Since I missed posting last year and don’t maintain rankings across years, I’ll instead share short things I learned from some of the books I read the last couple of years — categorized instead of ranked. (Order within category is semi-arbitrary). Disclaimer: I got lazy and so didn’t include or write thoughts about every one.

Science, Technology, & Society

1. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, by Virginia Eubanks. A huge problem with “targetting” benefits: data on who qualifies (for, e.g., unemployment or rehab or abuse shelters) can down the line be used to punish folks.
2. The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt, by Sinan Aral. Science on how social media affects us is hard and complicated, and many proposed outsider solutions would fail. But if academics like Sinan can predict the Burisma scandal and election misinformation years ahead of time, then there’s no good reason companies couldn’t have been prepared.
3. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri. AI in practice is currently a lie, powered by “mechanical turkers,” and perhaps more enabled by remote monitoring and work distribution technology than by any ‘intelligent’ algorithm.
4. Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini. Science and education certainly isn’t the cure to racism I once thought it was, but tools for either good or bad.
5. The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, by Tim Wu. Gave me the foundation to understand ongoing battles of anti-trust against Google/FB, and how a narrow view of harm to “consumers” as opposed to “citizens/people” might doom what should be slam-dunk cases.
6. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, by Anthony M. Townsend. Lasting urban tools are hard to build, and “top-down” vs “bottom-up” matters.
7. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, by Arun Sundarajan. Many competing models for the “sharing” economy, and that my view of my research area was too U.S. centric and recency-biased.
8. The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors, by Matthew O. Jackson. Social networks aren’t restricted to modern technologies, and consequences we see today are just scaled up and visible versions of long-standing effects.

Technical

1. Who Gets What and Why, by Alvin E. Roth. A lay overview of my research field (market design) by the (Nobel-prize winning) expert; entertaining, clear, and informative throughout.
2. Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. Appropriately used, mental models are perhaps the most useful way to quickly understand a new situation. Over-used, and you sound like a consultant who doesn’t take the time to learn the essential peculiarities of a given situation. This book is a list of such models. Here’s a medium post listing some models by one of the authors.
3. Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows. A classic must read, to understand common characteristics of complex systems.
4. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie. Accessible introduction to the essential science of causality. Useful, but skip the parts where Pearl claims too much credit and that his methods are the only way. For the technical reader, Guido Imbens’s review of the book is absolutely essential.
5. Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
6. Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn.
7. Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, by Steven Strogatz. Calculus is beautiful, and its story should be taught alongside the math.
8. Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.
9. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, by Richard Thaler.

Memoirs, Bios, and Essays

The powerful, must-read ones—among the best books I’ve read the last few years. Won’t share takeaways because you should just read them.

1. Becoming, by Michelle Obama.
2. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma.
3. Know My Name: A Memoir, by Chanel Miller.
4. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson.
5. Educated, a memoir, by Tara Westover.
6. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, by Toni Morrison

The fun ones.

1. Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help, by Larissa MacFarquhar. Collection of stories of people who’ve dedicated their life to others, and an exploration of, “When have I done enough for others? How will I know?.”
2. A Promised Land, by Barack Obama. Pure high-school/undergrad nostalgia porn.
3. A Primate’s Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky.
4. Maybe you should talk to someone, by Lori Gottlieb. An entertaining look on therapy as both therapist and patient.
5. Robin, by Dave Itzkoff.
6. Calypso, by David Sedaris.

Education

1. Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, by Jeffrey J. Selingo. Inside look on how admissions committees for undergraduate colleges choose a class. Illuminated how subjective the process is, and how removed academic discourse about legality of considering demographics is from on-the-ground decision-making,
2. The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure — Without Losing Your Soul, by Kerry Rockquemore and Tracey A. Laszloffy. Full of practical tips on, e.g., time management and office politics. Though not written for us, useful for non-Black folks to know of the additional hurdles our Black colleagues must navigate.
3. Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping, by Julie Posselt. Only partway in and intend to finish it soon, but a well-recommended book on graduate admissions in practice.

Race, Economics, History, & Politics

1. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry. History certainly rhymes — from “liberty cabbage” (cf. freedom fries) during WWI to anti-maskers and pandemic deniers. In my favorite, most brutal few paragraphs, the author juxtaposed statements from politicians on how the pandemic was almost over, with subsequent record death counts. The internet certainly hasn’t saved us from ignorance but also hasn’t caused (all of) it.
2. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. If people are doing something (e.g., spending their money) in a way you don’t understand, assume you’re missing something rather than that they are.
3. Good Economics for Hard Times, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Opinionated summary of empirical economics on the biggest domestic political debates — e.g., that immigration probably doesn’t harm any Americans economically, but that global trade harms many.
4. How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi. That ‘not being racist’ doesn’t matter, anti-racist actions do.
5. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. Not a fan of many of the specific proposals, but good at exposing that many of the ways society is structured could be otherwise. Also, that proposing radical, specific changes is a useful (if daring) exercise.
6. A History of America in Ten Strikes, by Erik Loomis. Absolutely shocking the power labor unions once held on behalf of workers, and that diffusing power often eliminates it.
7. Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change, by Eitan D. Hersh. “Staying informed” isn’t useful, acting with that knowledge is. Helped cement my desire to work full-time electing Democrats in the 2020 cycle.
8. Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World, by James Miller. Maybe? Tensions regarding who is a citizen and what democracy’s limits are is as old as the idea itself.
9. One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, by Matthew Yglesias. Simple idea (eventually the most populous country will be the most powerful) + strong opinion (that should be the US) + standard center-left policy recommendations (immigration & housing policy).
10. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas. What you do using moonlight as charity can’t compensate for what you do as your day job, so I better have a day job that advances my values.
11. Rockonomics: What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics (and Our Future), by Alan Krueger. Sobering tale of how celebrity winner takes all in music predicts the same in the broader economy. Also provides cogent explanations of other economic/business principles, like “loss leaders,” through the music industry.
12. Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley, by Cary McClelland. Collection of biographical tales from San Franciscans old and new taught me a history of the city I’ve lived near the last 5 years.

Business

1. Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, by Safi Bahcall. Organizational structure is everything, and it’s hard to both deliver efficiently today and prepare for tomorrow.
2. Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh. Accidentally reveals that tech’s tolerance of societal harms are calculated moves for personal profit. Full review here.
3. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone. Too hagiographical for my taste.
4. The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, by James Crabtree.
5. The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything, by Jason Kelly
6. Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race, by Tim Fernholz.
7. Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth, by John Doerr.
8. Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, by Scott Kupor. Seemingly useful handbook/how-to guide for those looking to to start a tech company.

Self-Help, Management, and Writing

1. Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein. Writing tips from a prominent fiction editor and author. Full of practical tips, some of which are summarized here.
2. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Book version of a class the authors teach at the Design School at Stanford. I’d have probably gotten more out of it if I did the exercises.
3. Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, by James Wood, Kory Kogon, and Suzette Blakemore.
4. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker.
5. The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. A classic business school operations/management book I read when I thought that there was a chance I’ll be a professor at one.
6. Confessions of a Public Speaker, by Scott Berkun. Story-filled, how-to guide for public speaking and giving talks. Might recommend it to students learning how to give talks, but holding out for a better one.

