

“How to write about a divisive show? Wait a decade.” – Nussbaum in her defense of Sex and the City

If all my Chuck Klosterman reading wasn’t a giveaway, I love following pop-culture. And especially television, as it’s an art form I’ve spent more time with and thought more about (than music or movies). Here, Emily Nussbaum, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has compiled an anthology of her TV criticism for The New Yorker (and reads them for her audiobook).

She has a bunch of pieces I love, opening with a comparison between TV and Poetry which explains why she focused her career on TV because, while she was working on her PhD in Literature, TV was not taken seriously as an art form until The Sopranos. This segues into my favorite analysis of The Sopranos, written by her immediately following its controversial finale aired. Following the Sopranos piece, she steps back and reflects on the origins of the TV anti-hero, tracing it back to the 70s Norman Lear-dominated era and (as she calls him) the original anti-hero Archie Bunker.

I won’t review every essay in this hefty collection, but a couple of the feminist essays I really enjoyed was her analysis of Sex and the City (a show I did binge from start-to-finish) where she gives it the commemoration it deserves for its role in history, and a two-hour epic speech on the Bill Cosby, Louis CK, and the arguments around separating art from artists. Her dissection of this complex issue is the most thorough I’ve heard.

Alchemy – The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

Ever since David Ogilvy made it popular, every advertising executive writes a book. Sutherland, now the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, has published his compendium of marketing ideas and lessons learned from his career in advertising.

Taking ideas from behavioral economics and Nassim Taleb, what Rory calls “alchemy” is really an arbitrage on the gap between what mid-century economics and business schools taught businesspeople to think about human behavior versus what people actually do.

Part philosophy and part sharp observations, I’d recommend this as a palatable way for practicing marketers or executives to think differently about how they approach problem-solving.

The End of Accounting – And the Path Forward for Investors and Managers by Baruch Lev and Feng Gu

The accounting industry has a problem: no one seems to care about accounting paperwork anymore!

The title is purposefully hyperbolic as a physical-world equivalent to clickbait so people will read something much more subtle than they expect. The main argument of the book: the three major accounting statements (cash flow statement, balance sheet, income statement) are no longer used by investors (who use other data sources to make decisions) and is therefore a huge waste of time and money for the companies that have to produce all this paperwork. These professors have their own prescription.

Drs. Lev and Gu have published a unique book. It’s got the rigor and gravitas of an academic paper, sprinkled with the humor and levity of a couple of guys who feel like they’re tired of this shit.

I won’t give a full recount of their arguments and the subject matter because it would sound dense. But as good academics should, they’re trying to bring light to problems that are bigger and more systemic than they seem. Or, in the authors’ own words: “Our nightmare: that a student will ask us what this means and who cares about it.”

Temp – How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman

Temp work has been around a whole lot longer than what people think of as the modern “gig economy”, and it’s a whole lot more pervasive. Louis Hyman’s history of temporary work in America is a comprehensive retelling of the 20th century through the lens of increasing economic instability.

Starting from the decline of the pre-industrial revolution agricultural economy, Temp tells the story of three major types of temporary work: consultants (primarily of the white-collar, McKinsey type), industrial and office (the decline of unions and their on-call replacements), and immigrants (and how changes in legislation have paradoxically encouraged and discouraged migrants from working in agriculture and Silicon Valley factories).

Though Temp leans slightly liberal in framing increased liquidity in the labor market as a negative, he gives fair shake to the benefits it has for companies and the greater economy. He ends the book with optimism for a future where everyone can survive the automation age, earn a living wage by contributing their unique skills and passions into the economy, and receive the security of housing and healthcare. If the history he recounts is any indication, it will be easier written than done.

Double Entry – How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by Jane Gleeson-White

Simultaneously concise and artistic, Gleeson-White has written a consumable history of accounting. With her unique background, having studied economics in undergrad before getting a Phd in Literature, she does a tremendous job intertwining the two subjects, starting with the role counting had in the creation of writing (early humans used speech and writing as much for quantifying as they did for other communications).

