Recent Reads

2023

• Favourites
• Are You Serious?
• Economics
• Do pay transparency laws raise wages?

2022

• Psychology
• How I Wish Trauma Had Been Explained to Me
• Erikson’s Stages of Development
• Ideas
• The Anti-Promethean Backlash
• Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought
• Sketches of Beauty, Shades of Remoteness
• On Practical Religion, Self-Improvement and Why Sermons Don’t Work
• Open Borders: A Review of Bryan Caplan’s Book
• The Fog of Change
• Micromort: A Standard Unit of Measure For Risk
• Predictions for 2050
• Progress & Science
• Value Created vs. Value Extracted
• Hispaniola’s Great Divergence: Why are Haiti and the DR so different?
• Science as a source of social alpha
• Indonesia: The most amazing development story on Earth?
• Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital
• When Extreme Necessity is the Mother of Invention
• Progress, humanism, agency
• Funding Models and Innovation
• Sustainability & Climate
• The finite pool of worry
• Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
• Methane hunters: what explains the surge in the potent greenhouse gas?
• The last design you’ll ever make
• Business
• Tokyu Hands Reborn as ‘Hands.’ A Closer Look at Nendo’s Rebranding
• Governance & Politics
• Britain’s ‘emerging market’ crisis
• Nestlé, Godiva and Nutella
• The fall of Sri Lanka
• An Interview with Pankaj Mishra
• The Human Cost of Normalizing Assad
• Rivalry between America and China will shape the post-covid world
• Crypto
• Axie Infinity’s vision of a “play-to-earn” video game
• Education & Learning
• Christopher Alexander’s architecture for learning
• Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

2021

• Governance & Politics:
• The Trouble with the View from Above
• Bashar al-Assad’s Unlikely Comeback
• Climate:
• Stripe Is Kick Starting Market for Carbon Removal
• Development:
• Th economic growth necessary to reduce global poverty
• National Development Delivers
• Innovation:
• What We Learned Doing Fast Grants
• Remote Work and the Future of Innovation
• Can a new approach to funding scientific research unlock innovation?
• Progress:
• How does progress happen?
• What are the returns to R&D?
• Education & Learning
• The New American University
• Cognitive Load, Emotion and Buoyancy
• Memories are made of this
• Organisational Culture:
• Where Do Pro-Social Institutions Come From?
• Building Products at Stripe
• Business:
• 1,000 True Fans
• Invisible asymptotes
• Idea Generation
• Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?
• Technology:
• Moderation in Infrastructure
• Anthropology:
• Rules of Thumb and Adaptive Rationality
• Ideas:
• Upside decay
• Truth, Status, and Tribes
• The importance trap
• Familiarity and Belonging
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
• Literature:
• Inside the Whale

Poetry

• Borges: For a Version of I Ching
• Gibran: On Work
• Eavan Boland: The Emigrant Irish
• Rainer Maria Rilke: Go to the Limits of Your Longing
• Charles Baudelaire: The Albatross