Sports

1. MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik. How analytics is used to not just make in-game decisions but also guide player training and improvement, and attributes Astros success to it. Naive, full review (pre-Astros scandal) here.
2. The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. Two analytics minded baseball journalists convince an independent league owner to let them run the team, saber-metrics style. Nice insights like: (a) every player is flawed, but some flaws you can live with, and (b) most things that analytics say is useful on average are quite noisy/small effect size in practice.
3. Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated, by Shea Serrano.

Fiction

1. Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Wonderful collection of short stories on Indian-American lives by my favorite fiction writer. Focused on stories of my generation, of those who grew up in the US to immigrant parents.
2. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. More short stories on Indian-American life. Focused on my parent’s generation.
3. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. Unnerving.
4. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. Read for a book club. Aight story of a post-pandemic world.
5. Dear Committee Members, by Julie Schumacher.
6. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, by Ken Liu.
7. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
8. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Not sure I understand why it’s a classic; felt quite obvious that the author spent less than 10 days writing it.
9. The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. Another book I wouldn’t have read if not for a book club.

“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” — Yogi Berra

Standing in long lines has been a new reality in our Covid world, whether for grocery stores, food banks, or voting. Is this our new reality for all shared spaces and resources for the social distancing future, from restaurants, gyms, and hiking trails, to public transportation and even our work places?

As a full shelter-in-place becomes politically and economically undesirable, and business-as-usual medically untenable, states and municipalities have started imagining what a partial re-opening looks like. The question of when to re-open what has dominated news coverage. Business owners and municipal government officials have been focused on the minutiae details of how to open safely (clean surfaces, mandatory masks, and the logistics of social distancing), if it is even possible.

One missing conversation is how we decide who gets priority to use our re-opened spaces, given that they’ll all be capacity constrained. Even with a robust testing and tracing infrastructure, we won’t be able to crowd into offices, restaurants, or subways like before — everything will operate at half (or less) capacity. Governments, companies, and other institutions must thus decide how to allocate what is now suddenly scarce: time-slots to use shared resources and public spaces. If we can’t all be somewhere at the same time, someone needs to decide who gets what, when.

This issue is not new: pre-Covid, we have waited in line at popular restaurants, been stuck in traffic in rush hours, or scrambled for reservations to use public spaces such as community banquet halls and basketball courts. Such limited capacity and resulting rationing will be the new reality for all our public spaces, as long as social distancing is necessary.

A strategy for potential over-crowding, of course, is either to do nothing and hope spaces don’t get too crowded, or to do almost nothing and have people wait in lines when they do get crowded. As I discuss below, this strategy has essentially worked for grocery stores, who now see minimal lines after the initial pains. However, it seems to have failed for many parks and beaches, which have re-opened with either few restrictions (Florida), with limited parking (Austin), or with “park ambassadors” who can close down a park if it is too busy (Seattle): over-crowding has led to officials re-considering their opening decisions, with some preferring that no one use these spaces over too many doing so.

Public transportation, office work-places, and many businesses won’t have the option of simply shutting down if they get too crowded, and simple line based solutions might be too inconvenient (do you really want to stand an hour in line to see if you can go into work, and then to enter your gym, and then to dine at a restaurant?).

So can we do better?

In my research, I design and build socio-technical systems to help groups of people coordinate. And in the past month I’ve talked with numerous local government staff members, store managers, and institutional leaders about their plans and experiences re-opening and managing crowds.

In this post, I’ll present some of the challenges and possibilities facing our leaders and us, as we try to navigate a newly capacity constrained world.

Allocating scarce resources is an old issue for economists (enough so that a classical definition of economics is “the study of … the allocation of scarce resources”). Researchers in my field, at the intersection of computer science and economics, have contributed to algorithms assigning medical students to residencies, kidneys to patients, affordable housing to those in need, and much more. From computer science, a real-time allocation mechanism balancing fairness and congestion underpins our modern internet.

While many of the ideas in these fields are too complex or burdensome to be used for everyday applications, they do provide lessons and prototypical solutions. Here, I describe three classes of solutions: (1) lines, (2) priorities and even/odd systems, and (3) reservation based systems. I discuss where each solution might be most applicable, and what new applications and systems they might enable.

Lines, information sharing, and selfish routing. The naive approach is to do (almost) nothing: if a given space (store, park, library, office, public transportation) is full, have people wait outside until it isn’t.

This approach is particularly powerful when some people can and are willing to shift their usage to off-peak times, and can learn patterns for when a place is busy. For example, people in my neighborhood learned that our Trader Joe’s has a long wait on weekend mornings, and so those who could shifted their shopping to weekdays and other non-traditional times — out of our own selfish desire to not wait in line, but collaterally to the benefit of others. This way, usage naturally balanced: according to a manager, last week the longest line was ~15 minutes, down from well over 40 minutes.

Some technical sophistication could further streamline this approach: real-time information could be shared about current wait times, or people could “virtually” wait online. Such solutions would allow us both to adjust our usage patterns faster, and to spend less time in physical lines.

Does this solution always work? Unfortunately, no. For example, in a pre-Covid world, we all both knew approximate rush hours in our respective cities and had instantaneous access to traffic via Google maps, and yet rush hours still occurred: many people would or could not shift their travel times. Our transportation systems were thus over-crowded, and traffic would back up. More recently, when it came to re-opened beaches and parks, nice weather and plenty of sunshine was too tempting to resist, and people were willing to brave crowds.

Priority passes, Senior Hours, and Even/Odd systems. If an unrestricted, line-based system does not reduce crowds even at a given space, an alternative is to apply the idea of grocery stores senior hours: someone with power declares that certain people receive priority access to a given space during special times. That access could come in many forms, from allowing people to skip lines to preventing everyone else from using the space at all.

Such systems already existed in our pre-Covid world. In many countries, including India and China, some cities adopted “even/odd systems”, in which only allowed half the population to drive each day, to limit congestion and pollution (those with odd license plates can drive on odd days, and vice versa). Many highway systems have “HOV” (high occupancy vehicle) lanes during rush hours, to encourage car-pooling. Disney World allows those able to pay to skip lines for popular rides.

Such systems can have substantial benefits over line-based ones: they can (equitably) reduce crowds, allowing for example everyone to use a park several times a week, without any crowding. They may further allow institutions to assert their legitimate priorities and support vulnerable populations, like senior hours do.

It’s easy to see how we can use these systems moving forward. When businesses open, we might need “medical and other essential worker cars” on public transportation, at the expense of workers can can more easily work from home. Workplaces, membership based gyms, and government spaces like parks and libraries might all need to adopt an “even/odd” system, in which each person is assigned the times or days in which they can use the service.

The key challenge of such systems, of course, is enforcement. Even/odd driving restrictions have had mixed success, for example, based on whether people can buy multiple cars or license plates. For public spaces with many entry and exit points, such as parks and beaches, restricting access might be physically impossible. If we have “essential worker” cars on public transportation, some people may just declare themselves essential to skip the regular line. From my conversations with city parks administrators, police may not be willing to enforce such micro-restrictions, and so we might have to rely on honest behavior.