From there, she tells the story of renaissance Venice (with due credit to the numerical advances of Eastern societies) and Luca Pacioli, credited as the founder of accounting for his work standardizing the bookkeeping methods used throughout industrial Italy into the first accounting textbook. Accounting as a profession grows from there as a key component of capitalism and the modern world. A well-executed book that’s as informative as it is easy to read.

Raised in Captivity – Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman

Do animals eat healthy? Would you still be friends with someone if they swore they only accidentally killed someone? What’s the greatest thing you could ever see, and how would your life change if you saw it?

Klosterman’s newest book is another experiment in form for the author known for his celebrity journalism, nonfictional music and sport criticism, and a couple long-form novels. Captivity is a fictional short story collection unlike anything I’ve read. The closest comparisons are The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, with premises are more grounded in the current state of the world. How you feel thinking about this review’s opening questions probably reflects on how you’ll like Raised in Captivity.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Whether you agree or disagree with Snowden’s actions, he’s got an unbelievable and unusual story to tell.

What really strikes me is that this is the first millennial memoir I’ve read. I can relate to his early life spent playing videogames and learning computer programming when parents aren’t around.

From there the story forks into the distinctly Snowden life. Things I did not know going in: he came from a military family, decided to go into Army because of 9/11, eventually ends up back in military technology after an injury during Army training, and the rest is history as his information technology works leads him to discover the government capabilities the public was unaware of. If you’re reading this review and haven’t heard of this guy, google him. He leaked a lot of classified government documents on how they surveil citizens. The government was not thrilled.

He’s clearly a thoughtful, ideological guy. Although the book is a bit of a hagiography, he’s been so persecuted by the government you understand why he wants to defend himself.

This story ends with a final chapter published from his girlfriend’s diary about how she learned Snowden’s story. It’s a scenario no one can relate to, and her diary does its best to convey how utterly insane the story you just read is.

Five Stars (Highly Recommend to Everyone)

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword – Patterns of Japanese Culture by Ruth Benedict

I picked this book because it was used for the title of a Mad Men episode.

Published in 1946 (a mere five years after Pearl Harbor), Benedict explains Japanese culture to the Western world in the aftermath of World War Two. I imagine that what she accomplished here is what all aspiring anthropologists hope to achieve in their careers.

Since, for a modern reader, this may be more of a reflection on times past than on the Japan of today, I won’t try to summarize the book or the Japanese culture, except to say it was a revelatory contrast to America in the 1940s.

Fundamentally, the reason this will stick with me is because it’s probably the best book on how to appreciate and interpret alternative perspectives. That is a lesson everyone needs to learn.

The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company’s Quest for the Perfect Drug by Barry Werth

Josh Boger is just barely on the right-side of crazy.

In the 1980s, the founder of a new biotech/pharmaceutical startup agreed to let journalist Barry Werth inside his nascent company and document its story. Having been an early employee at venture capital-backed companies, this is not something I would recommend.

The company is Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and its goal was to revolutionize the drug discovery process. Boger, a rising star at pharmaceutical powerhouse Merck, leaves to accomplish what he feels he cannot inside the corporate bureaucracy: build drugs atom-by-atom, a quantum leap from the Merck method of scouring nature for undiscovered molecules in plants and animals.

What ensues is the stuff of startup lore: Boger uses his power of persuasion and industry reputation to recruit a tight-knit team he can barely afford, fundraise from anyone who will write a decent check from Wall Street to Japanese ramen conglomerates, and race against time and science to revolutionize an industry.

Werth’s writing is phenomenal, knowing how to get just the right quotes from this set of brilliant minds. The emotional highs and lows of startup life may have never been depicted better, with chemists living in freezing labs, hoping to find the compounds that will make them legends of their field, and the executives feeling the strain where scientific excellence and capitalistic realities intersect.

It is nice to read such a stressful story (which concludes still early in the company’s life with its fate still uncertain), look up where Vertex is today, and see that it’s a $50 billion publicly traded company leading the world in the application of CRISPR. And presumably most of the early people who gave their sweat and blood to the business are now reasonably rich.

The Best Book I Read in the Second Half of 2019

The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis by Steven Harper

All of the socioeconomic bubbles (college, corruption, and concentration of wealth) people are worried about are alive and well in the legal industry. Harper, now a law professor at Northwestern, does a precise job deconstructing his own profession and its constituents.

The law schools are charging too much and caring too little about students future career prospects. The media is using phony, game-able ranking systems to sell subscriptions and keep themselves relevant. The government continues to underwrite some of its largest student loans to prospective students who will never repay or discharge them, trapping them for life. And the big law firms exploit cheap recent-grad labor to generate profits for elderly owners who founded a firm forty years ago in simpler times and now sit atop empires.

Harper offers his solutions, attempting to stay pragmatic as opposed to idealistic, and he is optimistic that change is already underway as news of the industry’s unsustainability spreads. But this is another entry into the increasingly-long list of tear-downs of society where the allegedly-intelligent are making a lot of dumb decisions and refuse to act against their own interests.

Now that he’s nearly a teenager, he’s almost the age I was when I started thinking independently from family and friends. For me, a big part of that was discovering Paul Graham’s essays. Hopefully one day my brother reads through them (but I won’t force him).

This got me thinking: if I were to recommend them to him, would I want him to read them chronologically? Or should I point him to specific essays based on his interests?

Alternatively, if one were to compile all of Paul’s essays into a collection or a Hackers and Painters sequel, how would it be organized?

So below is my attempt at tagging Paul Graham’s essays by subject matter.

Startups – General Lessons:

• Default Alive or Default Dead?
• Change Your Name
• What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
• The Fatal Pinch
• Before the Startup
• Do Things that Don’t Scale
• Startup = Growth
• Black Swan Farming
• What Startups Are Really Like
• What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
• Ramen Profitable
• Startups in 13 Sentences
• The Other Half of “Artists Ship”
• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
• A New Venture Animal
• Six Principles for Making New Things
• The Future of Web Startups
• How Not to Die
• The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
• A Student’s Guide to Startups
• The Power of the Marginal
• The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
• How to Start a Startup

Startups – On Location:

• Where to See Silicon Valley
• How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
• Why Startup Hubs Work
• A Local Revolution?
• Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
• Cities and Ambition
• Why to Move to a Startup Hub
• Why Startups Condense in America
• How to Be Silicon Valley

Startups – On Ideas:

• Fashionable Problems
• How to Get Startup Ideas
• Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
• The Hardware Renaissance
• Organic Startup Ideas
• Ideas for Startups

Startups – For Founders:

• Why It’s Safe for Founders to Be Nice
• Mean People Fail
• A Word to the Resourceful
• Schlep Blindness
• What We Look for in Founders
• The Anatomy of Determination
• Five Founders
• Relentlessly Resourceful
• Be Good
• Why to Not Not Start a Startup
• Learning from Founders

Startups – On Investors:

• The Ronco Principle
• Don’t Talk to Corp Dev
• How to Raise Money
• Investor Herd Dynamics
• How to Convince Investors
• Startup Investing Trends
• Subject: Airbnb
• Founder Control
• The New Funding Landscape
• High Resolution Fundraising
• The Future of Startup Funding
• How to Be an Angel Investor
• Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
• A Fundraising Survival Guide
• Why There Aren’t More Googles
• The Equity Equation
• The Hacker’s Guide to Investors
• How to Present to Investors
• How to Fund a Startup
• The Venture Capital Squeeze
• A Unified Theory of VC Suckage