The second, related challenge is how to set the priorities. The public will not comply with a system it deems to be illegitimate (for example, if NYC banned half their essential workers from using the subway each day, or otherwise prioritized white-collar office workers). Administrators in charge of public spaces need to be thinking through such priority systems today, and preparing both enforcement and to convince the public that they considered the trade-offs carefully and equitably.

Reservations and individual preferences. The above discussion misses a crucial aspect: people have preferences over when they use a space. An even/odd system that lets me to come in to work on Mondays and you on Tuesdays is terrible if you prefer Mondays and I prefer Tuesdays!

Fortunately, we have experience solving this problem: have people make reservations to use a space, with some way to deal with time-slots that are over-requested (first come first serve, a lottery, priority access, etc).

Such a system, properly implemented, would enable fine-grained control and sharing of our shared resources, and would combine the benefits of the two systems above: (1) like the naive solution of having people stand in line if a place is busy, people could decide for themselves when they want to use a space, and (2) like a priority or even/odd system, the administrator could control congestion and encode priorities for who deserves to use an over-demanded resource the most.

Unfortunately, this technical solution imposes substantial burdens on people, that need to be justified. For a public that is used to just running to the store or getting on the subway whenever convenient, having to sign-up ahead of time might seem unnecessary and over-engineered. There might be equity or privacy concerns, as not all of us have the technological access needed to consistently reserve time on a website or app. And, for important spaces, building and deploying something at the scale of a city is difficult on the necessary time-scale.

Where might we see such sign-ups? At the least, I expect industries used to reservations, like restaurants, to more widely adopt the practice. Gyms and other membership based services may also do so. Places where a signup is infeasible could adopt a hybrid even/odd that is respectful of preferences: each person simply is asked to use a service no more than a given number of times a week (without having to sign up ahead of time) — but this hybrid doesn’t work if everyone has the same preferences.

I’d like to see establishments experiment beyond a first come first serve reservation signup, to lottery or other systems. For example, a gym could run a lottery for who gets the coveted 6pm slot for a given day, with the daily losers receiving higher priority in future days. Grocery stores for which people are staying up until midnight to sign up for over-booked delivery time-slots could (and should) implement such a system today.

More interesting is whether offices will adopt a hybrid with priorities and even/odd assignments, with a reservation based system within teams that share a workspace. Consider a university’s research activities: in a phased re-opening, people conducting lab-based research requiring special equipment will receive priority. But those conducting theoretical research can’t stay home all the time. With highly heterogeneous preferences (dictated, for example, by one’s childcare situation and meeting schedule), universities will need to both allow us to choose when to come in, and somewhat restrict our ability to freely do so.

Such reservation systems could also be used to help re-purpose other spaces. For example, many banquet halls and streets currently lie empty. Restaurants would rush to use such spaces as overflow capacity if there was a simple matching mechanism to do so — a city could coordinate such usage fairly, using a reservation system.

As administrators of shared spaces make their re-opening plans, it will be tempting to hope that everything will be like grocery stores: that after some adjustment, a no-hassle, line-based solution will just work. I’m skeptical: I believe that even/odd or reservation based approaches will be worth the trouble in some settings.

Here are some general principles to consider when deciding on a system.

Priorities. Governments and institutions might be loath to seem like they’re prioritizing one group over another. However, every system prioritizes some people over others, whether implicitly or explicitly. Grocery stores without senior hours would be abandoning seniors who need to avoid crowded places, and long lines (such as to vote) prioritize those who have the time, energy, and ability to be in line — while such systems may seem like they’re working, that may only be because many have abandoned trying to use them.

Thinking through and communicating priorities now (such as getting us ready for “essential/medical worker cars” on public transportation) will save future trouble. After an institution formalizes its priorities, everything else is easy.

Enforcement, and off-loading capacity. There won’t be a one size fit all solution for our over-capacity shared spaces. Two features that will determine what type of system is best are enforcement capabilities, and whether peak demand can be “off-loaded” to other times (some people can shop at other times, but jogging in a park at midnight is hard).

As a rule of thumb, a naive or line-based solution will fail when a service is simply over-demanded at certain times, and even with long lines people won’t selfishly decide to some back at another time (or such non-busy times don’t exist). On the other hand, any non-naive solution needs enforcement, a clear communication of the system’s priorities, and potentially a new computational system to be built.

There are many details and design considerations for such sharing systems that I omitted here, and that need to be carefully considered — and I believe that the large economics and computer science literature on the subject can help.

If you are a policy-maker or administrator thinking through such challenges: I’d love to hear about what particular aspects you’re struggling with, and if there is a way I and my team can help. We’d be especially interested in building out a reservation or lottery system for a public space, or helping analyze data regarding daily usage patterns.

If you’re a researcher, in computer science, economics, or operations: there are many challenges and potential research questions here that need interdisciplinary attention. A partial list of questions:

1. There is a large theoretical literature on non-monetary mechanism design (I ignored monetary solutions because for many of the applications above, they are dead on arrival, rightfully so). What from that literature can be used to design and build simple mechanisms usable by regular people?
2. What level of heterogeneous preferences do you need for peak-demand offloading to work? What applications can we expect to meet that criteria? What can we measure or survey ahead of time to predict whether a line-based system work?
3. How does an entity like a workplace or university combine information (priorities, office floor plans and spatial data, collaboration network data and meeting schedules, people’s preferences, capacity estimates, enforcement ability and communication costs) to decide who gets to come in on which day? More generally, are there usable allocation policies that jointly consider priorities, preferences, enforce-ability, and capacities over time?

Growth mindset meets baseball analytics. Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik describe the (far more advanced) successor to Moneyball, in which players and teams are not just better measuring value but also creating it. By using modern imaging technology (especially a global shutter camera called the edgertronics), for example, pitchers can precisely see how a ball rolls off their hand with various grips, enabling the learning of new pitches in a summer. They can also intelligently change pitch compositions (e.g., throw more curveballs and fewer sinkers), and batters can adjust the launch angles at which balls leave their bat. Instead of trial and error, i.e., players can practice deliberately and implement specific changes.

Smart teams have overhauled their entire player development and acquisition program around such techniques. For example, the Astros infamously acquire pitchers and help them dramatically increase their spin rate, to devastating success. They have outfitted all their minor league parks with the edgertronics cameras and similar tools, and they deliver personalized insights to the most lowly of their prospects. It’s unlikely they would have won the World Series without these developments.

The book itself traces the origin of this revolution in baseball, in an anecdote driven manner. It especially focuses on the pitcher Trevor Bauer, who is obsessed with data-backed training techniques and first used the edgertronics to learn new pitches. Unlike most anecdote driven books, however, (perhaps unsurprising given the subject matter), the book is honest about the limitations in being able to attribute individual successes to changes influenced by the technology. It is also full of non-obvious tidbits, e.g.:

1. One of the most important growing roles on teams are “conduits,” former players who are analytics-minded and can translate the insights/lessons/data coming from the analysts into a language players want to hear and can immediately apply.
2. The Astros have basically killed scouting in their organization. Instead of sending scouts to watch players and write reports, they send interns and camera-people to measure potential players far more precisely, with “scouting analysts” studying the data offline.
3. While at an individual level improvements enabled by technology have enriched some players, the equilibrium effect on the league has been far more subtle. Baseball players don’t reach free agency until much later when compared to players in other leagues (due to “arbitration” years); by the time that they become free agents, they are often past their peak, and teams are realizing that they can develop younger, cheaper players to get close to their performance. There have been many calls to fix these issues.

The book delivers lessons beyond baseball. Something I’ve been curious about recently is how our education system and labor market can use such deliberate practice to achieve similarly fantastic outcomes. For example, online labor markets such as Upwork should be able to use the market-level data they have on client jobs, in combination insights on individual performance, to construct personalized education plans for workers. Of course, precise measurement of a person’s “mechanics” is a challenge, but one that can be overcome soon if not now.

It would not be the first time that innovations from baseball were transferred elsewhere. Sports have long been at the forefront of data decision-making, for good reasons: tens of teams — each worth hundreds of millions of dollars — are in ferocious competition, in a setting where outcomes (wins, points/runs) are easy to measure.

Baseball in particular has been the playing ground for statisticians for over a century, as it has several additional attractive features: (a) each team plays many (~162) games a year, (b) each game is a sequence of discrete events (at-bats), that each involve a small number of players, and (c) Every aspect about a single at-bat or pitch can be (and more recently, actually is) measured and stored, from pitch speed and ball launch angle to the at-bat’s outcome. These features make easy the gathering of relevant data — the most important challenge in most data science projects.

In one sense, the Moneyball era was the precursor to the modern tech company mantra of measuring and optimizing the right metrics; it’s no surprise that many prominent data scientists, including Nate Silver, cut their teeth in baseball before moving onto other domains. If this history is any guide, and with some luck, measurement-enabled deliberate practice will also grow in other domains.

In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying the Astros’s success while their development edge lasts.

A book on how to engineer a company worth tens of billions of dollars in just a few years, written by the experts. I cannot doubt that the authors have the strategy right if the goal is to build such companies, but the book leaves it unsurprising that companies built in this manner often impose substantial externalities, both on their employees and on society at large.

A few pieces of advice from the book:

1. Blitzscaling is about sacrificing efficiency in the name of speed. The goal is to scale and be the winner in a winner take all market, i.e., be the company that enjoys monopoly profits.
2. In the process, you need to move nimbly, like a “pirate.” Such movement might mean that you ignore some laws and regulations. The authors caveat that one should never do anything unethical, but they claim that ignoring bad laws is ethical. Who gets to determine whether a law is bad is left unsaid.
3. You must also “tolerate bad management” during this time. You don’t have time for anything else.
4. You must only fight the urgent fires and ignore everything else. Explicitly, they advise that you can often ignore customer service as long as you are still growing exponentially and claim that that’s what they did at PayPal.
5. In the interest of hiring quickly (without even wasting time to interview), they positively talk about a strategy employed by a partner company: only hire those within current employees’ networks and with top brand (college) names; don’t bother interviewing for skills.
6. When discussing blitzscaling in China, the authors praise the common Chinese startup’s 9/9/6 model (work from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), as well as one startup’s moving all their employees to a hotel to remove “distractions of everyday life.”

The authors do have a section near the end on culture, and how one should hire a diverse set of candidates (e.g., adopting the Rooney rule, or making sure that a brogrammer culture doesn’t drive away minorities, people with families, those who don’t like drinking, etc).

However, there isn’t any serious grappling with how all the advice in the rest of the book — with myriad sacrifices in the name of speed — might be incompatible with supporting a diverse culture and employee base or in preventing external harm. In particular: one does not only sacrifice efficiency with speed; one probably also sacrifices the ability to detect and correct problems that affect people away from the money, whether customers or employees.

Similarly, there is a section near the end on proper, ethical behavior, as well as whether scale itself can be a bad thing. The argument in support of big companies is the standard one: that with scale comes efficiency, and with bigger data comes applications not possible at a smaller scale.

They further claim (tongue in cheek, I presume) that the current tech companies aren’t monopolies, citing people being able to shop at Best Buy instead of Amazon if they want, for example. This argument is less convincing in that it follows the rest of the book, where the assumption is that blitzscaling is necessary precisely because companies need to be the market winner in a winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most market.

Finally, in a bizarrely nationalistic argument, the authors argue that a government would be self-defeating to regulate or restrict companies based in the country. They gave the example of US Congress calling Mark Zuckerberg and him coming, vs European governments asking for testimony and him refusing. In other words, if there will be all powerful, global companies, better they be based in your country versus in other countries.

I know nothing about building big companies quickly and so will have to trust the authors on how to do so. However, if they are right both on (1) how to do it, and (2) that doing so is necessary in today’s markets, then I am pessimistic about our economic and cultural future. Their strategy seems wholly incompatible with building a positive company culture. Perhaps most damningly, it suggests that the various tech company scandals we have seen in the last 3 years are not a product of poor management; rather, they are accepted collateral damage — necessary sacrifices — made in the name of winning.

As in previous years, I resolved to briefly review books in order to ensure both close reading and a modicum of memory. In the process, I maintain a (rough) ranking, which I lightly edited recently to account for how books stuck with me even months later. For some of these books, I wrote longer reviews earlier, to which I link.

Below are the top ten books I read this year. They’re all non-fiction, though the first is a collection of “creative non-fiction” articles found in the New Yorker. Four relate to large tech companies and online platforms, with three taking primarily critical positions — perhaps preparing me for the recent turn in the media’s coverage of such companies toward such a skeptical view. Three are ‘geographic’ non-fiction, covering the history and present of North Korea, British imperialism in India, and various terrorist groups.

1. Draft №4, by John McPhee. [Full review here]

2. Behave, by Robert Sapolsky. An excellent, sweeping, and comprehensive book that serves as a primer on the science of human behavior. Professor Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroendocrinologist, walks (in sometimes mind-numbing detail) the reader through what’s going on in a human the seconds, hours, days, months, years, and centuries before she performs an action.

One underlying point is that all facets of our behavior are inextricably tied to biological factors that are often beyond our control; it’s not just our impulsive behaviors that are controlled by biology. Our inclinations, thoughts, and desires are as well. Sapolsky uses this point to then argue (essentially as Professor Strawson does here) that our understanding of moral responsibility and criminal justice is wrong — the distinctions we make, for example, between those we deem mentally fit to stand trial and those we don’t, are crude. There’s no reason the treatment based approach — vs the the blame and imprisonment approach — is appropriate for some but not others.

However, unlike most pop-science books, Sapolsky doesn’t misrepresent the trees for the forest. The book is long, and the author uses most of that space to discuss scientific literature. Most importantly, Sapolsky readily acknowledges that 1) on most points, the literature is an ongoing debate with competing theories and their believers, and 2) he’s not an expert in most of the areas and so his interpretations and criticisms are not definitive. Despite these caveats, he does not shy away from sharing judgments based on his personal experience.

3. Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick. One of the more depressing books I’ve read recently. It details the last 40 years or so of North Korean history, through the lens of several North Koreans who each defected within the last 20 years. The book presents their lives in roughly chronological order, through the depths of the famines of the 1990s and each of their eventual defections. Probably the only thing that surprised me was how bad things got in the 1990s and how much the government described mirrors that of Orwell’s 1984. (A smaller surprise was hearing about how those that escaped to China would often return to North Korea for smuggling purposes).