Philosophy

• General and Surprising
• Life is Short
• What Doesn’t Seem Like Work?
• The Top of My Todo List
• This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
• Keep Your Identity Small
• Lies We Tell Kids
• How to Disagree
• Trolls
• How to Do Philosophy
• Stuff
• See Randomness
• How to Do What You Love
• Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
• The Word “Hacker”
• What You Can’t Say
• Hackers and Painters

Wisdom and Knowledge

• Novelty and Heresy
• The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
• How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
• How You Know
• The Top Idea in Your Mind
• How to Lose Time and Money
• Is It Worth Being Wise?
• Good and Bad Procrastination
• What You’ll Wish You’d Known
• Why Nerds are Unpopular

Charisma

• Charisma / Power
• It’s Charisma, Stupid

Economics

• The Refragmentation
• Defining Property
• The High-Res Society
• The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
• You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss
• What Business Can Learn from Open Source
• Hiring is Obsolete
• What the Bubble Got Right
• How to Make Wealth

Immigration

• Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
• The Founder Visa
• Made in USA

Inequality

• Economic Inequality
• An Alternative Theory of Unions
• Inequality and Risk
• Great Hackers
• Mind the Gap

Patents

• The Patent Pledge
• Are Software Patents Evil?
• 6,631,372

Credentialism

• The Lesson to Unlearn
• After Credentials
• News from the Front
• Two Kinds of Judgement
• After the Ladder
• Undergraduation

Math

• A Way to Detect Bias
• The Risk of Discovery
• Bradley’s Ghost

Writing

• Write Like You Talk
• Writing and Speaking
• Persuade xor Discover
• Post-Medium Publishing
• The List of N Things
• Copy What You Like
• The Submarine
• Writing, Briefly
• A Version 1.0
• The Age of the Essay

Tech Industry Trends

• Tablets
• Apple’s Mistake
• The Trouble with the Segway
• Why Twitter is a Big Deal
• Why TV Lost
• Microsoft is Dead
• Web 2.0
• Return of the Mac
• The Other Road Ahead

Computer Programming

• Holding a Program in One’s Head
• The Python Paradox
• If Lisp is So Great
• The Hundred-Year Language
• Revenge of the Nerds
• Succinctness is Power
• What Languages Fix
• Why Arc Isn’t Especially Object-Oriented
• What Made Lisp Different
• The Roots of Lisp
• Five Questions about Language Design
• Being Popular
• Java’s Cover
• Beating the Averages
• Lisp for Web-Based Applications
• Programming Bottom-Up

Spam Filtering

• Filters that Fight Back
• Better Bayesian Filtering
• A Plan for Spam

Distractions and Addictions

• The Acceleration of Addictiveness
• Disconnecting Distraction
• The Island Test
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule 

Art and Design

• How Art Can Be Good
• Design and Research
• Taste for Makers

Y Combinator

• Why YC
• What I Did this Summer

PG’s Life

• Having Kids
• Jessica Livingston
• Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
• What Happened to Yahoo
• Some Heroes
• What I’ve Learned from Hacker News

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.

Three Stars (Recommended)

Sales Engagement: How the World’s Fastest-Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale by Manny Medina, Max Altschuler, Mark Kosoglow:

Definitely better than Max Altschuler’s growth hacking because it focuses on tactics over tools. It’s still a not-subtle promotional book to sell their sales tool Outreach. To be fair, it does pretty comprehensively cover modern sales automation challenges and opportunities, so someone who hasn’t done sales beforehand would probably get some value out of this.

Let’s Go (So We Can Go Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discord by Jeff Tweedy (Audiobook):

My favorite childhood teacher got me this as part of an audiobook swap. I had never heard of the band Wilco before. For being a professional singer, Tweedy’s reading of his own biography started off flat until he seemed to audibly ease into it.