The book itself was fantastically written, by a journalist who has spent many decades following the regime and befriending defectors. Possibly the only thing missing — something that I think would have made the book the best I read this year — was the story of someone who was much higher up in the regime. The stories in the book are varied but somewhat the same; those profiled range from the bottom rung of society (due to their Japanese heritage) to the middle class (with someone with a prestigious engineering education from Pyongyang). Each of the defectors faced fear, hunger, and loss from the Orwellian regime. None were party members, though several hoped to be. I’m left wondering what the lives of party members, especially those very high up (some of whom have defected), were like during the famine years and other times, how aware they were of others’ struggles, and what eventually caused them to defect.

4. I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad, by Souad Mekhennet. I have too many great things to say about this book; it’s simultaneously a memoir and a behind-the-scenes reporting of some of the most important stories related to terrorism in the last two decades. The author, a Moroccan-German Muslim journalist, recounts numerous interviews with leaders of terrorist groups, as well as their victims. How she gains such access and trust of so many is incredible.

She doesn’t shy away from telling truth to power, even in the face of immediate and mortal danger. Mekhennet once told a jihadist that the “real Jihad” would have been to stay in the West and succeed in spite of the challenges that exist for Muslim immigrants, and she was the first to confirm and cover the CIA’s part in the kidnapping and torture of (sometimes innocent) terrorism suspects.

The book does leave one (almost) hopeless on the challenge facing the West in the face of extremism. Even with the best of governments and policies, it’s difficult to counter the narratives of racism and lost opportunity, as well as the allure of simple and sweeping religious answers, that produce more terrorists. And with the governments we have, it’s near impossible.

5. Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy — And How to Make Them Work for You, by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary. [Full review here]

6. The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, by Scott Galloway. [Full review here]

7. Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India, by Shashi Tharoor. [Full review here]

8. Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss. Entertaining and useful book on negotiating from the lead international FBI negotiator on kidnappings. Full of both principles, examples, and specific phrases and tactics one can use in a negotiation. Turns out that a large part of successful negotiation is asking the right questions with the right phrasing and tone.

9. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer. [Full review here]

10. Attention Merchants, by Timothy Wu. A history and present of advertising, including how technology companies have hijacked our minds. The book argues that the following advertising cycle is common: a new medium/idea arises, and advertisers enter; eventually, hucksters and traditional companies alike overreach (by being overbearing or disingenuous), sparking a public backlash and government intervention; the advertisters curb the worst of the excesses but as a whole adapt in a way that only increases their aggregate influence. Throughout the process, such “attention merchants” have found ever more insidious ways to enter previously sacred places and occupy the time, energy and attention of people.

It walks through a gamut of examples — posters in Paris covering every available space in the late 1800s, snake oil and patent medicine in the early 1900s, game shows on TV, all the way through Oprah and modern web platforms. A few fun facts:
a) At one point, apparently AOL was shipping out 50% of the CD ROMs in existence.
b) AOL’s downfall had a lot to do with fraudulently boosting its advertising numbers apparently.
c) The first mass marketing/spam email (sent out to about 300 email addresses on the Arpa-net) apparently received a Pentagon response that warned wthe senders.
d) Pepsi was one of the first to commoditize the counter-culture, using anti-”the man” messages to further its corporate needs.

Welcome to Part 2 of my ranking of books I read this year. Upon examining my preliminary rankings, I realized that (outside the top 10) different parts of the ranking could (roughly) be categorized by book subject. The overall rankings are still (for the most part) accurate, but I did some slight tweaking to form more cohesive topics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly if you know me, this list is also almost exclusively non-fiction books (with the exception of the #11), with histories, biographies, and books about technology dominating. The ranking in part 3 is a bit more diverse.

On race and gender

11. The Power, by Naomi Alderman. A fiction book whose premise is that, roughly around present day, women gain the ability to shock people (electrically), i.e. they gain the physical advantage over men. I’m not sure I can add much about this book that others haven’t already written (e.g. https://www.vogue.com/article/the-power-naomi-alderman summarizes the book well, and represents fairly well my thoughts on the book’s message about our world). I went into it fairly blind as to its plot, and I won’t spoil it here. However, I was surprised at how dystopian it became — the central idea is that power corrupts inevitably, always, and that it is those without power who suffer most when those seeking power fight. It cautions that even if someone is seeking power to make right grievous, undeniable wrongs, that once in power they can perpetrate the exact same wrongs.

12. Minority leader, by Stacy Abrams. Expecting a well-timed political memoir and instead got a wonderful part self-help book, part leadership manual. The “minority leader” in the title primarily refers not to her position in the Georgia State Legislature, but rather the subject of the book: how to be a leader from a minority position. Knowing very little else about her except this book and skimming her gubernatorial campaign’s issues pages, I want her to be president someday.

13. So you want to talk about race, by Ijeoma Oluo. Challenging, forceful, necessary book to read on race. A central thesis is that while your lived experiences are true, so are those of others; you can’t deny someone else’s telling of what matters to them because it doesn’t comport with your own. This thesis, when applied to race, leads to several conclusions with which your gut may not instantly agree but are important to hear and consider. Regarding whether something is about race: “it’s about race if a person of color says it’s about race.” Whether seemingly minor micro-aggressions should be confronted: they should, because they add up; to someone committing such an action, it may be only a small thing. To someone on the receiving end, it may be a long line of small things that together cause pain.

14. In the Shadow of statues, by Mitch Landrieu. Memoir, rumination on race, history of New Orleans, and discussion on Confederate statues by the former Lt. Governor of Louisiana and Mayor of New Orleans. He juxtaposes his own privileged life as part of the political family of New Orleans (his father as mayor helped desegregate New Orleans, and his sister was a senator) with that of many African Americans in New Orleans. The most powerful part of the book, perhaps unsurprisingly given the title, is Landrieu’s telling of what happened when he decided to remove the confederate statues and memorials in New Orleans — including one of Robert E Lee and an obelisk commemorating a white race riot that killed government employees, including police officers. Apparently, contractors who considered bidding on the removal project were threatened, many of the biggest contractors in the city refused to bid (only one ended up bidding on the project, a rarity), a car owned by one of the removal companies was bombed, sand was poured into the gasoline tank of removal equipment, and those removing the statues had to go as far as hide the names of their companies and their faces (from drones with HD cameras!) so as not face further retaliation. In this telling, Landrieu makes it clear that the White supremacy that erected the statues during the backlash to Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South lives on.

15. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. Explains, as the title suggests, how our potentially subconscious (racial, ethnic, gender, other) biases can hurt others, especially when such biases are widespread.

Probably the book in this vein that’s most likely to convince people who may not be pre-disposed to agree: to ready the listener for the idea that our active, rationalizing mind may not have full control over our subconscious biases, the authors start by showing various common optical illusions.

The authors then proceed to discuss the Implicit Association Test, ingeniously designed to try to uncover such subconscious biases. The test produces results that disturb many’s self-perceptions of being unbiased, and the authors painstakingly stress that such biases do not mean that someone is a “bad” person. The book grants that people can still be “good,” and have the best of intentions, but still show such biases.

However, it does not let us off the hook for such biases. The authors proceed to demonstrate how our actions, potentially stemming from such biases, hurt others. They emphasize that such actions themselves do not have to harm someone; selective aid of in-group or advantaged people (of which there is much empirical evidence) also harms others in the aggregate.