He’s got some reflective moments that I haven’t heard enough artists talk about, particularly that later in life he felt maybe he could’ve contributed more to the world, maybe become a scientist, if he had a different upbringing or gone to different schools as a kid. That’s the kind of thing I think non-artists suspect but don’t hear very often.

My favorite segments were near the end when both his wife and son get to read their own chapters about living with a rock-star (and all the drug abuse that comes with it). This audiobook was recorded in Chicago and for that it wins extra brownie points.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman

Killing Yourself to Live tells two stories: A request by his editor at Spin magazine sends Chuck on a road trip in a rented Ford Taurus to places around the country where rock musicians have died (sometimes by their choosing and mostly not) presumably as a way to help readers understand life. Layered on top of this premise is Chuck recounting his love for three women in his life who don’t exactly love him back.

It seems to be divisive among reviewers, depending on which of the two topics (rock ‘n roll or nostalgia for old romance) you care more about. The haters find this book to be a lot of white-dork navel-gazing, and I can’t say they’re wrong. I do wish it had more music history in it myself, although I still learned a fair amount about how many musicians have died in plane crashes and Seattle. I think a lot of those critics aren’t acknowledging a truth: a lot of guys in their late 20s and early 30s (possibly beyond) are probably nostalgic for the women who, five to ten years earlier, got away (probably with good reason). In this regard, Klosterman acknowledges his own narcissism.

If you only want the death-and-music story, there’s his original Spin Magazine story “6,557 Miles to Nowhere”.

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

The title is probably too obtuse too grab the casual reader (it’s loosely about the idea that time machines are too dangerous for anything more than finding out how dinosaur meat tastes).

However, the theme of this 2009 book is as important as ever. Klosterman himself describes the book as being about “What is reality, maybe? No, that’s not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened.”

He uses the lenses of Lady Gaga’s award show outfits, the popularity of Mad Men, and the Unabomber’s anti-technology manifesto to view the construction of false realities from a myriad of perspectives. In the decade since this book was first published, this “fake reality” has grown. And it’s not clear if Chuck sees this as a “problem” per se. But it’s certainly the new normal, either for the time being or forever.

Four Stars (Highly recommended for those interested in topic, or generally recommended for anyone)

The Making of a Manager: What to do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo

Written by a design director with a decade of experience at Facebook, Making of a Manager provides good comprehensive coverage of management. Filled with examples from her experience, Zhuo discusses delegation, running meetings, and other topics core to the role of “manager”. I strongly agree with her throughline idea of applying the “growth mindset” to her team and surrounding organization. A lot of the material might feel obvious or common-sensical to anyone who has held a management role or put thought into the challenges of the role before. Even in those cases, this is a good book to keep on the shelf as a reference to revisit and make sure your own broader managerial bases are covered in case you are drowned in your day-to-day.

High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People by Elad Gil

Entrepreneur Elad Gil interviewed some of the technology and investment communities sharpest minds to compile this guide to growing a business. Chapters switch between the condensed interviews with experts on each topic with Elad’s own experience. Well-structured by concepts makes it useful for future reference.

Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta by Chuck Klosterman

This was Klosterman’s first book, published at the turn of the century, and originally intended as an academic textbook on the history of 80s rock music, specifically heavy metal and hair/glam rock. I’m admittedly biased to liking this book; despite being a generation younger than Chuck, I also grew up on this music, heavily influenced by the music of my mom’s youth.

So as a self-identifying fan of glam-metal (Bon Jovi, Cheap Trick, Motley Crue to name a few), Klosterman does a tremendous job contemplating all the things I love and find fascinating about the genre. Many of the chapters are akin to the debates that high schoolers have about music (I mean this in a good way, as the book’s tone reminds me of youthful energy), including, but not limited to:

• What’s the difference between “heavy” and “hard” rock?
• Who is the greatest rock guitarist of all time (and is the typical answer of Jimi Hendrix the correct one)?
• Does the sexism of 80s rock, with its Cherry Pie music videos and groupie culture, say more about the artists or the rest of American culture?
• What are the greatest rock albums of the era?