Not Categorized

16. Can it happen here: Authoritarianism in America, collection of essays by edited by Cass Sunstein. [Full review here]

17. Long Story Short, by Margot Leitman. A guide on how to tell better stories from one’s own past, from a master and teacher of short-form story telling. Some of the books I read lead me to a personal call to action (e.g., maybe I should meditate, make my bed every morning, internalize certain negotiation techniques, become a baseball statistician, or start writing creative non-fiction), and I follow through less than I should. This one was unfortunately no exception (I didn’t sign up for a story-telling night or practice on my own). However, it did provide me a quote I have used several times to after convincing someone to join me on what turned out to be less-than-happy adventure: “Everything is either a good time, or a good story.”

A few lessons:
a) Tell the truth where it matters (e.g. don’t make up “1 year later” interactions so your story has closure) but fudge where it doesn’t (e.g. composite characters and filling in (reasonable) details you can’t remember).

b) Don’t rant, and only tell stories for which you have enough emotional distance.

c) The story has to be about you. If someone else’s behavior plays a prominent role, your reactions to the behavior need to be front and center.

The Manifestos

18. The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything, by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna. A book describing the high ambitions of a nascent technology. Most of what you have to know about where the authors’ beliefs lie is given by the title and the first chapter, which describes unironically and without incredulity the dream to bring about the “redesign of societal organization.” Some of the book felt like an enumeration of the world’s problems, with “blockchain can fix this” tacked on. Whether blockchain solutions are necessary (as opposed to good, centralized databases) or sufficient (many of the trust, security, and authority related problems discussed apply to blockchain solutions as well, as they relate to how it interfaces with the real world) is up in the air.

However, I hated the book far less than I thought I would, and I left it with an appreciation of the inadequacy of other digital solutions in solving many of the problems enumerated. The authors aren’t the hype machines one would expect based on the title. While they clearly believe in the potential, they provide a honest accounting of the limitations of the current blockchain technologies (e.g. its low transaction throughput, anonymity issues, political and governance problems, and various ‘hacks’/code exploits). I also learned quite a bit about the basic workings of the blockchain. Given the author’s experiences and the book itself, I believe that this is probably the book to read to catch up on what’s going on regarding blockchain.

19. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. [Full review here]

20. Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. Argues that for complicated tasks, especially in medicine, one should create checklists to not forget the little things. Also argues for what amounts to a ‘product manager’ — someone responsible for coordination of knowledge and actions, and to road-map a timeline of treatment — in medicine.

Biographies and histories

21. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. [Full review here]

22. Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, by Sharon Weinberger. [Full review here]

23. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. [Full review here]

24. Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. A comprehensive biography of the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, and our first president. Unfortunately was only able to read the first 500 pages or so (out of 900) before I had to return it to the library. Some facts that stood out to me: one of Washington’s most defining qualities was undoubtedly his physical stature and strength; a self-taught man, he prioritized controlling his earlier tendency to emotional outbursts; he knew his place in history, calling for Congress to bear the expense of copying all his war-time correspondence during the war itself. I also learned a bit more about the Revolutionary War: the reason that it was one of the few revolutions led by the upper class was that the British failed to co-opt the landed gentry in America; many of the grievances we learn about in history class (e.g. the stamp act) primarily affected the upper class, not regular folks.

25. Einstein, by Walter Isaacson. A biography of Einstein by the same author of the Da Vinci biography I read earlier. Learned quite a bit about him that I didn’t know earlier. For example:
a) Unable to get a professorship, he worked full-time at the Swiss Patent office throughout his “miracle year” of 1905, when he published four papers that each changed physics: on the photo-electric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence. More surprisingly, he continued working at the patent office for several more years, until he was more widely recognized for his work.

b) The Nobel was a political mess. By the time Einstein was awarded it, his lack of the prize ‘was more embarrassing to the Nobel committee than him.’ In fact, two years before he got the prize, he had already promised the eventual prize money to his ex-wife and children in his divorce. Isaacson blames both anti-antisemitism and the supposedly heretical nature of special relativity for the delay. He was eventually awarded the 1921 Nobel prize in physics in 1922 (the same time Neils Bohr received the 1922 prize), as the 1921 prize was not awarded at the appropriate time to anyone for some reason. And when he finally got it, he didn’t get it for general relativity, but instead for the photo-electric effect, supposedly for political reasons.

26. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester. [Full review here]

27. The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight, by Winston Groom. This book tells the stories of three men (only one of whom I’d heard of before) who, between them had the following life stories and accomplishments: first to fly across the Atlantic, first cross-country flight, most decorated WWI fighter pilot and tactician, first flight blind (cockpit covered, using only instruments), WWII fighter pilot, designed and led first bombing run from an aircraft carrier (ie first bombing of Japanese cities during WWII), survivor of a 24 day long ordeal stranded in the ocean on a life-raft without food/drinkable water, decorated racecar driver and owner of Indianapolis 500, tragic father of the victim of the “crime of the century,” inventor of an artificial heart decades ahead of its time, prominent environmentalist and promoter of indigenous cultures, early space program leader, and best-selling author.

It grants that these men weren’t perfect (racist, anti-semitic, supposedly fascist and pro-Nazi for a bit, philanderers) and that they give proof to the adage, “all heroes are horses’ asses.” However, it does not dwell on these subjects and ultimately concludes that their actions warrant calling them heroes.

I like reading such books not only because they tell the stories of those who did great things such as the above but also that they reveal little historical tidbits. For example, did you know that by the 1910s, the top racing cars were reaching almost 100mph? I’d always imagined this feat wasn’t achieved until the 1930–50s.

28. Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Profit and Power by Ellen R. Wald. A history of Saudi Arabia told exclusively through the lens of oil and Aramco, now Saudi Aramco.

29. Energy, a human history, by Richard Rhodes. [Full review here]

30. China’s Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle, by Dinny McMahon. [Full review here]

Welcome to the final part of my rankings of books read this year. As in Part 2, they’re roughly organized by topic, though the overall ranking remains roughly accurate. It’s important to note that I would likely choose to read most of the books even in this part of the ranking (I’d stop somewhere around the mid- 40s) — because my reading list is curated from friends and online lists, I happen to read many good books, and some have to be ranked lower than others.

You may also notice that several political books are at the bottom; their position reflects more my state of mind this year (tired of rehashes of recent political battles and gossip) than the books themselves. I’m sure if I reread these books after a few years, I would enjoy them and find them useful.

Science, Science Fiction, and Educational

31. Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin. English translation of book two of the 3 Body Problem trilogy. Much better than the first one. There were several interesting and new science (fiction) ideas, and they were executed well and in a self-consistent manner. The main character is creepy at the beginning for no apparent reason, but that plot line is forgotten eventually.

32. Theory and Reality: An introduction to the philosophy of science, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Exactly what the sub-title suggests: a solid introduction to the philosophy of science, written by a professor and researcher in the history and philosophy of science. From the publisher’s page: “Theory and Reality covers logical positivism; the problems of induction and confirmation; Karl Popper’s theory of science; Thomas Kuhn and ‘scientific revolutions’; the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend; and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field.” For the table of contents, see here.

33. Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law, by Jay M. Feinman. Claims to give an overview of the first year of law school in ~350 pages (what a deal if true!). Has chapters on constitutional law, torts, contract, property, and criminal law and procedure.

34. Ethics in the real world : 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter, by Peter Singer. From the book’s description: “Peter Singer is often described as the world’s most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. ... In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness.”

I found the articles a bit too short to really engage with the material, but his views are certainly thought-provoking.

35. Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong, by Paul A. Offit. As the title suggests, gives the stories of scientific ideas and people that did more harm than good, or at the least caused harm alongside the good they did. These include, among others: lobotomies to “cure” a whole host of alleged maladies, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (yes, as a cause of harm!), the banning of saturated fat, and the American eugenics movement. A bunch of interesting tidbits here:

a) The author claims that Rachel Carson, of Silent Spring fame, who led to both the banning of DDT as a pesticide in the US and the creation of the EPA, inadvertently caused countless deaths due to malaria. The internet is somewhat mixed regarding the true story here (e.g. see here and here).

b) Regarding saturated fat: the author argues that the emphasis on saturated fat led to dietary decisions, e.g. replacing butter with margarine, that dramatically increased the amount of trans fats Americans consume, with trans fats being far worse health-wise.

c) Fritz Haber discovered how to make synthetic fertilizer (through the catalysis of ammonia), which has enabled the lives of billions of people more than earth’s natural agricultural capacity could support. However, he was also the “father of chemical warfare,” and in 1915 during WWI personally oversaw the German use of chlorine gas leading to thousands of casualties. After war crime charges were dropped against him, he received a controversial Nobel prize in 1918.

The book goes on to discuss several other phenomena, from the use of opium as a medical pain reliever to the tendencies of scientific Nobel Prize winners to become crackpots in their later years (including Linus Pauling, the only person to receive two solo prizes).

Self-help and success

36. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. An overview of research on happiness, from Plato to modern times. The Wikipedia page is a surprisingly good summary of the book. Haidt is considered the pre-eminent Academic social psychologist of our times, so a book well-worth considering.

37. Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy” by Robert Frank. [Full review here]

38. Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, by Robert Wright. [Full review here]

39. Principles, by Ray Dalio. An enumeration and discussion of the personal and business principles by which Ray Dalio — founder of Bridgewater Associates — lives his life. I admire the thought and self-reflection that goes into writing something like this. The core message seems to be — to build a true meritocracy and meaningful relationships, one needs “radical transparency.”

40. On writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. I haven’t read any Stephen King novels, but when someone with over 58 books (selling over 350 million copies) tells you how to write, one has to listen.

41. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel. A short list of musings by Thiel on the mindset that it takes to create something new, impactful, and long-lasting. Many of his points are familiar to those that already breath Bay Area air; however, he presents several concise questions one should ask oneself before starting something new, and I found those valuable, not in their novelty but in that he has them in convenient list form. For example: ‘what truth do most people disagree with’ (or the business version: ‘what is your startup’s secret’), and ‘what is your 10x improvement’ (because anything less will be seen as derivative and won’t overcome others’ incumbency advantages).

A few others

42. Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman. I came into this book knowing nothing about Norse Mythology that Marvel didn’t teach me. The book is a light-hearted retelling of old Norse myths, one that focuses on the Gods’ personalities more than any particular story. The author doesn’t seem to have any agenda, except making the Gods look like petulant frat boys who cheat and kill others for their own amusement (and especially for alcohol); and we’re supposed to root for them, or at least delight in their antics. Well written and entertaining.

43. Astroball: The New Way to Win It All by Ben Reiter. [Full review here]

44. The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. The English translation of a Chinese science fiction novel. The less I say about the plot the better, as how the book unfolds is somewhat unexpected, especially as at the beginning it seems to be about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The world building is acceptable, the science is meh, and the character development is non-existent. I didn’t fall in love with it, but I’ll probably read the remaining books in the series. Update: I read the second book, but on the advice of a friend who also read the third (and who agreed with me regarding the first two), I didn’t read that one.

45. Less, by Andrew Sean Greer. A fun little novel, though not my preferred type of book. Had to read it for a book club.

46. 48 laws of power, by Robert Greene. Somewhat fun, modern-day compendium of lessons from (and extension of) The Art of War, The Prince, and similar treatises from various cultures. As the title promises, the book lists 48 laws of power, following each one with a summary and then historical anecdotes that either followed or broke the law. Most of the historical anecdotes come from warfare or the European royal courts, though the art collector Joseph Duveen also plays a prominent role.

The laws itself are cynical, and I don’t think they’re true. For example: #3) conceal your intentions, #6) court attention at all costs, #16)Use absence to increase respect and honor, #27) Play on people’s need to create a cult-like following, and #38) Think as you like but behave like others. For a full listing, see here.

47. The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. Ancient Chinese military treatise. I found it meh. At some point this book might have been a practical guide for warfare. But, today, it reads like a giant, repetitive list of metaphors that seem fairly obvious. There are probably 100 different ways it says, “Do the opposite of what your enemy expects you to do,” and 200 ways it says, “Victory is determined before the battle starts,” and 300 ways for “find and press your advantage if you can, but excess is bad” (which of course it is, by definition of “excess” and “bad”). Some of these metaphors and stories are entertaining and I might try to work them in daily conversation. In general, I don’t understand those who suggest that the book has insightful, unique things to say about modern problems.

48. When: The Scientific secrets of perfect timing, by Dan Pink. The pop-iest of pop-psych books I’ve read in a while. It’s incredibly short, but I still stopped reading about 80% of way through. The book contained a few too many references to non-replicated research and misinterpretations of good research.

49. Mastery, by Robert Greene. Written by the same author as “48 Laws of Power” (something I wish I realized before beginning), this book claims to tell you the secrets becoming a world expert in your field. It read, though, as if after the first “trick” — train many years as an apprentice under a world expert (huh, I wish someone told me to do that earlier)— the author relapses to re-writing his previous book. The rest of the advice includes how to find the right time to back-stab your teacher and to evade criticism (don’t be a jerk in public)!

The political books I was too tired to appreciate

50. What Happened, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. I made it about 70% through before election fatigue hit again, and I stopped reading at that point. I do think Clinton documenting her view of the election is important and valuable, but I just couldn’t drag myself to finish it. It’s (mostly) well written, but I’m not sure this book (or any that she can write at this stage) would convince anyone (who has followed US politics the last few years) of anything they don’t already believe. Whether that reads as an indictment of me, her, the book, or politics in general probably also depends on what you already believe.

51. Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail, Jonathan Chait. A book that does not live up to its title, but that’s probably my fault for expecting/wanting a different sort of book.

What I imagined going in, solely from the title: an in-depth walk-through of little-known but significant achievements (what they do, and why they matter) by the Obama administration, either through regulatory action or things tucked away in bills. This version of the book would proceed area by area, listing and discussing in depth the many (both small and large) things the administration did that changed the status quo and how the trends will be hard to reverse. It probably would still be written from Chait’s perspective of an avid supporter, and it would have taught me quite a bit.