In the end though, Klosterman concludes with the most important reason this book needed to exist and why I’m nostalgic for this material: For a generation of American kids, this was an artform that influenced them and briefly dominated American culture. That time should not be forgotten.

Downtown Owl: A Novel by Chuck Klosterman

Downtown Owl tells the story of the small, fictional North Dakota town Owl, not dissimilar from where Klosterman grew up. Clearly his youth informs his characters. The narrative is told in third-person, but follows three protagonists: an angsty teen who semi-subconsciously wants to escape his small town life, a twenty-something woman with the opposite experience of moving to Owl from the big city to start her teaching career, and an elderly man who has lived his life in a place where everybody knows your name. All three leads, and the surrounding supporting cast, are intimately developed, probably because Klosterman grew up around these archetypes.

More than just sharing the lives of these characters, Klosterman uses them as a vessel for understanding humanity. And this is what Klosterman excels at and has built his career. A lot of intellectuals and pseudo-philosophers take an Ivory Tower approach to thinking about people as aggregate abstractions. Klosterman understands individuals in all their strengths and weaknesses. And that’s how you begin to understand everybody.

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

Larson’s experienced a lot in his career across many popular software companies: Yahoo, Digg, Uber, Stripe. His essay collection on managing engineering teams covers so many important, under-analyzed professional issues I’ve encountered in my own career, particularly managing employees of different skill levels and thinking in trade-offs. The book is designed to sit on your desk for reference with its concise, topic-oriented articles.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle

Bill Campbell is perhaps, alongside Andy Grove and Ron Conway, as the most important behind-the-scenes person in Silicon Valley history. Having recently passed, his proteges from the Google executive team have written a biography of Campbell’s life (including his former career as a high school football coach before becoming an executive coach) intertwined with stories from other noteworthy tech people (such as Steve Jobs and the Google founders) about how Bill changed their lives. It’s a book filled with love, admiration, and advice, and the kind of book we’d all probably wish someone would write about us once we’re gone.

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

Lightman has had a unique career as the first professor at MIT to hold a joint position in both the physics and humanities departments at MIT. Searching for Stars merges both of his worlds into a memoir. From his small island off the coast of Maine, this is the story of one thinker’s attempt to reconcile science, religion, and philosophy in his own mind and on the page. He does this by interpreting past prolific thinkers and tracing the history of human thought. This is a great, thoughtful vacation read.

The Visible Man – A Novel by Chuck Klosterman

What would you do if you had invisibility? Probably not exactly what the villain “Y” does in Klosterman’s second novel. But maybe not as differently as you’d think. The Visible Man is the most horrifying story I’ve read since Lolita, and not as long.

A scientist only known to us as “Y” creates an invisibility suit out of the leftovers of an abandoned government project. The story is told by his therapist, who slowly realizes the implications of an invisible person’s capabilities. Most dangerously, the invisible person can know everything about you. Take the way Hannibal Lecter knows everything about Clarice’s life and personality just based on interacting with her, then remove the need for interaction. The story is a unique cross between The Sopranos and Silence of the Lambs. In a classically Klosterman way, it creates more questions, but the implications here are darker.

Five Stars (Highly Recommend to Everyone)

Born a Crime: Stories of a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah is, other than Dave Chappelle, my favorite comedian working today. Like Chappelle, his mix of wit, wisdom, and life experience gives him a searing insight into humanity. His insight that the language people speak creates more racism than skin color was uniquely educational. Where his stories are different from the typical middle-American life, other are more relatable. Specifically, his retelling of his mother’s relationships with different types of men, some absent and some psychopathically abusive, are universal.

Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor by Brian Keating

“Another year, another story for humanity” wrote physicist and friend Ritoban Thakur on the Amazon note he paired with this gifted book. Author and cosmologist Keating has written an important memoir on his time in modern academic physics. He explains the history of his research niche (the big bang and cosmic microwave background radiation) while telling his tale of the drama and politics of navigating the science-academia complex. Interspersed throughout the book are three interstitial teardowns of the modern Nobel Prize in Physics: it’s discouragement of collaborative groups, it’s lack of credit sharing across all the grad students and post-docs who contribute to major discoveries, and it’s negatively influential fame and cash incentives. Keating writes with clarity and humor in this teardown of culture’s arguably most famous prize.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

After listening to Cowen for years as a guest on EconTalk and reading his books before it was cool, it’s been fascinating watching him rise in popularity the past couple years as a sort of economist-to-the-technologists. I say this as a compliment, as he deserves all the recognition he’s now receiving.

Stubborn Attachments is Cowen’s collection of loosely related ideas on how humanity should live, framed in the language of economics and philosophy. He presents many ideas that resonated with me and I suspect they would with most smart people: society shouldn’t be discounting the value of humanity’s future as much as it does, there’s more to value than what we currently measure, and we need better frameworks for being able to make any decisions at all under uncertainty. Better yet, he provides his own starting points for solutions to all of these issues. It is the economics book I wish I’d written.

Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam

I love a great corporate whistleblower story and this may be the biggest of modern times. Some people have vaguely heard about the company Monsanto and of genetically-modified foods. While this book is not a comprehensive cover of the GMO debate, it may be the best argument against GMOs.

Journalist Carey Gillam uncovers how agriculture technology behemoth Monsanto poisoned the international supply with its bug-killer “Roundup” chemical (scientifically known as glyphosate). The story exploded in the press a couple years ago as farmers who had been in close, consistent contact with the pesticide started developing similar, quickly-moving lethal cancers. Multiple families have successfully sued Monsanto, winning large financial settlements but leaving children without parents.

Gillam digs deeper into how these deaths were allowed to happen and unveils deep corruption at the Environmental Protection Agency, highlighting multiple regulators who had been paid off by Monsanto in the ugliest form of regulatory capture by a corporation. Both the government and company used fraudulent science and the firing of real critical scientists to protect Monsanto’s profitability. Anyone captivated by recent fraud stories such as the Fyre Festival or Theranos will be enthralled by this story. While it’s more technically complex, the stakes are higher as Monsanto and the EPA clearly killed Americans.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

One of the hardest problems for any organization is resolving the tension between creating the “next big idea” and not destroying itself in the process. It’s the kind of problem that I’ve put a lot of thought into but never formalized a solution. Bahcall has done it here. This is the kind of book where I think “he’s articulated my own thoughts better than I could have” on every page.

Without going into the details, Bahcall has created a model for structuring organizations so they can walk the fine line between innovation and sustainability. He explains how he’s come to his conclusions based on historical examples (the history of the American airline industry, Vannevar Bush’s influence on scientific research, and how England quickly surpassed China during the Industrial Revolution, to give a few samples) and by bringing his background in natural sciences to the field of management. This is one of the best books I’ve read for bringing together multiple fields of thought into a cohesive theory tackling one of the toughest problems in people management.

The Best Book I Read in the First Half of 2019

Einstein’s Dreams: A Novel by Alan Lightman

Not exactly a novel, not exactly a collection of essays; Einstein’s Dreams is a unique combination of both. This is a fictional recollection of Einstein’s life during his “miracle year”, with chapters alternating between Einstein discussing his new physics with friends over coffee and his dreams at night.

It’s these dream sequences that make this book memorable. Each dream is a short story of an alternate reality where humanity has a different relationship to time. How would people behave differently if our lives were longer? Were shorter? Were frozen in time? Were based on how much you loved those around you? These original physicist-turned–writer insights are half of the appeal, with the other half being Lightman’s remarkably poetic prose.

It is the ideal coffee shop people-watching book as it will make you think differently about everyone you see.