What the book delivers: a recapitulation of the largest political battles and/or well known accomplishments and failures (Affordable Care Act, cap and trade, the stimulus, Clean Air act extension, Race to the Top, Iran deal, Paris Climate agreement, budget fights, Iraq pullout); where the administration succeeded, it simply states (rather than justifies) that they were big deals; where it failed, it argues that the blame should be shared by Congress or the Bush administration. It focuses on political battles and perceptions rather than the substance of the issues, and I felt like the choir being preached to. In the alternate universe where the 2016 election went the way Chait and everyone else thought it would when he was writing the book, I could imagine somewhat enjoying the book as a reminder of the major things that happened. In our real world, however, it doesn’t live up to what the moment seems to demand.

52. Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff. Can’t really say I read it — I stopped about 30% of the way through. I learned that I no longer have any tolerance for or draw enjoyment from the gossip-y aspects of politics, even though such books used to be a guilty pleasure.

This book starts with two serious, non-trivial, overarching claims: that Buddhism is correct in

1. Its diagnosis of the human condition, that we seek, mindlessly and eternally, temporary pleasures that fail to satisfy us and thus cause suffering, and
2. Its prescription of meditation as a way to understand this condition and to escape from it, leading to both greater happiness and more moral behavior.

In one of my favorite writing features that I wish more authors would adopt, the appendix details the 12 specific Buddhist claims the author is saying are “true,” which he often but not exclusively means in the scientific sense of there existing convincing corroborating evidence.

He then helpfully summarizes his book’s thesis; it is, paraphrased: ‘Humans are animals created by natural selection, which built into our brains what early Buddhist thinkers basically understood at a remarkable level. Now, in light of modern understanding of natural selection and the human brain (mostly through evolutionary psychology and neuroscience), we have convincing scientific defenses of (the naturalistic parts of) Buddhist thought.’

The author makes it clear that he’s, at best, a secular Buddhist who is defending only the naturalistic (not metaphysical) components of Buddhism. However, he does speak quite a bit from personal experience as an (amateur) meditator. At points the book reads like a pop psychology book, such as when the author cites specific scientific studies as evidence for (often far stronger) claims that the study’s authors themselves don’t make. In some cases, he is (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the claim) citing the same studies that behavior economists do regarding how susceptible the human brain is to various mistakes because of heuristics natural selection has drilled into us.

For at least the first overarching claim, the evidence is fairly convincing. Furthermore, it seems to me that the ‘natural selection engineered us to pursue these fleeting pleasures, leading to suffering’ argument is no different than the (increasingly believed) argument that ‘our phones/Facebook have been engineered to be dopamine buttons that capture our attention, making us unhappy and unproductive.’ In that sense, though it may be my Bay Area bias speaking, I imagine that many people will be receptive to this argument.

The second claim (regarding meditation as the prescription) is the far more difficult one to justify, partially because of the relative dearth of scientific backing. As a claim regarding mostly internal, consciousness feelings, it’s hard to imagine what convincing evidence looks like, unless one is convinced by MRI studies that show, approximately, that ‘something different is going on the brains of those who meditate, in particular in regions of the brain commonly associated with X.’ To this end, the author draws far more on his personal experiences with meditation and the testimony of others. He does so with a clarity of argumentation, as someone who is used to writing books distilling complex arguments into a simplistic, persuasive sounding singular idea. However, due to the nature of the claim, whether one believes him is a matter of personal preference, and, I imagine, experience with trying to meditate.

A historical survey of the major developments in the world’s collection and use of energy, from coal to steam power to electricity. It contains a bunch of interesting tidbits, including a few that corrected misconceptions I had.

For example, it tells the story of the battle between AC and DC proponents for which method is better for the transmission of energy (AC having won out, of course, due to the relative ease in transforming it to high voltage/low current for transmission, and then back; this property enables efficient transmission over long distances). Popular culture tends to tell this story as a battle between Thomas Edison (pro-DC) and Nikola Tesla (inventor of AC induction motor). The book, however, indicates that the real battle was between the companies of Edison (Edison Electric Light Company) and George Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Company) in the late 1800s, with Tesla more a side-figure in the battle. One of the turning points in favor of AC was the its use to transmit electricity from Niagara Falls to Buffalo. Read the gory details here (War of the currents), including how Edison sought to associate AC with the electric chair.

Other stories include the development of oil drilling — including in Saudi Arabia — and steam power and automobiles. One useful part of the book is that every development in energy is accompanied by discussion of its societal effects, most notably on jobs and the environment.

I found the latter part of the book, especially that regarding renewables and alternative sources, somewhat lacking. The entirety of the attention is given to nuclear energy, and how it is misunderstood and should be more supported. This focus is perhaps intentional — one of the points is that nuclear energy has dwarfed renewables (except hydroelectricity) in terms of energy provided, something that has only started to change the last few years (see page 11 here for a useful but somewhat depressing plot of energy consumption by source over time) However, it does leave the reader without an understanding of the full landscape.

A book that deserves a longer review than I have here. In it, journalist Franklin Foer argues, as in the subtitle, that big tech companies are an existential threat to many (good) modern institutions, and that it must be stopped. In particular, he lays out the case that big tech companies have killed journalism, our mental faculties, culture, and our society. He draws on his personal experience at the New Republic, from which he was eventually fired as editor after it was acquired by a Facebook co-founder.

The book itself is more a call to arms than it is a battle plan. I won’t summarize his claims here (see this interview for his own words), rather focusing on the challenges various actors face in solving the problem. Once you believe his diagnosis, a few questions emerge, all concerning how various entities respond to the fact that efficiency and excess power are inextricably tied:
a) how can government effectively regulate big tech
b) what can a well-intentioned tech leader do without destroying their business interests
c) how much must a wary citizen forgo her consumer interests — price and convenience foremost,
d) what should a young CS graduate do when many of the best jobs (by both remuneration and interesting work) are at companies seeking or having already won such monopolistic power.

On the first question, Foer (the son of a famous anti-trust lawyer) presents a simple yet difficult answer: the biggest tech companies are monopolies that need to be broken up and more strongly regulated.

Foer recently gave a talk at Stanford, and I asked him the second question. His answer simultaneously recognized the conflict and punts the answer to other actors, mainly consumers and government, that can better align a company’s incentives.

The last two questions are those that individuals must ask themselves. And they’re questions where I am undoubtedly failing the good citizen test, more than most, even as I increasingly believe the dangers inherent in a few companies dominating our media, retail, communication, and informational landscape. I hate going to stores, and so most of my shopping is off Amazon. I even bought and listened to this book through my Amazon Audible account, after a few months of waiting unsuccessfully for my local libraries to stock it; its price, especially after various promotions, was a fraction of the price elsewhere. That Foer chooses to make it available through Audible might be notable. I communicate almost exclusively through Facebook Messenger. My PhD research includes questions of how large platforms can be better designed, I’ve collaborated with such companies, and this past summer I worked at a large tech company that has had more than its share of corporate behavior troubles.

Foer, acknowledges the benefits for consumers — the one-day shipping and convenience of “free” information — but pleads us to recognize the costs, however abstract they may be: the loss of privacy and focus as we become inundated with advertising, and the long-term loss of quality journalism and a healthy public sphere. Foer further suggests a consumer-side savior: just as “organic, natural” food has carved a niche for itself, quality information websites may be able to distinguish themselves for their privacy, non-click-baity-ness, and good corporate citizenship.

Whether any solutions emerge is a question yet to be answered.